Tag: ABC Wednesday

C is for Covering Cohen

“I trusted Leonard more than anyone I had known…at times, more than myself.”

According to Wikipedia, Canadian poet-singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, a 2008 inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, has had over 2,000 renditions of his songs recorded. Indeed, there have whole albums of Cohen covers, some by various artists, but some by a single performer.

It has been stated by some that folk singer Judy Collins “discovered” Leonard Cohen because she was the first major artist to cover his tunes, starting with her sixth Elektra album, 1967’s In My Life, with Suzanne and Dress Rehearsal Rag.

She, however, would hastily disagree. On the liner notes of her tribute album to him, 2004’s Democracy Now, she writes: “what is more true is that he discovered me, and in that first year after our meeting, he told me I should be writing songs.” Subsequently, she did. They displayed a creative synergy, with her pushing him to perform, initially, at a WBAI (NYC) public radio fundraiser, quite literally. In return, she said, “I trusted Leonard more than anyone I had known…at times, more than myself.”

All these songs were sung by Judy Collins on Democracy Now:

Suzanne – Leonard Cohen and Judy Collins

Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye – Roberta Flack

Sisters Of Mercy – Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris

Bird On A Wire – Johnny Cash

Story of Isaac – Suzanne Vega

Most of the songs on Democracy Now were previously recorded by Judy, but there were three songs newly recorded by her, all written by Cohen, except the Song of Bernadette, co-written with William Elliot and Jennifer Warnes.

Song of Bernadette – Aaron Neville and Linda Ronstadt

And speaking of Warnes, who was a backup singer for Leonard Cohen in the 1970s, she also did a tribute album called Famous Blue Raincoat back in 1986, reissued with additional songs in 2007. Among the tunes, Song of Bernadette, Bird on the Wire, and

First We Take Manhattan – Leonard Cohen and Jennifer Warnes

Famous Blue Raincoat – here sung by Joan Baez

Of course, no Leonard Cohen discussion would be complete without the oft-covered Hallelujah. I opted for the version by fellow Canadian k.d. lang, which she initially recorded for an album of tunes by Canadian songwriters, 2004’s Hymns of the 49th Parallel, and performed at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, BC, CANADA.


ABC Wednesday – Round 9

B is for Big Daddy

I found a link that goes to some Big Daddy songs, including all of Sgt. Pepper.

There was a music group called Big Daddy. Perhaps more than one group. The one I’m talking about had this particular shtick, which you can read about here and here, which was that, basically, the group allegedly toured Southeast Asia in 1959, got stuck there, and were finally rescued in 1983. They heard the modern music and hated it, and so decided to “fix” it by recording the newer songs in the ways familiar to them.

Charles Hill put together a nice discography. Pop culture writer Mark Evanier has been a booster of the group.

The first album, which I own on vinyl, was BIG DADDY, aka What Really Happened To The Band Of ’59 (1983), which featured:

I Write The Songs, the Barry Manilow song actually written by Bruce Johnston, “Evoking Danny and the Juniors”
Star Wars. “Duane Eddy sits in with the Ventures”
Whip It. The Devo song is “Truly a standing-on-the-corner song for once”
Hotel California. “The stranger in town [in this Eagles’ tune] seems to be Del Shannon.”
Eye Of The Tiger

Album #2 was MEANWHILE…BACK IN THE STATES (1985) and featured:

Dancing In The Dark (Springsteen).
I Just Called To Say I Love You (Wonder)
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun – “The Duchess of Earl gets her say”

CUTTING THEIR OWN GROOVE (1991 CD), which is actually available for MP3 download on Amazon for $10; preview the 15 songs.

But my favorite is SGT. PEPPER’S, a 1992 CD that I own:

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – Chaz thinks it’s rooted in the Coasters’ Poison Ivy. It’s DEFINITELY the Coasters.
With A Little Help From My Friends – “Billy Shears unmasked as Johnny Mathis,” specifically Chances Are.
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds – “Goodness, gracious, great tangerine dreams;” Jerry Lee Lewis’ Great Balls of Fire.
Getting Better – “At least as good as cherry pie”.
Fixing A Hole – Dion’s “The Wanderer, updated”.
She’s Leaving Home – “She’s so young, and we’re so old”.
Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite – “Last seen stopped at the top of a Ferris wheel” at Palisades Park.
Within You Without You – “On the whole, word jazz is preferable to sitars”; I can practically see the beatnik with his goatee and shades
When I’m Sixty-Four – “And playing dominoes for sixty minutes at a stretch”
Lovely Rita – “The name of his latest flame” (Elvis)
Good Morning, Good Morning – “Instruments? What instruments?”
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
A Day In The Life – “That’ll be the day” – or more specifically the Buddy Holly songs Rave On and, on the bridge, Every Day.

Big Daddy – With A Little Help From My Friends
Found at abmp3 search engine

I found the link HERE that goes to some Big Daddy songs, including all of Sgt. Pepper. It’s from that source I was able to create the doohickey above.

ABC Wednesday – Round 9

A is for Adam and Eve

What bothers me about the literal Creationists is not that they believe what they believe. It’s that a whole pseudoscience that was created around it.

Big fat caveat upfront; I don’t mean to make light of anyone’s faith, I’m just trying to understand.

Someone I know only online, who I suspect wouldn’t consider herself a particularly religious person, decided to read the Bible. She stopped after Genesis 2. She complained that there were two seemingly contradictory Creation stories. In Genesis 1, the creatures came, then the man and the woman. But in Genesis 2, you get the Adam’s rib version, where the man is seemingly created before the creatures, but definitely before the woman. I say “seemingly”, because the NIV version reads at v. 19 “Now the LORD God HAD formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man…”; the “had” suggests the possibility that the animal had already existed and that the man, hanging out in the garden, simply hadn’t seen them.

The problem, I contended, is that the person was reading the stories as history, as science, not allegory. If you read it as history, and Adam and Eve were in fact the first people, what does it mean in terms of their descendants? Who was Cain’s wife, and who were the people he feared might kill him in Genesis 4? That specific issue confounded me when I was a teenager, and was one of the items that indeed shook my faith at the time.

Once I realized it was not a literal history, it became much easier to understand.


This is why I’m quite puzzled by those who have decided to take Genesis 1 verbatim. The earth and all its creatures, including humans, were formed in six days – possible? Sure, in a “God can do anything” way, but not at all likely. And the order of the creation seems to mesh pretty well with the evolutionary cycle we’ve come to understand, albeit considerably longer. The word “day” may not have meant 24 hours; remember, no one wrote this down at the time, but rather learned it from the oral tradition, transcribing it relatively quite recently, in the last millennium Before the Christian Era. This philosophy, I’ve learned, is called progressive creationism.

What bothers me about the literal Creationists is not that they believe what they believe. It’s that a whole pseudoscience that was created around it, of people walking the earth with the dinosaurs only 4000 years ago, and the planet only 10,000, rather than humans being around for 50,000 to 200,000 years, the dinosaurs having been extinct for 65 million years, and the Earth itself being about 4.6 billion years old. How does this narrative conflict with “some vast eternal plan”, quoting Fiddler on the Roof?

I guess I’m saying that I don’t think science and creation are that much at odds. The shoehorning of a literal six-day earth making – that seems to be a lot more work.

Can someone please explain this to me? Oh, and check out this recent Doonesbury strip, which addresses the issue.

ABC Wednesday team – Round 9

Citation to top piece of artwork.

Z is for (Led) Zeppelin 1969

The Dixon composition was so similar that Led Zeppelin reached a settlement with Dixon over the royalties for the song, and credited Dixon as the writer when this appeared on Led Zeppelin’s How The West Was Won live DVD

I have such mixed feelings about the band Led Zeppelin.


Their eponymous first album I loved. I recall quite clearly the day I first heard it. It was a sunny and warm day in late May or early June 1969, when I was 16.

I was riding a borrowed bicycle and was riding over from the First Ward to the South Side of Binghamton, NY, along with my very good friend Carol, to visit friends. The bike had hand breaks, which I had never had on any of my bikes; one “broke” by putting one’s foot back. Got down Front Street without having to slow down, but crossing the bridge, I was gaining on Carol, and couldn’t stop, so I put my foot to the ground to slow down, flipped the bike, and crashed to the ground. I got a nasty gash on my right forearm. Carol said, “Are you OK?” and I lied, “Sure.” And that’s when I learned about hand breaks.

We rode the rest of the way, talked with our friends, had some food, and someone played that LZ album. I was immediately entranced by the opening chords of Good Times, Bad Times.

Then my friend Lois noticed the gash on my right forearm, just above the elbow, and she, Carol and Karen started removing gravel from the abrasion. It hurt, a lot actually, and left a scar that remained until the vitiligo obliterated it only a couple years ago. But it didn’t matter, because I’m really enjoying this music. My first favorite song was Communications Breakdown.

When I bought the album shortly therafter, I noticed it had two songs by the blues legend Willie Dixon, You Shook Me and I Can’t Quit You Baby, and attributed as such. The biggest deception was the 3:30 running time for How Many More Times, which was more like 8:30, apparently a trick to try to get radio stations to play it.


Led Zeppelin II was even more entertaining, but ultimately it became problematic for me. The first song, Whole Lotta Love was attributed to the band, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham. But I discovered a few years later that it bore a distinct similarity to You Need Love as performed by Muddy Waters, which was a song written by Willie Dixon. As described here, the Small Faces had nicked the song even before Zeppelin.

“Another blues classic on Led Zeppelin II became famous as The Lemon Song. Derived directly from Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor”, there is also the infamous quote about squeezing lemons that comes from Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues.” Chester Burnett, a.k.a. Howlin’ Wolf, received no credit for The Lemon Song. In the early ’70s, Arc Music sued Led Zeppelin for copyright infringement. The suit was settled out of court.

But the most egregious theft, I thought, was Bring It On Home. As described here: This was influenced by a song of the same name recorded by Blues great Sonny Boy Williamson and written by Willie Dixon. The Dixon composition was so similar that Led Zeppelin reached a settlement with Dixon over the royalties for the song, and credited Dixon as the writer when this appeared on Led Zeppelin’s How The West Was Won live DVD. Plant’s beginning vocal even imitates Williamson’s.

I just don’t understand the need for misattribution. Yet, which album did I ultimately buy on CD? You guessed it: LZ II.

I have other Zeppelin albums, but that’s enough for now, except for this
Republican congressman quoting the group on the floor of Congress. Oy.

Y is for Yiddish

Leo Rosten also defined chutzpah as ‘that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.’


My wife, who teaches English as a Second Language, sent me this article about how “certain words from other languages express meanings that no English words can.”

The author, Connie Tuttle, notes: “Part of the richness of English comes from the thousands of words derived from other languages. Nevertheless, there are occasions when no English word expresses the nuance of a situation. A friend who is a linguist once commented that English was the language of commerce, but was lacking in vocabulary expressive of complex social relations. Maybe so. If she is right, that could explain why over the years I’ve found myself resorting to an increasing number of words from languages other than English, not only in conversation but also while writing.”

Unsurprising to me, six out of the ten examples comes from Yiddish: ALTER KOCKER, OY VAY (or just OY), MISHEGOSS, MESHUGGE, PUTZ, NU, and BUBKES. Three of these I find that I use quite a bit: oy (which is a versatile word), putz (meaning a fool), and bubkes: “If you want to make a living as a poet, be prepared to earn bubkes.” These terms do not come to me as an affectation; rather, they are words I heard from my great aunt Charlotte, and especially from her family.

But the word, not on the list, that IMMEDIATELY leapt to mind was chutzpah: “to express admiration for nonconformist but gutsy audacity.”

“Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as ‘gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible guts, presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to.’ In this sense, chutzpah expresses both strong disapproval and grudging admiration. In the same work, Rosten also defined the term as ‘that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.'”

“Yiddish is a Germanic language originally spoken by the Jews of Central and later Eastern Europe, written in the Hebrew alphabet, and containing a substantial substratum of words from Hebrew as well as numerous loans from Slavic languages.” But the same word in Hebrew may have a different nuance in Yiddish; chutzpah in Hebrew is much more negative, for example.

There are a lot of words on the list beginning with SC, usually combined with other consonants, that are just fun to say. “Schlemiel, schlimazel” show up in the lyrics for the theme song to the TV show Laverne and Shirley, meaning “an inept clumsy person” and “a chronically unlucky person,” respectively. In fact, I’ll write at length about another one of those words…tomorrow.

Among the words of Yiddish origin I’ve been known to use include kvetch (complain habitually), schlep (drag or haul), and zaftig (pleasingly plump, buxom, full-figured, as a woman). I suppose a synonym for the latter would be Rubenesque, but zaftig suggests a more positive attitude, I’m told.

ABC Wednesday – Round 8

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