Jamie Hoover: Jamie Hoo-ever

Jamie Hoover
Jamie Hoo-ever
Loaded Goat
2004-07-16

Jamie Hoover’s probably best known as the frontman for Charlotte, North Carolina’s favorite power pop sons, the Spongetones, but to simply refer to him by that position is to do his career a disservice.

Hoover has toured and recorded with Don Dixon and Marti Jones, served as bassist for the Smithereens when Mike Mesaros was unavailable, done road stints with both Graham Parker and Hootie & The Blowfish, played bass with the Orange Humble Band, and engineered albums by artists as diverse as the New Life Community Choir and the Frankenstein Drag Queens from the Planet 13. He and Bryan Shumate teamed up and released two albums as the Van de Lecki’s, and, most recently, he and Bill Lloyd, (very) late of Foster and Lloyd, produced a full-length collaboration, Paparazzi.

Hell, Jamie Hoo-ever isn’t even his first solo album; that honor belongs to 1990’s Coupons, Questions, and Comments.

What we have here, however, isn’t really a proper follow-up. It’s really more of an odds-and-sods collection of covers that Hoover has contributed to various tribute albums over the years, with a few additional covers — some old, some new — thrown in to fill out the rest of the disc.

The album title comes from a misspelling of Hoover’s name that appeared on a gospel album he engineered for John P. Kee, and he’s been chuckling about it ever since. In the liner notes of this disc, Hoover says of tribute albums, “the only thing you really ever get out of it is the pleasure of doing your own version of a song you really dig”. The width and breadth of the artists Hoover tackles are a testimony to the diversity of his musical tastes. To open with a Traveling Wilburys track (“Handle with Care”) and close with a Beatles cover (“Goodnight”), okay, that really doesn’t show much in the way of stylistic diversity. But in between those selections, one can find the Everly Brothers, Let’s Active, Bobby Fuller, covers of “Sukiyaki” and “A Summer Place,” and even “Elusive Butterfly”, by the elusive Bob Lind.

Some of the best performances on the album come via the more obscure songs, like Klaatu’s psychedelic “Silly Boys”, which blends acoustic jangle with a reggae shuffle, and Let’s Active’s moody “Horizon”, performed with Don Dixon. Hoover also changes the arrangements of “Handle with Care” and the Beatles’ “Only A Northern Song” enough to avoid instant comparison to the originals. The cover of “Goodnight” is the perfect ending, and, with Hoover’s voice being decidedly smoother than Ringo’s, it breathes new life into the song.

Hoover makes no apologies for those tracks on the collection that might otherwise be written off as schmaltz or elevator music by some. To him, they’re “brilliant pieces of songwriting that have never been equalled. These songs affect me physically. They can bring tears and pain, which is my highest compliment for a song”. Unfortunately, with “A Summer Place” and “Cathy’s Clown”, Hoover puts in solid performances but seems almost too in awe of the songs to do anything with them that hadn’t already been done in their original renditions.

Jamie Hoo-ever is a nice collection that saves his fans from spending the bucks to hunt down all of the tribute albums on which these covers appear, and, perhaps more importantly, it’ll keep ’em happy until Hoover’s next release of original material.