Where’s DIY classic recreations?
Watching the adorable indie cult film Son of Rambow and remembering the also-recent Be Kind Rewind, I was struck by this adorable idea of film nuts recreating their favorite movies, be it for fame and recognition or desperation and profit. Both films are hilarious because the subjects are so DIY that they can’t match the originals and instead come up with lovable copies where the gap between the original manufactured reality and the fan’s version of it are so wide and implausible that it’s ridiculously hilarious.
But what if this premise got transferred over to the realm of music? True that there have been bands that have done full album covers- recently the Dirty Projectors did so with Black Flag and Abbey Road has been covered more than once in its entirety for instance (not to mention Phish’s tradition of Halloween shows where they did whole album covers).
What I was thinking though was ‘wouldn’t this idea also make a great film?’ Think of it as another mis-matched comedy. Let’s say that a group of inspired stoners decided to recreate Sgt Pepper with very limited resources? Not only would it be funny to see them try it but you could also have all kinds of interesting (and insane) conversations and arguments about the songs and the album itself. Ditto with other classics like Thriller or Appetite for Destruction or Purple Rain or Who’s Next, all high tech monuments of technology that could easily be exploited by unwashed fans. One request to any producer that does mount such a quest- please pass some royalty points my way, OK...?
I think part of the problem is that there’s such a preoccupation with being “real” in music, even amongst the indies. Be Kind Rewind and (I’m told though I haven’t seen it yet) Son of Rambow worked because they were made by folks who were willfully clueless, but just enamored of the dynamism of the big screen. Music, to most of those who pick up instruments, is less wrought with an elite club membership mythology (as there is in Hollywood) than it is with a working class Horatio Alger mythology (rags to riches, being “discovered"). Also, there’s the knowledge of those tons of “cover” bands out there (and try to articulate exact replicas of the entire oeuvres of popular bands).
The indie milieu is far too self-aware. They can take on nothing too pop without sounding too faux-hipster “ironic” or kitsch. Sterogum hosted some indie tributes (to Post and Ok Computer) a little while back, but they’re often reverently perfunctory, despite a few good entries. Gone are the days when Joy Division can pump through a take on “Louie Louie” in concert for the piss of it or the Sex Pistols running through a medley of songs they never bothered learning how to play, as they did on The Great Rock N Roll Swindle. There’s a “punk” cover of everything these days.
Maybe what you’re suggesting is more a task to be taken on by outsider artists. Ariel Pink with the all the tape hiss, but not as self-aware. What would Wesley Willis’s take on Pet Sounds have been like? The problem, I guess, is that what you’re looking for or suggesting surely exists, but not in any major available outlet.
I knew a bunch of guys in Upstate New York who ran a micro-DIY label called Paste Room Records who put out a tape compilation called Louie Louie Louie, which featured about two dozen bands covering the famous Kingsmen-popularized tune including a looped rendition on kazoo with the sound of someone urinating in the background. The same group did a live performance as “A Capella Jerks” wherein they sang all 15 minutes of the Circle Jerks’s “Group Sex” album straight through using nothing but vocal chords. You can’t get any more stripped down than that.
Comment by Timothy Gabriele from Philadelphia, PA — May 12, 2008 @ 8:56 pm