John’s November Recommendations: 2 Covers by Super Groups (Tin Machine’s “If There Is Something” & Beck’s “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime”

I remember reading Reeves Gabrels’s articles in Guitar For The Practicing Musician back in high school.  He’d write about unconventional guitar techniques every month, like using a TV remote to make “bleep-bloop” noises come from your guitar pickups, or stringing a plastic garbage bag twist-ties between your guitar strings to make it sounds like a banjo.  I never heard him play until the mid-nighties while watching a rerun of an episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Macaulay Culkin.  Gabrels, along with David Bowie and the Sales brothers (who played with Todd Rundgren, among others) performed a blistering cover of Roxy Music’s “If There Is Something.”  Holy moly…  Instantly a fan.  Sorry to say that the studio version of Tin Machine never lived up to their live performances.  (Isn’t that often the way with super groups?)  And you can’t find a recording of that SnL live performance anywhere on the internet.  (Their second performance of the night “Baby Universal” is available, but not nearly as cool.)  So this recording is the closest thing I could find in that spirit.

My second recommendation is a cover by Beck from the soundtrack to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  First let me say that movies were better about 10 years ago, or at least more interesting.  Also this is a supergroup performance of sorts, too, as it features an introspective Beck coming off his Sea Change album and Jon Brion performing, arranging and producing pretty much everything on this track.  It’s one of my favorite recordings ever, and the cover is light years beyond what the original ever hoped to be.