At the end of the 60s, super­star drum­mer and angri­est man in rock Gin­ger Bak­er was on the verge of col­lapse. Strung out on hero­in, deeply griev­ing Jimi Hendrix’s death, and alien­at­ed from his for­mer Cream and Blind Faith band­mates, he need­ed a new direc­tion. He found it in Nige­ria, where he decamped after dri­ving a Range Rover from Alge­ria across the Sahara Desert. (A mad­cap adven­ture cap­tured in the 1971 doc­u­men­tary Gin­ger Bak­er in Africa). Once in Lagos, Bak­er start­ed jam­ming with Afrobeat leg­end Fela Kuti.

The meet­ing of these two musi­cal forces of nature pro­duced a suite of record­ings. “Baker’s drum­ming appeared on sev­er­al albums along­side the Niger­ian king of afrobeat,” writes Okay Africa, “includ­ing Why Black Man Dey Suf­fer (1971), Live! (1972) and Stratavar­i­ous (1972).”

Kuti’s long­time drum­mer and arranger—and inven­tor of the “afrobeat”—Tony Allen was high­ly impressed with Bak­er’s range, and Nige­ri­ans, as Jay Bul­ger writes at Rolling Stone, loved him.

Arriv­ing in Lagos, Nige­ria, Bak­er set up west Africa’s first 16-track record­ing stu­dio and formed a life­long friend­ship with Afrobeat star Fela Kuti. Per­form­ing with the musi­cal icon for crowds of 150,000, Bak­er became famous through­out Nige­ria as the “Oyin­bo” (White) Drum­mer. “If Gin­ger wants to play jazz, he plays jazz,” says the Niger­ian drum­mer Tony Allen. “If he wants to play rock, he starts Cream. If he wants to play Afrobeat, he moves to Nige­ria. What­ev­er he plays, he brings his own pulse and sound. He under­stands the African beat more than any oth­er West­ern­er.”

High praise, but Bak­er didn’t seek the spot­light, his enor­mous ego off­stage notwith­stand­ing. He trained and he learned. Always a col­lab­o­ra­tive play­er, by his own descrip­tion, Bak­er adapt­ed him­self to the needs of the music. In Kuti’s band, he found a well-drilled ensem­ble and in Fela him­self, a kin­dred spir­it with a per­son­al­i­ty as grandiose and cap­ti­vat­ing as his own, though Baker’s par­tic­u­lar charms were maybe best appre­ci­at­ed at a dis­tance. Hear the loose, sprawl­ing Live! above, with anno­ta­tions telling the sto­ry of the two leg­ends in brief.

Bak­er and Kuti first met in the ear­ly 60s in Lon­don when Fela stud­ied at Trin­i­ty Col­lege of Music. Once they final­ly con­nect­ed musi­cal­ly, the sound was explo­sive, thanks to Baker’s record­ing stu­dio and Fela’s New Afri­ka Shrine, the per­for­mance space where the live mag­ic hap­pened night after night. Then there are the war stories—not only sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but also the actu­al Niger­ian Army try­ing to shut down Fela’s com­pound, which he called the Kalaku­ta Repub­lic, and which housed his 27 back­up singers and his stu­dio. The band­leader was beat­en and jailed over and over, and the com­mune was final­ly burned to the ground in 1977.

The video above from YouTu­ber Band­splain­ing gives an enter­tain­ing syn­op­sis of the Baker/Fela sto­ry, though beware, as sev­er­al com­menters have point­ed out, it con­tains sev­er­al inac­cu­ra­cies, includ­ing at the out­set the sug­ges­tion that Fela has only recent­ly received wide­spread recog­ni­tion. This, of course, is total­ly false—Latin Amer­i­can musi­cians have cel­e­brat­ed his fusion of African polyrhythms, big band funk, and psy­che­del­ic rock for decades; in Nige­ria and else­where in Africa, Fela was as big a musi­cal god as Clap­ton in Eng­land, as well as a pow­er­ful spir­i­tu­al and polit­i­cal sym­bol of Pan-African social­ism; and in the US and UK, New Wave bands like Talk­ing Heads made entire albums build­ing on Fela’s inspi­ra­tion.

One might think of Baker’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with Fela Kuti and the Afri­ka ‘70 as an ear­ly inter­na­tion­al super­group, of the kind that would become com­mon­place in lat­er decades. But Bak­er didn’t use Fela’s music as a back­drop for his own brand. He was thrilled just to be there in the band.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Why Gin­ger Bak­er (RIP) Was One of the Great­est Drum­mers in Rock & World Music

An Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Music of Fela Kuti: Rad­i­cal Niger­ian Band­leader, Polit­i­cal Hero, and Cre­ator of Afrobeat

Who Are the Best Drum Soloists in Rock? See Leg­endary Per­for­mances by Neil Peart (RIP), John Bon­ham, Kei­th Moon, Ter­ry Bozzio & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

Many years ago I tried to per­suade friends I played with in a local indie band to debut a coun­try-punk ver­sion of Wu Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” live. No one went for it, and look­ing back, I’m pret­ty sure it would have been a musi­cal dis­as­ter. That 90s hip-hop clas­sic deserves bet­ter than our Weird Al-meets-Ween-meets-Wilco approach, which is not to say that such a cov­er couldn’t work at all, but that Neil Young was more our speed.

Great cov­er songs come in all styles, and the world’s best musi­cians (which my friends and I were not) can take mate­r­i­al from almost any genre and make it their own (cf. Coltrane). For most peo­ple, the cov­er song is tricky ter­ri­to­ry.

Hew too close­ly to an icon­ic orig­i­nal and you risk a com­pe­tent but total­ly unnec­es­sary remake, like Gus Van Sant’s ver­sion of Psy­cho—“all that’s miss­ing is the ten­sion,” as Roger Ebert wrote of that 1998 endeav­or, “the con­vic­tion that some­thing urgent is hap­pen­ing.”

Stray too far from the source, as I near­ly dared to do with “C.R.E.A.M.,” and the effort can seem hokey, tone-deaf, dis­re­spect­ful, cul­tur­al­ly appro­pria­tive, and so forth. For some rea­son, old­er artists seem to have more grace with oth­ers’ mate­r­i­al, per­haps because they’ve lived enough to under­stand it inside and out. Many of my favorite cov­ers, and yours, are in this vein, like two well-known from film and tele­vi­sion: Charles Bradley’s cov­er of Ozzy’s “Changes” and John­ny Cash’s cov­er of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt.”

The fact that both of these soul­ful, raspy singers have passed on gives these songs an extra-musi­cal poignan­cy. They were also two singers well acquaint­ed in life with grief, loss, and hurt. Oth­er cov­er ver­sions that stick with me include Cat Power’s “At the Dark End of the Street” and R.E.M.’s cov­er of art-punks Wire’s “Strange.” What makes them great? I could go on about  the mer­its of each one, but I don’t have a gen­er­al the­o­ry of cov­ers. You’ll find such a the­o­ry in the Poly­phon­ic video at the top, how­ev­er, which asks and answers the ques­tion, “how does an artist nav­i­gate the tumul­tuous waters of cov­er songs?”

The nar­ra­tor admits the ambi­gu­i­ty inher­ent in judg­ing a suc­cess­ful cov­er. “I don’t think there’s a clear set of rules you can stick to that will guar­an­tee suc­cess. But I do think there are lessons to be learned from look­ing at the great cov­ers of the past.” He does so by ana­lyz­ing three of the most suc­cess­ful cov­ers, both crit­i­cal­ly and com­mer­cial­ly, ever record­ed: Jimi Hendrix’s haunt­ed elec­tric take on Dylan’s “All Along the Watch­tow­er,” Aretha’s anthemic trans­fig­u­ra­tion of Otis Redding’s “Respect,” and Cash’s open wound cov­er of “Hurt.”

All of these songs, in their own ways, trans­form the source mate­r­i­al com­plete­ly, such that each became a sig­na­ture for the artist. Dylan, for exam­ple, was so impressed with Hendrix’s cov­er that his live ver­sions began to resem­ble Jimi’s arrange­ment. “Strange how when I sing it,” he wrote in the lin­er notes to Bio­graph, “I always feel it’s a trib­ute to him in some kind of way.” That’s a rar­i­fied “endorse­ment of a suc­cess­ful cov­er,” if there ever was one, Poly­phon­ic says. But there’s more to it than earn­ing the song­writer’s approval.

To under­stand how a suc­cess­ful cov­er works, ret­ro­spec­tive­ly at least, we have to go back to the source and find the qual­i­ty the cov­er artist extrap­o­lat­ed and expand­ed upon. In Hendrix’s case, that was a “sense of ten­sion and desperation”—announced in his pound­ing intro, the first howl­ing line of the song, and, of course, in Hendrix’s slinky, spooky, effects-laden gui­tar runs. He trans­lat­ed the emo­tion­al tenor of Dylan’s orig­i­nal into a musi­cal vocab­u­lary that was ful­ly his own in every respect.

Cov­ers also evoke a host of per­son­al asso­ci­a­tions, as the video con­cedes, that are dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate to firm con­clu­sions about what makes one a suc­cess. We form life­long rela­tion­ships with cer­tain songs and may accept no substitutes—or we might, on the oth­er hand, be more drawn to cov­er ver­sions through a love of the orig­i­nal. That’s espe­cial­ly true with cov­ers that alchem­i­cal­ly change a song’s sound, mean­ing, tem­po, and feel while keep­ing its intan­gi­ble emo­tion­al essence intact. Leave your favorite cov­ers in the com­ments below and tell us what you think makes them so great.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 100 Amaz­ing Cov­er Ver­sions of Bea­t­les Songs

Icon­ic Songs Played by Musi­cians Around the World: “Stand by Me,” “Redemp­tion Song,” “Rip­ple” & More

With Medieval Instru­ments, Band Per­forms Clas­sic Songs by The Bea­t­les, Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, Metal­li­ca & Deep Pur­ple

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The con­cept of gen­er­a­tions, as we cur­rent­ly use the term, would have made no sense to peo­ple liv­ing through­out most of human his­to­ry. “Before the 19th cen­tu­ry,” writes Sarah Leskow at The Atlantic, “gen­er­a­tions were thought of as (gen­er­al­ly male) bio­log­i­cal rela­tion­ships with­in families—grandfathers, sons, grand­chil­dren and so forth.” The word did not describe com­mon traits shared by, “as one lex­i­cog­ra­ph­er put it in 1863, ‘all men liv­ing more or less at the same time.’”

The the­o­ry was thor­ough­ly ingest­ed into mass cul­ture, as any­one can tell from social media wars and the fix­a­tions of news­pa­per colum­nists. One such cor­re­spon­dent weighed in a few years ago with a con­trar­i­an take: “Your gen­er­a­tional iden­ti­ty is a lie,” wrote Philip Bump at The Wash­ing­ton Post in 2015. (He makes an excep­tion for Baby Boomers, for rea­sons you’ll have to read in his col­umn.)

All this debunk­ing is to the good. While schol­ars rou­tine­ly inves­ti­gate the ori­gins of con­tem­po­rary ideas, too often the rest of us take for grant­ed that our present ways of see­ing the world are time­less and eter­nal.

Yet, whether gen­er­a­tions are a real phe­nom­e­non or a cul­tur­al con­struc­tion, glob­al­ized mass media of the past sev­er­al decades ensures that no mat­ter where we come from, most peo­ple born around the same time will share some set of near-iden­ti­cal experiences—of lis­ten­ing to the same music, watch­ing the same films, TV shows, etc. Giv­en the way our think­ing can be shaped by for­ma­tive moments in pop cul­ture, we’re bound to have a few things in com­mon if we had access to Hol­ly­wood film and MTV. Maybe what most defines gen­er­a­tions as we know them now is cul­ture as com­mod­i­ty.

Take the video series fea­tured here. Each one cuts togeth­er 50 songs released in a sin­gle year, begin­ning in 1979, along with video mon­tages of some of the year’s most pop­u­lar artists. Cre­at­ed by The Hood Inter­net, “a DJ and pro­duc­tion duo from Chica­go, known for their exper­tise in mashups and remix­es,” the series could serve as a lab exper­i­ment to test the emo­tion­al reac­tions of peo­ple born at dif­fer­ent times. We may have all heard these songs by now. But only those who heard them in their youth will have the nos­tal­gic reac­tions we asso­ciate with gen­er­a­tional mem­o­ry, since music, as David Toop  writes at The Qui­etus, is “a mem­o­ry machine.”

Every­one else could stand to learn some­thing about what the 80s looked and sound­ed like. As a his­tor­i­cal peri­od, it tends to get cast in a fair­ly nar­row mold, with syn­th­pop and hair met­al defin­ing the extent of 80s music. The pop music of the decade was fab­u­lous­ly diverse, with gen­res cross-pol­li­nat­ing in what turn out to be sur­pris­ing­ly har­mo­nious ways in these mashup videos. The cre­ators of the series worked their way up to 1987, and we get to see some dra­mat­ic shifts along the way that fur­ther com­pli­cate the idea of 80s music, even for those who heard these songs when they came out, and who have nine years of for­ma­tive moments to go with them. See all of the videos on The Hood Inter­net’s YouTube chan­nel.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1980s Met­al­head Kids Are Alright: Sci­en­tif­ic Study Shows That They Became Well-Adjust­ed Adults

A Soul Train-Style Detroit Dance Show Gets Down to Kraftwerk’s “Num­bers” in the Late 80s

How a Record­ing Stu­dio Mishap Cre­at­ed the Famous Drum Sound That Defined 80s Music & Beyond

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

It’s quite a tes­ta­ment to Joni Mitchell’s musi­cian­ship that her “voice is arguably the most under­rat­ed aspect of her music.” So writes a con­trib­u­tor to The Range Place, an online project that ana­lyzes the vocal ranges of pop­u­lar singers. This is not to say that Mitchell’s voice is underrated—far from it—but her adven­tur­ous, deeply per­son­al lyri­cism and exper­i­men­tal song­writ­ing are how she is most often dis­tin­guished from the cohort of 60s singer-song­writ­ers who emerged from the folk scene. (She first became known as the writer of Judy Collins’ hit, “Both Sides, Now.”)

That said, there’s no mis­tak­ing her for any oth­er singer. “With very wide vibra­to, she would fre­quent­ly reach into her upper reg­is­ter com­fort­ably with a bliss­ful falset­to while still being able to reach some smooth low­er notes with ease.” You can hear exam­ples of her vocal range above, in excerpts from dozens of songs, both stu­dio and live ver­sions, record­ed through­out her career. “She was a mez­zo-sopra­no through the late six­ties and sev­en­ties, with her voice stand­ing out among oth­er singer-song­writ­ers due to its unusu­al com­fort in the fifth octave.”

There are many oth­er qual­i­ties that set Mitchell’s voice apart, includ­ing her incred­i­ble sense of pitch and rhythm. As ses­sion singer and vocal coach Jaime Bab­bitt writes, “singers who study singing and play instru­ments that make chords are bet­ter than all the rest. Joni Mitchell played many: dul­cimer, gui­tar, piano, and flute, even ukulele as a child.” Mitchell’s instru­men­tal skill gave her pre­cise vocal tim­ing, “a crit­i­cal and often over­looked singer-skill,” and one that con­tributes huge­ly to a vocal per­for­mance.

Her love of jazz infus­es even her folki­est songs with rhyth­mic vocal pat­terns that run up and down the scale. (Hear an exam­ple in the iso­lat­ed vocals from 1971’s “Riv­er,” just above.) Just as every singer’s voice will do, Mitchell’s range nar­rowed with age. “Her voice nowa­days,” writes The Range Place (though she no longer per­forms), “is clos­er to that of a con­tral­to than to that of a mez­zo-sopra­no, hav­ing low­ered sub­stan­tial­ly more than oth­er singers from the seventies”—a like­ly out­come of her life­long smok­ing habit.

It’s com­mon to say of an old­er singer that “she can’t hit the high notes any­more,” but this judg­ment miss­es out on the rich­ness of a mature voice. Mitchell’s “indomitable tech­nique” nev­er wavered in her lat­er years, Paul Tay­lor argues at The Inde­pen­dent. Her lat­er voice was “stun­ning (bereft, bewil­dered, sto­ical),” trans­formed from the ambi­tious, pierc­ing falset­to to “radiant/rueful” and wise.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Joni Mitchell Sing an Immac­u­late Ver­sion of Her Song “Coy­ote,” with Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn & Gor­don Light­foot (1975)

See Clas­sic Per­for­mances of Joni Mitchell from the Very Ear­ly Years–Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell (1965/66)

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When Clare Tor­ry went into the stu­dio to record her now-leg­endary vocals for Pink Floyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky,” the cen­ter­piece of 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon, nei­ther the singer nor the band were par­tic­u­lar­ly impressed with each oth­er. David Gilmour remem­bered the moment in an inter­view on the album’s 30th anniver­sary:

Clare Tor­ry did­n’t real­ly look the part. She was Alan Par­sons’ idea. We want­ed to put a girl on there, scream­ing orgas­mi­cal­ly. Alan had worked with her pre­vi­ous­ly, so we gave her try. And she was fan­tas­tic. We had to encour­age her a lit­tle bit. We gave her some dynam­ic hints: “Maybe you’d like to do this piece qui­et­ly, and this piece loud­er.” She did maybe half a dozen takes, and then after­wards we com­piled the final per­for­mance out of all the bits. It was­n’t done in one sin­gle take.

Asked the fol­low-up ques­tion “what did she look like?,” Gilmour replied, “like a nice Eng­lish house­wife.”

Tor­ry, for her part, was hard­ly starstruck. “If it had been the Kinks,” she lat­er said, “I’d have been over the moon.” She also remem­bers the ses­sion very  dif­fer­ent­ly. “They had no idea” what they want­ed,” she says. Told only “we don’t want any words,” she decid­ed to “pre­tend to be an instru­ment.” She remem­bers “hav­ing a lit­tle go” and knock­ing out the ses­sion in a cou­ple takes.

This Rashomon sce­nario involves not only faulty mem­o­ry but also the legal ques­tion as to who com­posed the song’s melody and vocal concept—a ques­tion even­tu­al­ly decid­ed, in 2004, in Torry’s favor, enti­tling her to roy­al­ties.

She clear­ly wasn’t about to become a tour­ing mem­ber of the band, even after the album’s mas­sive suc­cess and two sub­se­quent tours. Still, while Tor­ry may not have suit­ed Gilmour’s phys­i­cal pref­er­ences for female singers, and while she may not have thought much of Pink Floyd, she has appeared live with their dif­fer­ent iter­a­tions over the years, includ­ing a show at the Rain­bow The­atre in Lon­don just months after the album’s release (fur­ther up). Lat­er, in 1987, Tor­ry appeared again, this time with Roger Waters at Wem­b­ley Sta­di­um on his K.A.O.S. on the Road Tour.

Tor­ry would then join the David Gilmour-led Pink Floyd in 1990 for “Great Gig in the Sky” at Kneb­worth. I do not think she resem­bles an Eng­lish house­wife in the con­cert film at the top—or at least no more than the rest of the band look like mid­dle-aged Eng­lish hus­bands. But she still pulls off the soar­ing vocal, more or less, sev­en­teen years after she first stepped into the stu­dio, hav­ing lit­tle idea who Pink Floyd was or what would become of that fate­ful ses­sion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear How Clare Torry’s Vocals on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” Made the Song Go from Pret­ty Good to Down­right Great

Pink Floyd Stream­ing Free Clas­sic Con­cert Films, Start­ing with 1994’s Pulse, the First Live Per­for­mance of Dark Side of the Moon in Full

Watch Doc­u­men­taries on the Mak­ing of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Joni Mitchell doesn’t like to do inter­views, but once she starts to open up, she real­ly opens up, not only about her own strug­gles but about her feel­ings towards her fel­low artists. These are often decid­ed­ly neg­a­tive. Maybe she took a cue from her per­son­al hero, Miles Davis (who, it turned out secret­ly owned all her albums). Mitchell matched his lev­el of caus­tic com­men­tary in 2010 when she told the L.A. Times that Bob Dylan “is not authen­tic at all. He’s a pla­gia­rist, and his name and voice are fake. Every­thing about Bob is a decep­tion.”

Attempts to clar­i­fy fell flat with the most back­hand­ed of com­pli­ments. “I like a lot of Bob’s songs, though musi­cal­ly he’s not very gift­ed.” If any musi­cian has earned the right to crit­i­cize him… In any case, what­ev­er she thought of Dylan dur­ing her mid-sev­en­ties peri­od, when she record­ed and released her dense­ly exper­i­men­tal The Hiss­ing of Sum­mer Lawns and Court and Spark, she was hap­py to join the 1975 Bob Dylan Rolling Thun­der Revue.

Mar­tin Scors­ese cap­tured the tour, which played small­er, more inti­mate venues than Dylan had in years. The doc­u­men­tary, Rolling Thun­der Revue: A Bob Dylan Sto­ry by Mar­tin Scors­ese, was only released last year. Dylan may have been the head­lin­er, but this is also a Joni Mitchell sto­ry, and a Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, and oth­er artists’ sto­ry. In the clip above, Mitchell plays a new song, “Coy­ote,” at Gor­don Lightfoot’s house, with Dylan and McGuinn join­ing in on gui­tar. Her per­for­mance is immac­u­late, full of con­fi­dence and nuance. McGuinn leans for­ward before she begins to intro­duce the song for Joni, mansplain­ing into the mic, “Joni wrote this song about this tour and on this tour and for this tour.”

Mitchell says noth­ing, but fans will know she wrote the song about Sam Shep­ard and first intro­duced it onstage dur­ing The Hiss­ing of Sum­mer Lawns tour. They’ll also rec­og­nize it as the first song on Mitchell’s 1976 album Heji­ra. The stu­dio ver­sion, above, is still dri­ven by her acoustic gui­tar but incor­po­rates per­cus­sion and Mitchell’s ser­pen­tine vocal line entwines with Jaco Pastorius’s bass. Lyri­cal­ly, the song is full of dusty, for­lorn images like the set­tings of Shepard’s plays. How McGuinn could have thought that it was about Dylan’s tour is beyond me. But Mitchell nev­er need­ed any­one else to speak for her.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joni Mitchell Pub­lish­es a Book of Her Rarely Seen Paint­ings & Poet­ry

See Clas­sic Per­for­mances of Joni Mitchell from the Very Ear­ly Years–Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell (1965/66)

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness