Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

A consequence of cucumbers

White supremacy is terrorism.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

We’re not going back!

American History and Black History Cannot Be Separated

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

The willow is too close to the house.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Chutkan laughs. Lauro sits back down.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Cole is on a roll !

You are here: Home / Music / When That Hard Rain Comes…

When That Hard Rain Comes…

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…Gimme Shelter:

<div align=”center”><iframe width=”560″ height=”349″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/GJtq6OmD-_Y” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>

(h/t DeLong).

This is another one of those “songs around the world” featured in the Playing for Change documentary.  I got my first taste of this project with this little gem.

But I’m with DeLong on this one:  I never thought this was a song to cover, given how thoroughly Mick and Keef and the rest own it.  But I was wrong.  And on a day within a run of days during which the worst among us seek to deny our connections to each other…well why not a little DFH musical open thread to throw in their shriveled, joyless faces?

Have at it, all.

Reader Interactions

82Comments

  2. 2.

    DMcK

    Actually, Grand Funk Railroad did a kickass cover of Gimme Shelter on their album “Survival”.

  3. 3.

    isildur

    The Sisters of Mercy covered Gimme Shelter. When I was a goth I thought it was awesome. I’ve grown to like the Stones’ version better over time.

  4. 4.

    MonkeyBoy

    how thoroughly Mick and Keef and the rest own it

    umm, The real owner was Merry Clayton. Nobody has been able to cover that song in a way that matches what she did on the original.

  5. 5.

    wenchacha

    As long as that hippie-punching, song-molesting Pat Boone stays away from it.

  7. 7.

    Comrade Colette Collaboratrice

    Keith’s autobiography is out in paperback and Monsieur Colette just got it for me. I’m looking forward to it, but I should probably have waited until afterward to read this.

  8. 8.

    MikeJ

    Patti Smith’s is pretty good, but you could probably guess that.

    The Goo Goo Dolls covered it on an early album when they were louder and sloppier, pre alt-rock. I can’t say it’s a good cover, but if you ever hung out in rehearsal rooms with your high school/college buddies who had Marshall stacks there’s something to appreciate in it. At least they did something a bit different with it.

    Patti’s cover is great because it’s Patti, but it’s arranged too much like the Stones to make it one of the truly great covers of a song.

  9. 9.

    Corner Stone

    Man, you want to talk about having a bad fucking day?
    Flying bear kills two Canadians in freak accident
    “Two Canadians died instantly in a freak accident when a car hit a 440-pound (200-kg) black bear and sent the animal flying straight through the windshield of an oncoming vehicle, local media said Wednesday.”

    This sounds an awful lot like the Q Continuum murdered these Q refugees. Not sure there can be any other rational explanation.

  10. 10.

    Death Panel Truck

    I never thought this was a song to cover

    There a whole lot of songs I think shouldn’t be covered, and yet they are, most often with embarrassing results.

    Musicians should create their own work. Writers do. It’s not like I can say, for example, “Salinger did an okay job with ‘The Catcher In The Rye,’ but I can improve upon it. I think I’ll cover it.”

    (Actually, I hate TCITR. It could be improved upon. ;)

  18. 18.

    Suffern ACE

    @Corner Stone: I need to get my glasses checked. I originally thought the headline said “Flying Beer”, which would be an extra tragic way to go.

  19. 19.

    Comrade Colette Collaboratrice

    @Southern Beale: @cleek: Sounds even more delicious than that: AP now says his whole senior staff is ditching him, but he’s staying in the race.

    I give him 24 hours. And a dick pic.

  21. 21.

    MikeJ

    @Death Panel Truck: Completely disagree. Some people are great writers, some are great performers, some are both. Some people totally transform a song.

    If writers had to go around and read their novels to people you see more covers than you already do. Yes, there are literary covers. Check out John Scalzi’s Fuzzy book.

    The real key to why people do covers is
    1) musicians love music. They became musicians because they love listening to other people’s work. It’s natural they’d play it.
    2) Most musicians spend at least part of their careers playing out a *lot*. They get bored with the same stuff, and playing a cover is a nice break. It’s fun. Fun is good, no? Lighten up.
    3) It makes you a better writer and a better player. Joe Walsh lived two blocks over from when we lived in the same town. He said if you want to be a great guitar player, sit down with every Beatles album and learn how to play every song. When you can play them all, you’ll know enough to go play anything else.
    4) and oh yeah, fans love it. They like to see that other people are fans of stuff too. which leads to
    5) the people being covered usually like it. If it’s recorded they get a cut, and even if it’s just in a club somewhere, somebody else is raising awareness of their songs, and maybe making new fans for them.

  23. 23.

    Marcellus Shale public dick.

    @Death Panel Truck:

    Music has a longer tradition of covering songs. Its only recent that songs could be recorded, even more recent that people prefer a d.j. with an original to a live interpretation by a live band.

  27. 27.

    Carol

    @Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: He’s staying in? Where is he going to get a new staff? In a way I can’t blame them for quitting. There’s no chance he’s even going to have a prayer of getting the nomination, so why should professionals hang on? He’s not even going to be on anyone’s short list for VP either for the same reasons he’s not going to be the nominee. But he probably managed to get a few hopeful professionals who considered it training for the time they could get a real job, combined with a few true believers. But when your candidate declares, and then goes on a cruise three weeks in at a time when others are beginning to ramp up their campaigns, you know you’ve been screwed. So you guit to hopefully go to someone who’s a little more serious about running.

    I also bet he hasn’t paid them either.

    In short, unless there’s a mob of true believers willing to work for free, he’s toast.

  30. 30.

    scav

    I can’t stop laughing at TPM’s “Newt Gingrich’s struggling presidential campaign may be entering yet another rough patch” as though being utterly directionless would possibly be a step in the right direction.

  33. 33.

    Carol

    @MikeJ: I would also add that a lot of musicians have to play covers to pay the bills until they have enough of a fan base to make a living playing their own stuff. Not to mention all the student musicians who learn their craft by playing someone else’s material.

  36. 36.

    Violet

    Thanks for the video! I had heard about this project and had totally forgotten about it. I’m in need of a birthday gift for someone and this CD/DVD combo is just the perfect thing. Thanks!

  40. 40.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @jimbob: A 440 lb. bear went through the windshield, driver, one passenger, and rear window of one of the cars. The 440 lb. bear was launched into the air with sufficient force to do the aforementioned by another car. I doubt the cars are okay. I really doubt it. Sorry.

  41. 41.

    MikeJ

    @Carol: Good point. I had friends who really liked playing the local shitty dive where they could play their own stuff, but they’d get 1/3rd of the door (other bands played too) at a place that held 150 and typically had a $5 cover. Or they could play a frat party, do covers, and make $1000.

  42. 42.

    Studly Pantload, a full-service troll

    @Carol:

    He’s staying in?

    Newt’s a very plucky fella, dontchaknow? Just chock full o’ spunk!

    Eww, I think I just put myself off of my lunch…

  43. 43.

    Elliecat

    @MikeJ:

    If writers had to go around and read their novels to people you see more covers than you already do.

    Or ought to—in my college days I went to every reading I could and some authors were so lousy you wondered if they’d even SEEN the story before, let alone written it. (Poets were almost always good, though—Judy Grahn and Audre Lorde in particular were electrifying.)

    I’d add another reason for doing covers to your list. Sometimes another musician can bring an interesting or even enlightening difference in perspective or meaning to a song through their style, energy, mood, emphasis, age, gender, whatever.

    This is not always positive though—every time I catch myself singing “Whoops, I Did It Again” I think Richard Thompson has a lot to answer for.

  44. 44.

    stuckinred

    @MikeJ: My brother manages a Floyd cover band in LA. Members went to the Berklee school of music and the such. They love what they do and people come see then. What’s the harm?

  45. 45.

    Comrade Colette Collaboratrice

    @Carol: He’s always been toast. It was just a question of when the toaster was going to pop up and eject his burnt ass onto the kitchen floor. As for the timing, I’m guessing that either the latest round of marital trouble is about to hit the headlines and the cruise is going to be billed as a marriage-rescuing getaway, or it’s a last chance to enjoy some peace and quiet before Newt’s own #dicktwitter is exposed. Of course this is pure speculation, but I’m trying to be responsible…

  46. 46.

    Amir_Khalid

    @Death Panel Truck:
    Some songs are just too personal to the artist for anyone else to cover — nobody but Keith Richards could sing Before They Make Me Run, not even Mick. Some original performances simply can’t be improved upon, but other artists do have every right to try.

    What I don’t like is those pointless, note-for-note copies of the original artist’s performance. Guns’N’Roses’ cover of Sympathy For The Devil is exactly my idea of how not to cover a song.

    Covers are fine by me as long as the covering artist makes the new version their own. Like this one of Gimme Shelter, or Living Color’s live version of Bruce Springsteen’s American Skin. Jimmy Page liked Dolly Parton’s bluegrass cover of Stairway to Heaven a lot better than Pat Boone’s jazz version, so I hear.

    On Newt Gingrich, I doubt his top campaign people quit because of ideological differences. If they disagreed with him on that they wouldn’t have been on his staff in the first place. I think they had come to a consensus that they were wasting time on an inept candidate with no idea how to lead a campaign organization.

  47. 47.

    scav

    To pile on, ahh yes, Glenn Gould is clearly the lessor a musician as he merely covered the Brandenburg Concertos instead of playing his own works. (Although I am glad he managed The Idea of North.)

  48. 48.

    Corner Stone

    @Omnes Omnibus: Can you imagine the force necessary to drive a 440lb wet sack horizontally through a windshield, human, seat, human, and rear windshield?
    It’s fucking mind boggling.

    If you’re a loved one (FSM bless you and keep you in Her noodly appendages), do you keep waiting for the curtains to part and someone show you where the hidden camera is?

  51. 51.

    Corner Stone

    I love covers. As I’ve mentioned here before, the Johnny Cash cover of NIN’s Hurt is so good I thought they should’ve written it for him.
    And anyone who hasn’t heard Adele’s cover of The Cure’s Lovesong is missing out.

  52. 52.

    Carol

    @Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: You might be right. The timing of this vacation never made sense to me. If this was something already planned, why not take the cruise first and then declare? I mean this is mid 2011, so there is still a bit of time to make it official left, and certainly enough time to squeeze a cruise in.
    I suspect that Mrs. Gingrich is someone who must be catered to, or else she blows up the joint, and she’s less than happy about Newt’s run. So the cruise is a way of appeasement. If he cancels’ she’s probably a devil on wheels.
    He can’t afford to have his third wife publicly unhappy: he has too much baggage.

  54. 54.

    eemom

    I have nothing against covers at all and there are some great ones — but there are also some examples of highly successful covers where I thought the lesser known original was vastly better. Rod Stewart doing Tim Hardin’s Reason to Believe, and ESPECIALLY, James Taylor’s whiny-ass You Got A Friend. Carole King’s own version rawked.

  56. 56.

    Amir_Khalid

    @stuckinred: But they don’t release those note-for-note covers, do they? It’s perfectly okay, to my mind, to copy someone else’s performance down to the last detail as a benchmark of your own musicianship. And if people will pay to hear your close mimicry, then good for you. But, even in classical music where they play, from the original scores, music created two centuries ago, you still have to bring something of your own artistic vision to a performance to make it worth releasing.

  57. 57.

    Violet

    @eemom:

    ESPECIALLY, James Taylor’s whiny-ass You Got A Friend. Carole King’s own version rawked.

    Carole King performed “You’ve Got a Friend” yesterday on the Today Show for Meredith Vieira’s last day.

  60. 60.

    eemom

    come to think of it, what a totally stupid proposition is this “there shouldn’t be covers” attitude.

    And come to think of it further, why is there NO attitude SO inane that someone won’t pop up on this blog to spout it, thereby causing others here to try to reason with inanity?

  64. 64.

    shortstop

    Mmmmmmm, that was gooooooooood. I needed that. Thanks, Tom!

    You know how you don’t mind about not having some talents, but really wish you’d been closer to the front of the line when others were passed out? I’ve always wished I could open my mouth and let Merry Clayton’s pure, powerful wonderfulness come out instead of my off-key wails. I once heard that Jagger and Richard got her out of bed after midnight to come down to the studio and do the backups for that song; she came down in her curlers, did her bit, then went home and back to bed. I loved that story until I heard later–and this sounds apocryphal, but Clayton says it’s true–that she’d had a miscarriage the next day, which must surely have soured her on the memory of that song.

  65. 65.

    Brachiator

    @Amir_Khalid:

    Some songs are just too personal to the artist for anyone else to cover — nobody but Keith Richards could sing Before They Make Me Run, not even Mick. Some original performances simply can’t be improved upon, but other artists do have every right to try.

    Disagree with this big time. Eric Clapton wrote Tears in Heaven from the depth of the pain of the loss of his 5 year old son. Jose Feliciano sang a devastatingly powerful version of the song, with far more nuance than Clapton’s original. Music is funny that way.

    And the plain fact is that some covers are more well known than the originals. And the originals of some songs were not written by the singers that made them famous.

    One more thing. Terry Gross did a great interview with Keith Richards. One thing he talked about that really struck me was how he saw himself as writing songs for Keith to sing. This is not quite the same thing as a collaboration of equals, and reminded me a bit of Bernie Taupin writing lyrics for Elton John or Burt Bacharach and Hal David writing songs for Dionne Warwick.

    And then we have the Motown factory, where people like Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye wrote songs for other artists long before they began their own performing careers.

    Pop music and rock is built on covers and people performing the songs of others. And of course in both pop and jazz, interpretation is the love supreme, not just original creation.

  68. 68.

    Alex S.

    My favorite cover, if I have to decide, is Sinead O’Connor’s version of Nothing Compares 2 U by Prince.

  69. 69.

    WyldPirate

    @Corner Stone:

    Thanks for those two, CS. I haven’t heard either in a good while. Just listened to both and they’re still great covers that I like way better than the originals.

  71. 71.

    thehersch

    Aretha Franklin did a widely admired cover of “Respect” by Otis Redding. Perhaps some of you have heard it.

  74. 74.

    MCA

    I know, wet blanket, if you can’t say something nice, etc., but I’m a little “meh” on that cover. Especially up until Taj Majal showed up, when it got some emotion and weight. It’s too laid back. I’m totally cool with covers, and they’ve tried to reinterpret the musical tone rather than mimic here, but in doing so (IMHO) they’ve lost the urgency necessary for a song about war, chaos, rape, murder, and general apocalyptic terror to really work. Not that the Stones can’t be covered, but I’m fonder of some other efforts. To put myself out there instead of just dumping on things everyone else seems to like, I actually thought the Sundays’ cover of “Wild Horses” was just devastating and sounded more real than the original, which had just a little bit of drunk at the end of the night insincerity to it.

  75. 75.

    Bill Murray

    I too like covers to be different from the original, my faves

    Devo’s cover of Satisfaction — the SNL version was so shockingly cool to the 15 year old me living out in the hinterlands that I never recovered

    Susanna and the Magical Orchestra’s cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart really transforms the song in a nice way.

  76. 76.

    Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason

    @Bill Murray: I’m with you there.

    For Stones covers, I always thought Devo nailed “Satisfaction”. I mean, Jagger “… can’t get no satisfaction.”? Really? Now Devo, with those guys you knew it was God’s Own Truth.

  77. 77.

    gbear

    @Death Panel Truck:

    Yea, all those cover songs just sucked the life out of The Beatles first three albums (not counting the soundtrack lps). John Lennon singing ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘Money’? Paul singing ‘Long Tall Sally’? How dishonest could they get?

    PS: That cover of ‘Gimme Shelter’ is great.

  78. 78.

    The Fat Kate Middleton (aka Jim, Once)

    Damn you, Tom Levenson. All I’ve done for the last three hours is look at videos from Playing for Change. Oh wait … I’m retired. I can do that. So, so awesome.

  82. 82.

    Exurban Mom

    @Corner Stone: The Adele cover of The Cure’s “Lovesong” is worth your time. Just watched the live version on Letterman, and she just has the most amazing voice. It’s a cover that does justice to the song while making it her own, which is the key to a good cover.

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