On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 11:19 PM, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
> APR: So, here's the question: Why are there no Rock and Roll standards
>> like
>> there are in Jazz, Blues and Folk?
>>
>
> MP: Because:
>
>> APR: Me, personally, I LOVE a good cover - Mark Lanegan's version of The
>> Leaving
>> Trains' "Creeping Coastline of Lights" comes to mind - but hate most cover
>> bands
>>
>
> MP: What you are calling "great covers" are the exception in rock -- where
> someone takes a song and changes it substantially to match their own style.
APR: I don't think this is right. There are great covers that are substantially modified and there are great covers executed with minor modifications... though, of course, where that threshold between minor and substantial lies is almost surely to be contested.
>
> MP: The normal cover in rock -- what you get with cover bands -- is slavish
> imitation. Hence the derogatory sense of it.
>
> In jazz and folk, the norm is to take songs and remake them in your own
> style. It's the majority of the songs that are played. That's why they're
> called standards instead of covers.
APR: But, again, I think this isn't quite right. I think it is something like a combination of the reification of Dylan's auteur-ship and Doss's hypothesis that "Rock is the main earner for the music industry, right? They need to move new product..." What makes the first part weird, of course, is that Dylan has always covered traditional folk songs and blues standards in his live shows... which suggests, perhaps - relative to the second part, that the simultaneous rise of the LP may have had something to do with it as well - not so much the need to move new product in general but the need to move product comprised of 10-12 song blocks.
This, as I've noted before, suggests that the Dylan/early-Beatles era finally differentiated rock and pop. (An aside: I know nothing about music theory.) With Elvis, among others, there's a blues/rock structure but pop production... even if Sun is an independent label. Along these lines, Brill Building and Motown pop operated in a world closer to pop standards than to rock auteur-iness... when professional songwriters, arrangers, studio musicians, choreographers pull 50-75% of the weight, that's pop. What Dylan and the early-mid-stream Beatles LPs do is re-emphasize the DIYishness of Chuck Berry et al... but after the cross-over is complete.
Of course, English blues rock and all varieties of folk rock are all about blues standards and traditionals... think of all the rock gods who trained at the feet of John Mayall... and then think of Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, the Byrds, Richard Thompson, etc... but because these folks are associated with what's generally believed to be the high point of rock, I/we regularly lose sight of this.
MP: Rock isn't a standard-based genre. If the vast majority of your songs
> aren't original with you, you aren't a real band. But that's certainly not
> true in folk or jazz.
But that's just restating the premise of my question as if it were fact rather than a problem.
When Doss added his note about moving product it also struck me that the performance of traditional folk songs, jazz standards and blues classics is largely about experiencing the music live whereas rock - for all of the celebration of live performance - is predominately about recorded/broadcast music...
The other thing that struck me is that the extraordinary proliferation and differentiation of popular music since The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and Meet the Beatles means that even classic rock is too damn big to filter/sift down towards a repertoire of even, say, 50 classics that are sufficiently similar in tone to encourage standard-ization. If you can't effectively distill the genre then all you can do is cover different songs for different reasons... and one of the coolest things you can do is cover a great song that wasn't a hit or make a great version of a song that the original artist couldn't - for whatever reason - get right (and isn't that part of the reason we [sometimes] love alternative studio versions, etc?)