Recently, I was in Northern VA to visit with my Big Bros and Sister-in-Law Lora and attend the Washington National’s home opener. (OK, recently is kind of relative – I started this post and then sat on it for about a month.) It was a really good time. On Sunday evening, there was this glorious stretch of about four hours, spent just shooting the shit and reminiscing with Rich, Steve, and Lora about Joan and Cody N™. We were at Rich's basement bar, surrounding the two-tower keg system, which was efficiently dispensing copious amounts of Sam Adams Boston Lager and Miller Lite. Those were just about the best four hours Your Faithful Servant has had over the last six months. Really need to figure out a way to do that more often. Nourishment for the soul, indeed.
It was a brief trip and we were all subjected to some serious traffic challenges. Mine were getting from NC to VA, getting to and from the game (as a passenger) , and even returning back to NC where I hit a mess on I-95 just inside Richmond. Real First World Problem stuff there. With all that traffic during the Great Traffic Jams of March 31 and April 1, there was lots of down-time for productive reflection. However, rather than taking advantage of that period and doing some serious soul-searching in a quest to become a “better me”, I found myself obsessively locked into noodling about an observation that I made to myself before I had even reached I-85 on Sunday.
At that time, around 1:10 PM Sunday afternoon, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s classic remake of Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile was just melting the interior of my 2009 Civic. I said to myself: “Jimi, I understand that the conventional wisdom is that the remake is never better than the original, but, with all due respect, SRV’s version just blows your rendition with The Experience away.” (What? You mean to tell me when you are alone in the car, you don’t talk to yourself or to killer guitarists who have been dead for 33 years?)
But why do I feel that way? Is it just a matter of taste and subjectivity as with many things related to art? Or are there some deeper trends at play here? So I got to thinking about the relationship that a listener has to multiple versions of the same song from different artists. Are there patterns at play here? Do I generally favor the original or the remake? If so, why? By the time I hit Henderson, NC I had formulated the following theory, which I set out to prove (or disprove) over the next two days.
Chep’s Theory of Song Remakes: When comparing two versions of any song (the original and a subsequent remake by another artist), one will almost always favor the version of the song that one heard first. This is due to intense emotional and nostalgic roots that the “first-heard” song lays in the cerebellum.
OK, that last part about the physiology of the brain is just fabricated bullshit. While the first version of a song that you hear is usually, but not always, the original, my theory doesn’t at all imply that a remake is never better than the original. Rather, the first version that you hear (whether the original or a remake) seems to register so strongly with you (emotionally or nostalgically) that any other version you hear in the future pales in comparison. I think my take is a strong one. I spent the better part of those two days in traffic evaluating personal data points against my theory – and it held up just fine, thank you. It held up across genres (Classic Rock, Grunge, Pop, Progressive Metal, Big Band). It held up across musical eras (60s, 70s, 80s).
So I was on the lookout all weekend to identify songs that would disprove my theory. To do this, I was focusing in on a specific collection of songs: remakes that I favored over the original. This is generally a smaller set. To confirm my theory, I needed to verify that, for this collection of songs, I had heard the remake before the original. On the return back to NC Monday evening (after a 155 minute trip to get from Nationals Park back to Manassas), there was this magical stretch between Ashland and Petersburg, where in a space of about 45 minutes on FM radio, I had tested my theory against the following remakes, all of which I was introduced to before the original:
- Linda Ronstadt’s 1975 version of “Heat Wave”, which just mopped the floor with the original from Martha and the Vandellas in 1963.
- Elton John’s 1975 edition of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, clearly superior to the Beatle’s sloppy original.
- Jackson Brown’s 1978 rendition of “Stay” over the Maurice Williams’ original.
- Rare Earth’s classic 1969 remake of The Temptations’ “Get Ready”.
What can I say – I am a child of the 70s. Confirmation bias? Maybe. For good measure, I dropped in Van Halen’s eponymous 1978 debut into the CD player. On this classic disk, Diamond Dave and the Pasadena Pistols laid waste to both the original versions of the Kink’s “You Really Got Me Going” and Chicago blues guitarist John Brim’s “Ice Cream Man”.
So what do you think? Am I on to something here? Does my theory work for you? Or is this just more “Chep being Chep” – an outlier in his own blog community?
