I was joking around with my twin daughters last night about music and starting up a band (one more than a passable singer, the other plays flute and piano). They are toying around with starting up a cover band that does 80s songs in their own style and with their own instrumentation and in the middle of the discussion I smacked my forehead and cussed.
“Total missed opportunity,” I said. “I wish I would have thought about it when I was playing with various bands when I was younger.”
“What?” they asked, in unison.
“Love Will Keep Us Together,” I said. “It so would have made a great punk or goth song.”
“Or folk cover,” said one of them, knowing that I used to regularly ruin songs in my folk duo, as much to annoy the other guy as to get giggles from the crowd when he would get visibly annoyed at my antics. He hated Nirvana. He hated Owner of a Lonely Heart. He took too much time to tune between songs, which annoyed me, so I decided to add filler while he tuned. He really would have hated me playing Love Will Keep Us Together.
“I wonder,” I asked aloud. “I wonder if anyone gave it the punk treatment?”
I found two whole “alternative” variants of the song. One live version by a band I’d not heard of which was more rock than punk. Serviceable, but not punk. I found another which was done with more of that 90s grunge sound, which is still not really punk. Such untapped potential!
I’m not sure how accurate it is, but the closest I can come with goth is Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart, which at least several sites claim was an intentional inversion of Love Will Keep Us Together. It’s news to me, but I am willing to admit that the information might have flown under my radar if it came to me.
But… Imagine the Kennedys, The Replacements or Hüsker Dü doing a cover… Or some no-name dive bar punk act that imploded before their third paid gig (whistles in the dark)… How cool would that have been?
What covers do you wish someone would have taken and completely subverted the original genre? There are plenty of cases where bands have played the cover straight, but what’s your favorite subversion (one of mine is The Cure playing Do You Wanna Touch Me (Joan Jett), but that was hardly a huge subversion. Gimme unsung covers that totally changed the sound below (like the theme from Mary Tyler Moore).
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