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A lot running interest of mine is the difference between a great song and a great record.

Bob Dylan has written dozens of great songs. He's only made a few great records. (Although the majority of the records he's made are really good.) Some of his best songs are merely very good records: "If You See Her Say Hello" for example. This is no slight on Bob Dylan. His stuff is kind of "of the moment," if that makes any sense. His songs exist in performance. His very best performances are live. The Manchester Concert from 1966. . . the famous "JUDAS!" show. . . is undoubtedly the best Bob Dylan record ever. For years it was just a live bootleg. It was an accident of a particular time and place.

It's plenty hard to make a really good record. No shame in a forty plus year career filled with records that are mostly very good and a songbook waiting for others to mine. Garth Freakin' Brooks even got a hit out of an overlooked Bob Dylan song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkiD_vkXITE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqUFHEyu5hM&feature=fvw

(By the way, the guy playing the drums in that BD video later had a small part on "Home Improvement." He was the big guy with the crazy red beard who showed up on "Tool Time" occasionally and mugged while Tim Allen did dangerous nonsense. Ah, TGIF.)



Joy Division, on the other hand, wrote songs that were mostly just pretty good. By the standards of pop radio, they were pretty astounding, but that's not saying much. But they made records (and created live performances of the arrangments that are on those records) that can only be described in superlatives. Ian Curtis certainly had a way with a lyric, but most of his stuff kind of floats into the either. It's the tension between him and the rest of the band that makes it work. That's why Joy Division songs aren't covered very often. It's mostly a dumb idea. You can:

1. Do it real faithful but make it more aggressive or modern sounding. NIN did this with "Dead Souls." Worked out okay, and it was cool to get to hear the song more often, as NIN was more popular that JD back in the day that NIN was popular. But there's no reason to listen to that anymore. Techno artists like to cover Joy Division. It usually doesn't embarrass anybody, but it's not a good use of time.

2. Be New Order.

3. Do it acoustic. This means you are clearly an idiot. But knock yourself out. Idiot.

Seriously though. This shit is pointless:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIe3IgmdSlI&feature=fvw

Here, wash that stupid out of your head:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flVEoNuEYgE&feature=related




In my world, the Clash made great records. Leonard Cohen writes great songs. Beach Boys: great records. Jimmy Rogers: great songs.

Of course there's pleny of overlap in my silly categories, and the two aren't really seperable. It's tough to make a great record out of a bad song (although Phil Spector did is many times), but it's easy to make a terrible record out of a great song. Leonard Cohen's version of "Tonight We'll Be Fine" is revolting unless you consider it to be a joke. I do think that in pop music, artists tend to lean one way or the other.

A few of the greatest of the great really can't be described in this way. Merle Haggard is one of America's greatest songwriters and his classic records are among the most well produced and perfectly considered pop recordings ever. The Beatles reinvented both the songwriting and record making wheels several times over, although I'm not the biggest Beatles fan. (That's a subject for another day.) Duke Ellington's compositions were meant for specific musicians to play. That's Jazz too, where composition and performance get blurrier.

Maybe breading it down my artist doesn't work that well. It's an interesting little excersize though. If you had to list the greatest SONGS in pop music history, that wouldn't be the same as the greatest RECORDS in pop music history.

Songs might include "Like a Rolling Stone," "Satisfaction," "Chealsea Hotel No.2," "Your Cheatin' Heart". . . .

Records might include "Strawberry Feilds Forever," "Lucille," "That's Allright," "Anarchy in the U.K.," "Love Will Tear Us Apart," "God Only Knows". . .

Anyway, an intersting topic. I'll keep considering it.