Tribute Compilations

This 1990 curio arrived at the outset of a decade that would end with a much deeper connection between alt-rock and the influence of Beach Boys genius Brian Wilson. Maybe that accounts for how idiosyncratic this roster might seem compared to a more reverent accounting of bands directly touched by the wonders of Pet Sounds or Surf’s Up: when you lead off with the Dictators’ Handsome Dick Manitoba bellowing “Brian Wilson, you rule bay-bay” before cheerfully growling through a taunting surf-punk “Dance Dance Dance,” you’d be right to expect a lot more off-kilter joy on that front. Garage-rock miscreants have free rein here, whether it’s Billy Childish & Thee Headcoats turning “409” into a fuzz-n-scuzz ode to carjacking (“I can’t pay cash so I commit a crime/Gimme that, gimme that 409”) or the Cynics sneering through a pop-punk “Be True to Your School” that sounds like their favorite part of school is beating up crosstown rivals after the homecoming game. There are a few other jaunts into the oddball corners of Wilson’s catalogue, too — Das Damen tromps through an uglied-up mutation of The Beach Boys Love You novelty “Johnny Carson” — as well as some off-kilter updates of the old surfing-and-cars material that first made Wilson famous, like Jan & Dean’s “Gonna Hustle You” delivered with a characteristic hiccuppy wildness by Peter Stampfel & the Bottle Caps.But along with a few of the tribute-album usual suspects — Sonic Youth contributes a noisy yet spiritually faithful excursion through the beautiful existential bummer “I Know There’s an Answer” — are some solid gems by now-obscure (and likely then-obscure) garage bands, with selections like the A-Bones’ “Drive In” and the Untamed Youth’s “Chug-a-Lug” making it clear just how much lineage there was from the Beach Boys through the Ramones and onwards.

If the Kinks didn’t invent the witty, literate wing of power pop, it at least stands to reason that most bands in that category at least owe them a debt. This Is Where I Belong: The Songs of Ray Davies & the Kinks is a strong exhibition of where that led at the turn of the 21st Century, even if its most fascinating moments are the genre outliers. When a band reminds you of the way Ray Davies’ odd blend of pathos and archness was put to use in upbeat-yet-tender rock’n’roll, you get some fine homages — especially Fountains of Wayne’s opening “Better Things,” a gracious breakup song that became a burst of defiantly hopeful optimism when they played it on Late Night with Conan O’Brien performance ten days after 9/11. But even if many of the other more straightforward adaptations are better reminders of what makes the Kinks exceptional than the artists who cover them, hearing Matthew Sweet’s “Big Sky” or Fastball’s “Till the End of the Day” or Ron Sexsmith’s title cut makes it all sound feel like a welcome and crucial part of alt-rock’s DNA. More fascinating are the tracks where the Kinks’ stylistic detours into other genres are matched by their subjects — Bebel Gilberto nodding towards her mother Astrid’s influence on 1967’s “No Return” and making its bossa undercurrents undeniable, or Tim O’Brien translating “Muswell Hillbilly” into a first-language adaptation of the Americana that the Kinks cheekily (if compellingly) dabbled in. And then there’s the less-faithful excursions: Lambchop guts the ironic tropicalisms out of “Art Lover” and renders it into a slow, pretty-yet-unsettling dirge that drains all the whimsy out of the narrator’s Lolita fixations, while Yo La Tengo take advantage of the quietude of “Fancy” to lean into a meditative, droning atmosphere the original merely hints at. And for a closer? Why not bring in another previously recorded live performance — this time from a 1995 episode of the British series The White Room featuring the man of the hour himself, as Davies is joined by Damon Albarn for an acoustic duet on “Waterloo Sunset”.

He might have been bestowed the honor of being the Godfather of Grunge in the ‘90s, but it didn’t take a tour with Pearl Jam for people to connect the dots between Neil Young’s noise-conversant country-rock auteurism and its lingering, sprawling effects on the alt-rock underground. Assembled in part to raise funds for The Bridge School, a non-profit launched after Neil’s wife Pegi found difficulty in finding a place that could educate their non-verbal son Ben, The Bridge followed on the heels of a series of benefit concerts headlined by the likes of Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan. And while the roster here diverges pretty far from that classic rock household-name status, it’s still a strong assemblage of some of indie rock’s most now-revered next-gen heirs. The best part is that there’s still some surprising transformations at work. You may think you can picture what a Flaming Lips cover of “After the Gold Rush” might sound like, and you’d probably be wrong; Wayne Coyne’s found his now-familiar voice at this point, but the moments where that high, occasionally raspy quaver meets Young on the original’s minimally-backed terms are subverted by a noisy drum-hammering full-band outbursts, omitting the first verse but still looking at mother nature doing sweat-flinging windsprints towards the 1990s. Psychic TV beat Saint Etienne to the punch by a year on their cover of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” and while it’s nowhere near as winsomely upbeat, it finds a different angle in maintaining the original’s lonesome country waltz as a hypnotic fugue state riddled with quivering guitar distortion and a sorrowful violin. Sonic Youth do their part to rescue Trans from critical ignominy with a raucous (if synthless) take on “Computer Age” which sounds like the ‘79 Crazy Horse squall that technophobes probably wish the original could’ve been — or at least like if Neil’s kosmische ear turned towards ‘75 NEU! instead of ‘78 Kraftwerk. And since Neil’s catalogue has benefited from both reverence and deconstruction, it seems fitting to get both a starkly heartfelt Nick Cave excursion through “Helpless” and a bloodily smeared culture-jamming drone-gone-punk corrosion of “Mr. Soul” by Bongwater, while Pixies (“Winterlong”) and Dinosaur Jr. (“Lotta Love”) lean into how compatible Young’s songwriting is with college-rock jangle and unfettered noise respectively.

Go ahead and call them a guilty pleasure, taunts the Keane-painting kitsch of the album art, but you know you’ll get choked up a couple times listening to this. Dropped into the midst of alterna-nation’s mid ‘90s struggle session with irony and taste, If I Were a Carpenter follows in the iconoclastic footsteps of that other great arthouse tweak of the mythos behind the lives of Karen and Richard, Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, by finding the unease and ennui beneath the surface of one of the 1970s’ most archetypal easy-listening acts. Sonic Youth’s tension-and-release version of the Leon Russell-penned “Superstar” has grown into this comp’s main attraction over the years, and it still holds fast to the original’s melancholic grace even when the discord plays at the margins and the distortion boils over on the chorus. (It also sounds uncannily like Thurston Moore more-or-less channelling Ira Kaplan.) Mark Eitzel’s voice fights through a dazed wistfulness on American Music Club’s version of “Goodbye to Love” and makes it hit as a sincere alt-country-tinged reckoning with regret. And Babes in Toyland taking on the Klaatu-penned, Carpenters-popularized space-alien entreaty “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” is a cover of a cover and punchline without a joke; Kat Bjelland committing to the bit because it’s more fun to take a song like this into fuzzed-out, upbeat hard rock-via-power pop than it is to roll one’s eyes at it. But often enough what remnant irony might’ve gone into a project like this recedes into a sort of shared understanding: Shonen Knife’s pop-punk “Top of the World” amplifies the song’s joy instead of undercutting it, Sheryl Crow’s “Solitaire” is country-folk at its sincerest and most unguarded, and Redd Kross’s history of finding the nostalgic childhood roots of pop enthusiasm in things their punk peers thought were uncool pays off wonderfully in “Yesterday Once More.” Grant Lee Buffalo’s comp-closing “We’ve Only Just Begun” is the best of both worlds — eerily, psychedelically dissonant at the outset, but coalescing into something as heartfelt as it is enigmatic.

While the timing for this tribute album was accidentally fortuitous, marking a delineation point between the old Disney canon and the “Disney Renaissance” that took off with 1989’s The Little Mermaid a year later, Stay Awake is better approached as a tribute to the absurd breadth of Hal Willner’s creative vision (and his Rolodex). Willner’s collective here emphasizes the timeless-feeling cross-generational appeal of this music by making it cross the boundaries of culture, genre, and era, a version of the Great American Songbook with a whimsical pop-culture bent and a testament to where the curious wonder of childhood can take you when you get older. The sequencing aims to be cinematic in itself, building atmosphere around thematic medleys and the cavernous warmth of Ken Nordine’s “word jazz” narration (“somebody told us what we wanted to be… it was candy for the mind”). And there’s an emphasis on subversive, surreal distortion with a vague undercurrent of menace and bewilderment that Disney’s more contemporary corporate mythos is hellbent on avoiding. There’s still room for levity: Los Lobos’s Louis Prima-goes-Tex-Mex rendition of The Jungle Book classic “I Wan’na Be Like You (The Monkey Song)” still sounds like the most joyful villain theme in the whole Disney catalogue, and as beautiful as it is, there’s something inherently, wonderfully absurd about hearing Aaron Neville’s quavering grace set to the Mickey Mouse Club March. But the odder angles are hit with both irreverence and accuracy: Tom Waits cackle-growling through an industrial-Dust Bowl terror-blues deconstruction of “Heigh-Ho! (The Dwarfs’ Marching Song)”, Bonnie Raitt and Was (Not Was) converting the maternal sorrow of “Baby Mine” into a sultry yet reassuring torch song, and a medley that segues from Betty Carter’s weathered and contemplative noir-jazz “I’m Wishing” to the Replacements turning “Cruella De Vil” into a six-beers-in hootenanny. By the time it gets to Sun Ra & His Arkestra galumphing, then gliding through a fittingly hallucinogenic “Pink Elephants on Parade,” it really sinks in that Disney’s soundtrack to dreams is at its best when it accounts for how intangibly odd dreams can feel.

In a way it’s fitting that one of the longest-running pop-music tribute series inaugurated itself with an album filled with reinterpretations of one of the definitive American songwriters and composers of the early 20th Century: if you start with Cole Porter, you can go just about everywhere from there. And Red Hot + Blue, the first in the 25-years-and-counting series of HIV/AIDS awareness compilations, goes everywhere. The twenty selections on this comp can be roughly divided into two categories, the reverent and the iconoclastic, both of which approach the material with the same respect but have different ways of showing it. The former category boasts some impressive moments of quiet reverie and carefree jauntiness: Annie Lennox goes torch-song cabaret with piano accompaniment on “Ev’rytime We Say Goodbye,” k.d. lang helms a smoky-cafe small-combo rendition of “So In Love,” Lisa Stansfield vamps saucily through a brass-filled big-band arrangement of “Down in the Depths,” and Jody Watley’s “After You, Who?” is pure cocktail-bar vocal-jazz sophistication. But the bulk of the collection strikes a certain chord of dawn-of-the-nineties pre-alternaboom genre-warping eclecticism, letting artists be themselves even as they engage with a giant of the canon. Engagements with hip-hop include rap&B rework “I’ve Got U Under My Skin” featuring new AIDS-crisis-themed lyrics by Neneh Cherry (“share your love, don’t share the needle”), a co-production by Jungle Brothers’ Afrika Baby Bam to be filed next to the Jungle Brothers’ own jimmy-hat-advocacy rewrite “I Get a Kick.” Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop’s punk-vet sardonicism updates “Well Did You Evah?” into a winking celebrity-casualty schmoozefest where they commiserate over missing out on a party at Pia Zadora’s house. David Byrne, deep in his international music ambassadorship, takes the origins of cowboy classic “Don’t Fence Me In” as a piece of the score for unproduced musical film Adios, Argentina and reintroduces it to the music of South America. And dance-pop covers by Jimmy Somerville (a hi-NRG-adjacent “From This Moment On”) and Erasure (“Too Darn Hot” as campy mutant New Jack Swing) prove you don’t have to futz with Porter’s lyrics to play up their queer undertones (or overtones). U2 fans might also appreciate their take on “Night and Day,” an early hint of the electronic futurist moves that Achtung Baby would signal as their next big phase.

When this compilation was released in 1990, Roky Erikson was less of a household name than at least half of the artists who appear on this tribute to his creative work with 13th Floor Elevators and in his solo career. But all you need to know about how far his influence actually carries is that Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye is bookended by covers of the Elevators’ “Reverberation (Doubt)” by blues-rock greats ZZ Top in synth-boogie mode and The Jesus and Mary Chain oscillating through outbursts of feedback. The lineup of Pyramid, a comp assembled by Sire’s Bill Bentley to benefit Erickson during a tough stretch of legal trouble, is a curious sprawl of alt-rockers and roots rockers, some of whom are loosely united in their Texas home turf — which is how you get Butthole Surfers dousing proto-grunge in windowpane acid on “Earthquake” and T-Bone Burnett recasting “Nothing In Return” as an old-time rocker worthy of Buddy Holly. Erickson’s vision of psychedelia was a versatile one, expanding far beyond the bounds of Summer of Love frivolity and hippie caricature to confront the more disconcerting outer reaches. And while that eeriness isn’t always obvious in the guise of, say, baggy Madchester dance-rock (Primal Scream’s “Slip Inside This House”) or hi-gloss country-AOR (Southern Pacific’s “It’s a Cold Night for Alligators”), it’s never far from the surface. In the case of Thin White Rope’s desert-psych blow-up of “Burn the Flames,” it’s practically the stuff of high melodrama. R.E.M.’s double-dip is a bit closer to a more nuanced trip into his spirit, boasting a jangly “I Walked with a Zombie” and an incognito Blue Öyster Cult-caliber rockout “Bermuda” (recorded under the alias Vibrating Egg with manager Jefferson Holt on guest vocals). Take note that two of the best cuts come from fellow Austinites: Doug Sahm and Sons’ “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” which ramps up the guitars but still finds room for the original Elevators’ jug-hooting, and Lou Ann Barton’s “Don’t Slander Me,” a blues-rock rebel-rouser delivered with a sneer and a straight razor.

One fascinating thing about the music of Hank Williams is that it doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s from another time — more like it feels as though it’s always been around, the bedrock of a long American tradition that its greatest practitioners never stray far from. Lost Highway’s 2001 tribute comp Timeless proves that just with a skim of its roster, with representation by Williams’ torchbearers, surprising next-gen heirs, and, in the case of Hank III, actual flesh and blood. The latter’s “I’m a Long Gone Daddy” is the country-punk firebrand doing his grandpappy proper with a hi-fi take on an otherwise vintage steel-and-fiddle sound — and the twang in his voice echoes his family tree with eerie familiarity. But the stars who join him in this collection are just as faithful, at least in their own kinds of ways. Bob Dylan’s “I Can’t Get You Off of My Mind” is a lively roots boogie with subtle zydeco flourishes, a highlight of a year where he also gave us Love and Theft. Keb’ Mo’ imbues “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” with a country-blues sway and a voice that finds a warm strain of heartache. Lucinda Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart” puts her wounded yet resilient voice front and center in front of a lonely, dusty acoustic arrangement as desolate yet gorgeous as the vistas of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. Keith Richards’ “You Win Again” bristles with the spirit of Sticky Fingers in high resolution, only with his wearied voice as the showcase instrument that his guitar subtly accompanies. Even Beck plays it as straightfaced as anything he’d done this side of One Foot in the Grave, though Jon Brion’s arrangements on “Your Cheatin’ Heart” emphasize a dreamlike feeling that reverberates like the darkness of a moonless night. And if you haven’t had to hold back tears at any point during this record, you will at Johnny Cash’s closer “I Dreamed About Mama Last Night” — part-sung, part-recited, with a bottomless sorrow in his voice.

“Mack the Knife” became a standard and The Doors covered “Alabama Song” on their first LP, but it still must’ve seemed like a bit of a curiously anachronistic idea for MTV-era rock stars to interpret the work of Kurt Weill. Maybe it’s because Weill’s compositional mixture of cabaret theatrics, German-Jewish melodic traditions, and acerbic social commentary feels deeply tied into interwar 20th Century culture in the looming shadow of fascism — an atmosphere that America was more than happy to push to the fringes in the heart of the ‘80s. But as Hal Willner’s Lost in the Stars easily proves, Weill’s work is readily adaptable to the avant-conversant sides of art rock, no wave, and post-punk. The marquee names are well up to the task, whether it’s Sting skulking with arch malevolence through a Dominic Muldowney-abetted “Ballad of Mac the Knife,” Lou Reed casually facing the onset of middle age with a nonchalant shrug on a pop-soul-tinged “September Song,” and Tom Waits’ nightmare carnival tromping through Threepenny Opera anthem “What Keeps Mankind Alive” like the final reckoning of a warning left unheeded for more than half a century. Maybe the two most audacious adaptations are also the starkest contrasts: Marianne Faithfull’s performance of the Bertolt Brecht adaptation “Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife” is steeped in a Dixieland-redolent arrangement that underscores the bitter rasp of her voice and builds to her astoundingly devastated-sounding delivery of the final verse’s morbid punchline. Meanwhile, Todd Rundgren’s “Call From The Grave / Ballad In Which MacHeath Begs All Men For Forgiveness” sets up a glossy, danceable synthpop arrangement that sounds so deeply entrenched in the era’s contemporary idea of cutting-edge tech that it seems attuned to the idea that the social ills that inspired Threepenny Opera in the first place have only gotten more frantic and pressurized with time — an idea that comes through even more clearly in Rundgren’s horror-struck screaming. Meanwhile, the jazz and avant ensembles — Charlie Haden and Sharon Freeman in reflective repose on the bass-and-strings “Speak Low,” the tense scattergun chaos of John Zorn’s mini-operatic “Der kleine Leutnant des lieben Gottes,” Henry Threadgill’s symphonic brass tempest “The Great Hall” — take Weill’s melodies to the outskirts.

Occasionally tribute albums might precipitate a renewed interest in the artist they pay homage to, but it’s rare that one helps turn an obscure deep cut into an omnipresent standard. The John Cale cover of “Hallelujah” that closes out this comp, curated by French music mag Les Inrockuptibles, singlehandedly turned that song from one of Leonard Cohen’s near-castoffs into a standard so ubiquitous — thanks to an assist from Jeff Buckley a few years later — that it somehow wound up in the first Shrek movie. In Cale’s hands, that solo piano number perfectly captures a graceful yet still prickly quality to Cohen’s songwriting, even with a bit of editing (Cale stated that he culled his favorite verses from the original fifteen-page lyric sheet Cohen sent him). But it’s far from alone in this compilation’s highlight reel. R.E.M.’s “First We Take Manhattan” is one of the best covers in the band’s whole catalogue, Stipe and Mills intoning with harmonized dread as the band splits the difference between Crazy Horse’s serrated roots and Gang of Four’s nervy, rhythmic insistence. Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster turns the spaciously lonely “Tower of Song” into a whiskey-scented, bleary-eyed country-rock what-can-ya-do shrug, and the added tone of musical levity just lets the self-effacement sink in easier — though Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ additional version is its own theatrical, ferally glowering psychobilly-opera beast. Pixies’ “I Can’t Forget” is upbeat and overdriven enough to add an edge of agitated anxiety to the original’s atmosphere of existential detachment. And that’s just the best of the I’m Your Man-era covers; the earlier heart of Cohen’s catalogue is represented well by alt-indie artists who find beauty in his sparse quietude, whether it’s The House of Love’s acoustic close-harmony folk interpretation of “Who By Fire” or the rhythm-machine dejection of Peter Astor’s “Take This Longing.”