The thing about the great American standards is, they’ve been incarnated by so many singers in so many different styles that there’s bound to be at least one version that’s up your street. It’s also a bit confusing, not knowing who to attribute a song to. We’ve become used to, in our age of the singer/songwriter, to associate a song with one artist. It’s shocking enough if a cover version outshines the original. A song with no established original and no particular defining moment is hard wrap our heads around. On the other hand, it’s fun to stumble upon different iterations of the same song, each one its own statement, independent of others, and often with different lyrics. How Long Has This Been Going On? was written by George & Ira Gershwin in 1927 for the musical Funny Face. Probably the most familiar version is Audrey Hepburn singing it in the 1957 film. Unfortunately, Hepburn wasn’t much of a singer, so film fans aren’t getting a very good introduction to the song itself. There are plenty of versions to choose from including Judy Garland, Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles and Rufus Wainwright. I have a soft spot for Ella Fitzgerald and her low-key rendition. Fitzgerald’s singing had an emotional authority that many singers with prettier voices just lacked. She makes it into a very sad song, whilst it was rather a happy one in the musical. While I also like what Vaughan and Garland did with it, my favorite has to be Carmen McRae’s playful take. She makes it sassy and brassy, and to modern ears, I recommend MJ Cole’s remix.
Here’s some Ella Fitzgerald in action, from the movie Pete Kelly’s Blues, 1955. Yeah, it’s pretty evidently a lip sync job, but take what you can get. It’s a tragedy that none of the jazz greats left much of a visual trace of themselves, besides photos. But live performances just weren’t filmed in those days. Filming concerts didn’t become a big thing until the 1970′s. That’s largely due to technological limitations. In the 40′s they just didn’t have small lightweight cameras that could shoot high quality in a smoky dark club, or outdoors. Also, it probably didn’t occur to anyone that an Ella Fitzgerald performance would be a historical artifact that fans in another century would long to see, or even that Ella would still have fans in another century. Of course today it’s the opposite – everybody’s every sneeze is newsworthy nowadays. Does it cheapen an experience when everybody is filming everything? When I go to a concert and take photos, those photos have no historical worth, just because 50 other people have taken identical ones. Someone who saw Ella Fitzgerald sing at a concert where not a single picture was taken will take that experience to the grave. Does that make it more or less a valuable experience for not being documented? How do we know it even happened? How do I know if something happened in my life if I don’t document it? And is a video a better document than a still picture, or a recording?
Last year when I did a comprehensive post on Kurt Weill’s super classic Alabama Song I couldn’t find any footage of Marianne Faithfull singing it live. So now there is, and I just had to post this great performance. Besides, can I resist an excuse to post another sexy Marianne picture? No, I can not.
‘Alabama Song/Whiskey’ by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. In career spanning decades, Weill composed a wide variety of music including chamber, and orchestral pieces. But he is best known for the musicals he composed (especially with Brecht). Brecht also wrote famously life-affirming plays, such as “Mother Courage and Her Children” and “Baal”. But his influence is also best felt in the songs he wrote with Weill. Songs from ‘The Threepenny Opera’ and ‘Mahagonny’ have come to define the Cabaret style. Brecht/Weill songs are the very soundrack of Weimar Berlin, the years between the wars, of decadence, nightclubs, poverty, hard living, glamour and violence and all the mystique of that time and place. It originally appeared in the 1927 songspiel ‘Mahagonny’. Since then it has become a cabaret standard and has been performed by every kind of singer imaginable, from Lotte Lenya to Marilyn Manson.
My top favorite cover is by The Doors. They included it on their 1967 debut album. I love The Doors, I love Jim Morrison. Today the tide of opinion has swung away from Morrison. It is now the fashion to dismiss him as pretentious. I don’t think he was pretentious – he was a genuinely intellectual person. Because he read Rimbaud and Nietzsche and enjoyed, understood and related to their works he’s pretentious? Than just shows how dumbed down our culture is.
This is a shortened live version, dated from Before Jim Got Fat.
David Bowie has made ‘Alabama Song’ part of his onstage repertoire since the 70s. No version of the song exists on any of his studio albums, but he did release it as a single in 1980 and it can be heard on ‘Stage’ (1991 reissue) and on compilations. This live performance is from the 2004 ‘Reality’ tour. I was very, very lucky to see Bowie play that year. It was a 21st birthday present for me. It was, needless to say, absolutely amazing. The concert DVD from the tour doesn’t even do it justice. The DVD focusses on the more dour songs, while the songs choices were in reality (ha ha) more upbeat and the atmosphere was very bright. Bowie was in great voice, and looked great, very chipper, as you can see in this video. Doesn’t he look happy?
This video is of my own making! This is Marianne Faithfull, from her Weill cover album “20th Century Blues” (1997). If anyone is overqualified to tackle the Brecht/Weill songbook, it’s Faithfull. She’s blossomed from the ‘angel with big tits’ you see so much of in the video, to one of our greatest interpretive vocalists. Thank you heroin!
For many people, the definitive version is Lotte Lenya’s. Lenya was, of course, Weill wife and leading lady.
This is a more traditional take, by Ute Lemper. Lemper is a performer who specializes in the cabaret style. I think she’s great, although she does sometimes push the German schtick too hard. This material doesn’ t need a dramatic German accent, it’s got all the drama it needs.
Here’s a 1986 performance by Nina Hagen. Surprisingly, she’s reigned in the weirdness and plays it more or less straight (except for her appearance).
Out of morbid curiousity, I’ve included Marilyn Manson’s cover (vomit). I fucking hate Marilyn Manson. I didn’t like Alice Cooper the first time around, and I don’t have any use for an Alice Cooper ripoff with even less talent than the original. But the magic of really great songwriting is you can be the most godawful singer in the world and still come off tolerablely well.
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