Burlington, VT -
Remember the song, “You Light Up My Life” (Joe Brooks)? If you don’t know or recall the 1977 Debby Boone mega-hit, lucky you. It's not very good.
Two years later in 1979, however, the punk diva Patti Smith covered the tune. I just heard her version for the first time this week and it's a revelation. By design, Smith’s arrangement and sensibility with its punky atonality and off-kilter drum bashing runs great distance from the original sung by Pat Bone’s Grammy Award-winning daughter. That said, this punked-out, thoroughly ironic edition - comfortably at home and bleary-eyed at 3:00 a.m. in CBGBs - refocuses the mind and the mood. If nothing else, it's interesting. Thanks to the Wall Street Journal’s Rich Cohen for introducing some of us to this alt version.
So let’s try another scoop of vanilla, this time the enjoyable band, The Monkees. So many of their mainstream hits also readily translate into ironic punk and post-punk anthems. Enter The Flies and The Sex Pistols, the latter reinterpreting the Monkees’ 1966 hit “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” (Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart), which was actually first recorded by Paul Revere & The Raiders earlier in 1966. It was also 1979 when the Pistols turned “Steppin’ Stone” into a thrasher. I was prepared to detest this version, but it's also interesting and mildly entertaining.
In the first case, punk made a dreadful piece of confection something more fibrous and interesting - its live rendition delivering a faint echo of an Allen Ginsburg recital. In the second case, the punkification made a decent song, well, different, somehow weirdly compelling, and all true to form.
I don’t like punk, per se. I do believe strongly in appreciative inquiry, however, and in this case one can appreciate how the punk lens can shift perspectives - sometime jarringly - and make more interesting what are otherwise rather basic, saccharin tunes.
Image courtesy of SoundCloud.