The Cowsills In Books





Play it Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music
by George Plasketes
Ashgate Publishing 2010

Book

on Page 36:
As the versions of a song accumulate, the listener is drawn deeper into the dialogue and the dynamic of the duets. With the original framed in forefront or back of our mind, we consider the conversions and their contrasts, weighing the repetition and relocation, recognizing the potential for delight and disappointment, different or diminished meaning, noticing minor makeovers and incongruities. The We Five and Crispian St. Peter's mid 1960s hit versions of Ian and Sylvia's "You Were On My Mind" changing the lyrical reference to drinking ("I got drunk/And I got sick/And I came home again"); but The Cowsills leaving it in. Ronstadt's obvious gender transposition and softening of Warren Zevon's Rainbow Bar and Hyatt House redezous in the low self esteem "Poor Poor Pitiful Me," by changing the location to Yokohama and dropping the snarling line "I don't want to talk about it."




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