Josh Turner Guitar Covers "And Your Bird Can Sing"

 

And here's Josh Turner Guitar (that's his performance name) and two guys doing a pretty good cover of The Beatles' "And Your Bird Can Sing".  I first became aware of Turner via his cover of The Beach Boys "Sloop John B" -- not as letter-perfect as The Fendertones, but also pretty good.

Several points about this song and this video:

1. Although John Lennon famously didn't like this song,* and neither does Peter Asher (he wondered why it did so well in one of his listener-selected Top 100 Beatles countdowns in 2017 on Sirius XM Radio), I always agreed with Rob Sheffield that "it's one of his best songs ever".   (I sent Asher an email explaining why I thought the song was so good, and he replied "Very cool!")

*He also didn't like "It's Only Love," another one of his very best songs.

2. In addition to being "so scathing and yet also so empathetic and friendly," as Sheffield says, it's also "packed with tiny musical triumphs".  Sheffield mentions the "girl-group hand-claps that sneak into the song for the middle guitar break".  One of my all-time favorite "tiny musical triumphs" in any song is the minor-to-major chord change in "And Your Bird" on the word "awoken" (1min13sec to 1min14sec in this video) -- just a perfect acoustic coming to life of that word.

3. In the Turner video, I have no idea if this was deliberately staged, but the background works just right: the guy in the red hat kicking a ball and then the little dog on a leash pulling the blonde and brunette birds in masks.  A time-stamp tableau of our age.

Ok - here's Josh Turner Guitar and a different crew doing "Sloop John B" on a bus at the end of 2018

And my reviews of Rob Sheffield's masterful Dreaming the Beatles begin here.

Three Beach Boys Covers: Foxes and Fossils, Hal Eisenberg, The Fendertones

I'm still in a musical frame of mind -- actually, I always am -- but this frame includes writing, so here's my third blog post in two days about exceptional music, in this case, three excellent Beach Boy covers that I've been really enjoying on YouTube.

The first is "Don't Worry Baby" by the cleverly named Foxes and Fossils.  That would be three women who look and sing great, and a number of guys who sing and play, and bill themselves as old, though some are probably younger than I am (I usually feel like I'm 17, unless it's a bad day, and it's more like 19).  I love the velvety harmony and the whole general feel of this video.

Next is "I Can Hear Music," which I just came across the other day, by Hal Eisenberg with "friends and family" in Nashville.  This is not a typical Beach Boys song -- it was written by Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and Phil Spector (Ellie Greenwich, by the way, produced my group The Other Voices aka The New Outlook for Atlantic Records in 1968) not Brian Wilson, who didn't even sing on the Beach Boys 1969 recording (Carl sang lead, and produced the record).  That makes it a tough song to cover really well.  Hal Eisenberg's is the best I've come across -- I like it even better than Kathy Trocolli's 1996 version with some of the original Beach Boys -- with Hal's evocative lead backed by sweet sweet harmonies.

And last but in no way least is the Fendertones' "Sloop John B".  The Fendertones have done so many Beach Boy covers that they may add up to more songs than the Beach Boys actually recorded.  And this one is a masterpiece, with Scott Totten and John Cowsill (who tour now with the Beach Boys and, yep, that's John Cowsill from the Cowsills) joining the Fendertones in a gracenote perfect rendition of Brian Wilson's stunning arrangement and recording, down to someone singing "I feel so break up" about a third-way into the song, when everyone else sings "broke up," just as The Beach Boys (probably accidentally) did in 1966.

I should mention how much I've always loved The Beach Boys.  They usually are my second all-time favorite group -- the first are the Beatles, and once in a while The Rolling Stones are my second.  The New Outlook sang "Surfer Girl" as one of our regular numbers, when we cut classes and sang in the early afternoon in The Alcove at City College up on 140th Street in Manhattan in the Fall of 1963.  So I'm always looking for good covers, and Foxes and Fossils, Hal Eisenberg, and The Fendertones are among the very best.