I know we said that the next thing we were going to do was going to be heavy…not JUST heavy but Higgs-Boson heavy. Work in the rock and roll particle accelerator is still progressing well and except for vocals and continued guitar experiments by the crazed Doctor Heider, I can report to you that “C is for Cthulhu” is moving along quite nicely and we should return to finalizing it after this month’s show at Rudz.
In the meantime, we had an unexpected diversion from our heavy laboratory work when we got an invitation by Cairo‘s C.J. Boyd to submit at tracks for a compilation of Kate Bush covers. Now if you had come up to me at any point in the life of this band and told me that the Linus Pauling Quartet was going to do a Kate Bush cover, I’d have thought you were Ozzy pissing on the Alamo drunk. Yet, there we were, midway through recording our Winter EP and prepping for the next show, when we got the call and, for some bizarre reason, we agreed to take a stab at it. Luckily we were able to recruit Mlee Marie (Hearts of Animals) to help us and to be sure, without her gravity keeping the solar system in order, the whole thing could have easily collapsed.
Now choosing a Kate Bush song for Linus was trickier than expected but I eventually whittled it down to three tracks from Hounds of Love and after a few dry runs with Larry on drums, we decided that doing a slowed down stoner-rock take on Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love” or “Big Sky” just sounded too pat – too much like…well, a rock band covering Kate Bush. So we dug a little deeper away from the hits and decided on “Watching You Without Me” which is from the 9th Wave side of the same album. The idea was to just do a loose interpretation, take some liberties with the original arrangement, and lay a trippy psych ocean for Mlee’s vocals to float in. In other words, I just tossed everyone the basic structure and hoped that serendipity would take its course. Clinton heard echoes of Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan”, Charlie (on Micro-Korg) heard a bit of Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand” , and (because I was using a reverbed out Fender amp) I pulled from Echo and The Bunnymen circa Ocean Rain guitar. So in the end you had this crazy mish-mash with an extended jam that included some backwards guitar solos from Clinton and all done with the chord progression flip-flopped. That may sound like a big mess but with Mlee’s vocal work (which, let’s face it, is really where all the heavy lifting happens here), the whole thing falls together quite nicely.
I don’t know if you could call it a straight cover but I don’t think you need or even want that with Kate. She’s pretty meticulous in her production and so she’s already done THAT version and it would sound pretty dull to just do a note for note cover. The idea here was to be more loose and not be so slavish to the original yet still be respectful enough of the material to evoke the song while we make it our own. In the end the listener is the one to decide if we succeeded in that or not but we definitely felt we did a solid job with a songwriter that fell outside our safety zone. Let it not be said that we don’t try to rise to a challenge. Naturally, we’ll let you know what happens with the comp once we hear back from CJ.
For final giggles here is the poster Clinton used to make fun of me having in the dorm room. I think this was flanked by REM, Bangles, and New Order posters. Ahh the 80’s!
