Remakes in the image of

It's easy to come out against remaking old songs and artists that get rich off those remakes - certainly in the history of music, there are more bad than good ones. I remember catching the old Leif Garret episode of Behind The Music in which a poor, awkward teenage Garret is forced to stand up for the practice of remaking that made him a teen heartthrob. Now I think no one would be put in that same position - remakes are beyond common, samples are even more rampant, and no one would confuse a Garret with an "artist" that needs to defend his approach to old songs.

Right now, two albums are making me think quite a bit about remakes though. One, Herbie Hancock's River: Letters to Joni is a jazz recapitulation of an odd, interesting selection of Joni Mitchell's songs, and has just been nominated for a Grammy for Album of the Year (dubious honor as it may be), and is described by Hancock as his "meditation" on Mitchell's work. The other is the soundtrack to Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, the deep vision creation about Bob Dylan is much more of a "meditation" - a brave, mind-bending one that is truly a film experience apart from any other you'd encounter. But it's that soundtrack of good and forgettable Dylan remakes that I'm thinking about. To think that in the same month, these two songwriters who take up so much of my thoughts are getting so much remade attention. One wonders when I'll have time to work or bathe with all the attention to strange details this is going to require.

Hancock's album came to my attention about a month ago in the form of a "song of the day" email featuring its version of "Edith and the Kingpin" featuring a guest vocal by Tina Turner. The song was beloved by that email's writer, but the truth is it doesn't really work. Turner, call it a product of old age, seems baffled by all of words - and lord, are there a lot of words. But that's what interested me about the remake - who in the world would conquer "Edith and the Kingpin," of all songs? That song, one of the more overtly moralistic of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, is the definition of an esoteric choice - it's not famous, not flashy, not memorable, and from a period of Mitchell's career that is still contentious.

Yet what the Herbie Hancock version did for that song is to remind me how great a bad Joni Mitchell song can ben. That song is so narrative and unusual, so descriptive and evocative. And the reason, I think, that the album has been so much more successful than any average tribute record is that Hancock knows what he is replacing by creating jazzy piano and clarinet arrangements. In this case, he strips away the 70's orchestration of guitar and synths and turns them into something, arguably, more interesting. Hancock has internalized, ripped up, and rebuilt the structure of Mitchell's songs and found an instrumet to replace each piece he's found.

That's more of a compliment to Hancock's ambition than his result. I hate most of the songs on the record. He and Luciana Souza bore me to death trying to rebuild "Amelia," and Corinne Bailey Rae, with her obnoxious 5-year-old squeakiness, seems simply undeserving of singing "River." Yet when he does right, he's really onto something. He and Leonard Cohen turn "The Jungle Line" (maybe the second most esoteric choice from Hissing of Summer Lawns) into a spoken word jazz piece, and it emphasizes the beat nature of that song, but also emphasize its poetry and rhyme scheme. Best of all, the album opens with a glorious expansion of "Court and Spark" with a magnificent vocal by Norah Jones.

What is it that those songs get right that "Amelia" or "River" get wrong? What I think it is is a couple of things - the courage to expand the original coupled with the understanding of exactly what made it work. The greatest remakes, truly, are ones that respond to elements in the original that are hard to see and then creates a song around them, exposing what was there all along. "Court and Spark" is one of my favorite Mitchell songs, a song as creative as it is honest, a song as human as any I can recall, and Jones deserves it. For those of us that love that song, there are a couple of slight changes to its words that she may not have noticed, but I think alter the meaning - she turns "He saw how I worry sometimes - I worry sometimes" into pure repitition, adding a second "how" before the second "I," which diminishes the innate poetry of that line. Ditto for calling LA the "city of the falling angels" rather than the "fallen angels."

But I love that I can speculate on meaning that specific to the song - that's what a good remake can do, too - continue the conversation about a great song. Unfortunately, very few songs on the I'm Not There soundtrack figure that out, which is especially disconcerting as the movie from which it comes is a once-in-a-lifetime deep meditation on an artist and all his meaning - it expands and obsesses over Dylan, and is, truly, unlike any movie experience you can recall having. The album, however, is like every tribute experience you remember having. Not every song is as dull as, say, Jeff Tweedy's version of "Simple Twist of Faith" or Eddie Vedder & Calexico's of "All Along The Watchtower" (a song nonpareil in how unnecessary it is to have another remake). Some are interesting - Richie Havens bluegrasses up "Tombstone Blues" thrillingly, Yo La Tengo has just the right mellowness to make "4th Time Around" as comforting as it needs to be.

Yet even those rare gems on the soundtrack only reminded me how many great Dylan remakes there already are, and how none of these deserves to stand with those. Nina Simone doing "Just Like A Woman" internalizes that song's vulnerability, Joan Osborne doing "Make You Feel My Love" makes the song so warm and sexy, Them's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" makes the song expansive and desperate, R.L. Burnside's "Everything Is Broken" that turns the song into the best blues jam you've never heard, Norah Jones (again - for a simply good artist, her sense of remakes is top notch) turning "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" into a sensuous lullaby. And it reminds me of how many bad and irrelevant Dylan remakes there are - from Hole's own "It's All Over Now" to that obnoxious Guns N Roses version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."

Each of those great songs that I can recall (to say nothing of the dozens of hits other artists, like Peter, Paul, & Mary or Joan Baez had with his work in the 60's) responds to elements in the song that need to be contemplated - much like the movie does. That makes me think what an act of interpretation and reconstruction a great remake is. The way that, say, Me'shell Ndegeocello turned Jimi Hendrix's "May This Be Love" on its ear by making its guitars into a piano and string arrangement, or how Emmylou Harris used that song to soften it into gliding harmonies on Wrecking Ball - songs like that seem just as much work to create correctly as an original work.

I think that's why remakes are degraded and forgettable for the most part - no one's willing to do the work they require. Did Ndegeocello hear the Hendrix original and realize how sexy it could be? Did Hancock hear Mitchell's "Court and Spark" and think of ways that a jazz vocalist could expand it? I have to say yes and no - those artists heard those originals like true fans, injested them, and remade them in their own image. Good thing it's a worthwhile image.