Least appealing song on "Encomium: A Tribute to Led Zeppelin"

good lord

I almost couldn't read past that first track. Jesus.

good luck shitty 90s bands!

wtf at this thing

http://z.about.com/d/pregnancy/1/5/x/c/pooptrans1.jpg

"Misty Mountain Hop" (Page/Plant/Jones), by 4 Non Blondes

like not even fucking close

love how STP is one of the only remotely hard rock bands on here and they did an acoustic track w/ no drums.

That STP cover of "Dancing Days" got quite a bit of radio airplay and wasn't half-bad, as I recall. Of course, at the time I'd never heard the original.

Rollins once told me in an interview that he changed the words to the bridge in "Four Sticks": "I couldn't sing 'When the owls cry in the night.'"

ha a friend of mine got this for christmas when it came out. it sucked every bit as hard as you would imagine, but i want to say the STP & Blind Melon takes were the least vomit-inducing.
xxposts

the Sheryl Crow track is by far the most unpleasant to listen to. as for best, i like the Rollins Band track alright the Hootie one is pretty decent by Hootie standards.

"Custard Pie" (Page/Plant), by Helmet with David Yow (of the Jesus Lizard)

Wow. What's this track like? I suspect it will be awful, but there's a possibility it could be amazing.

scratch the blind melon portion of my last post

ha i forgot about this....i really wanna hear that helmet/yow joint though.

This doesn't sound that bad. For the most part, these aren't bands likely to fuck up songs this good. It's completely unnecessary but if you were a huge Cracker fan or whatever I bet this was great. I voted for Big Head Todd b/c wtf but I've never heard of the Bride band so maybe that would appeal less.

Unnecessary, yes. But Stone Free wasn't necessary either and it was pretty bitchin in places. Cure Purple Haze and Body Count Hey Joe were all right. Mebbe that tribute needs a poll too.

This doesn't sound that bad.

I'm sorry, did you miss track 1?

these are (were? i don't come across them anymore now that i don't work in shitty cd store circa '97) always so incredibly dissapointing. teh exception: return of the grieous angel g. parsons tribute.

the "Misty Mountain Hop" cover is really one of the more tolerable moments, decent heavy groove and lol dave navarro solo

lol all I know by that band is that pretty horrible single "What's Up" or whatever, but I figure they don't sing like that on every song (do they?)

Okay, so it wasn't about the whole album and it wasn't a poll, but I knew all of this sounded somewhat familiar:

Led Zep's "Dancing Days" Classic or Classicest Classic That Ever Classiced On A Planet Capable Of Classicness?

it's just so weird because this CD was released at the height of a time when a lot of very Zep-influenced grunge/metal bands were selling tons and tons of records, and instead they do this bizarre grab bag of adult alternative acts, and present it with a completely straight face, not even "a soft rock tribute to Led Zeppelin" or any kind of modifier.

famed soft rock bands like The Jesus Lizard, Helmet and Rollins Band

yeah, those bands make a little sense ... you get soundgarden, umm rage against the machine, errrr ... some other bands, you might have a cohesive comp there. it would still suck, but perhaps less so. Wild that David Yow is on the same CD as Sheryl Crow ...

come to think of it, are there any actually good Zeppelin covers?

come to think of it, are there any actually good tribute albums?

seriously, are there?

http://www.amazon.com/Return-Grievous-Angel-Tribute-Parsons/dp/B00000JMXD

but it really is like the only one

seriously... even the whiskeytown/ryan adams song on that is great...

the Hootie cover is pretty solid!

I actually prefer the older Parsons tribute, called Commemorativo or something like that.

The Neil Young Bridge CD is pretty OK. Has some nice stuff on it anyway. Ummm. I was actually just listening to some of that Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert, which sort of works as a tribute. It is PRETTY OK.

Unnecessary, yes. But Stone Free wasn't necessary either and it was pretty bitchin in places. Cure Purple Haze and Body Count Hey Joe were all right. Mebbe that tribute needs a poll too.

^^^^^^^ this

are there any actually good Zeppelin covers?

Dolly Parton "Stairway to Heaven" FTW

yeah, never hear the Parton cover -- is it bluegrassy?

This is kind of half decent.

there was a kristoffersonn tribute album that was alright from a few years back

kristoffersonn

That Tom T. Hall tribute record was damn good.

Still have a fondness for Elektra Records' Rubiyat.

I love the Merle Haggard tribute called Tulare Dust, on Hightone from the mid 90s.

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:0nfoxq8gld6e

news to me. might need to check it out.

i said HAY-yay-aay-aaay-ay boy, do you wanna SCORE

yeah that's the one! The covers of "Sin City" and "Juanita", in particular, are pretty heartbreaking; I don't know anything about those two bands otherwise though.

I like the Elvis C tribute "Almost You" fine.

bloodshot has a good bob wills tribute and they also released a wanda jackson tribute that i was interested in checking out but never did

Cure Purple Haze - I've totally gotta check this out. Those Parsons tributes sound pretty great, too. The best tribute I'm aware of is the Spacemen 3 one from the late 90s. Still, though, even with its awesome roster, it's only about half as good as it should be. That said, Low's version of "Lord, Can You Hear Me" is truly one of the best covers by anyone, ever.

helmet/yow track is a monster, custard pie riff was practically custom-made for helmet. read somewhere that yow had never heard this track until he went into to record it w/ them and winged it off a lyric sheet. the tori amos/plant rendition of 'down by the seaside' is pretty decent too, if i remember right

answer to the question - FOUR NON BLONDES

I really want to hear the Helmet/Yow cover. Hootie version sounds worst to me at first glance.

i liked this! it was one of my first CDs, and the tori/plant song was the worst.

"Thank You" (Page/Plant), by Duran Duran 2

again, it's not any individual instance so much as the overwhelming, suffocating aggregate effect. (also, I have never understood the dislike for 4 Non Blondes or "What's Up," I like Sheryl Crow a lot, and if someone tries to tell me either artist is worse than fucking Hootie and the Blowfish or Stone Temple Pilots then I fundamentally do not understand that worldview, even though it's foisted upon me daily by the music canon)

― a self-reinforcing downward spiral of male-centric indie (katherine)

yeah i understand where you're coming from - this is why discussing pervasive gender prejudice is so pernicious because you can't discuss the whole without talking about specifics. personally i think the hootie number should've ranked higher, on par with sheryl crow, because in both cases we're talking about terrible musicians doing terrible versions of terrible led zeppelin songs - and i do think darius rucker is probably worse than sheryl crow.

what's the takeaway from this, though? are straight "pick one" polls like this just fundamentally a bad idea, prevalent only because they're easier to implement than ranked lists? should we all spend more time pondering the relative merits of darius rucker and sheryl crow before talking about songs we hate?

Duh, and there it is

i dig hootie's hits and have a lot of fondness for sheryl crow's self-titled album from around this same time. both acts have a lot more cred, with me and i think with ILM, than 4 non blondes. mind you, i don't think sexism is an irrelevant thing to bring up in relation to which acts get cred, which ones get passes for their earnest and embarrassingly 90s alt signifiers and which ones don't, especially when we're talking about cover tunes of a sort of classically "dude" band - - i'm willing to believe that at least some of the negative response to some of the covers stems from a sense of "wrongness" which is consciously or unconsciously gendered.

nonetheless i think there are at least a few other factors here which should be taken into account. #1 this whole album is a mediocre cash-in by the label, so there are no wrong votes. #2, 4 non blondes winning reflects them being a loudly terrible one-hit wonder, long a target of imho legitimate mockery both on ILM and in pop culture generally. #3 "misty mountain hop" was a single, with a long and painfully mugging-heavy video, which surely gives it a boost in people remembering and disliking it. iirc "dancing days" was the only other promo track off of this, and not only is that a slightly more competent rendition, it's a slightly less beloved Zep song in the first place, so less of a sense of "travesty" attached. STP were also a popular band with many songs on the charts so this seemed like just another thing by them, whereas, #4, 4 non blondes were several years out from their lone hit (literally their only release to ever chart, and it was no longer getting airplay in 1995/96) and in fact had broken up a year before this CD came out, so their inclusion feels particularly like a desperate cash-in. #5 depending what you look for in a zeppelin cover this is a pretty lousy one - it doesn't add much to the original song besides vocal ad-libs. ymmv of course!

"#1 this whole album is a mediocre cash-in by the label, so there are no wrong votes."

yeah but you know "herd of independent minds"; whatever the individual motivations were (or what individual voters _thought_ their motivations were), the aggregate is shit, and it's shit in a way post hoc rationalizations don't seem to _really_ address.

I'm not trying to write a hot take here, just pointing out the universal principle that given any assortment of artists of roughly equal quality and stature, with very few exceptions the female artists will be seen as worse and/or more forgettable, and if pressed the answer will be "because they're just bad." (no idea how artists chose and/or assigned songs on this, but presumably that wasn't random either.)

(for some reason this is really prevalent with '90s artists; I suspect it's the analogue to the backlash against feminism in the '90s, where people consciously or subconsciously resent having to care about female artists.)

that's true...i think as an example w/the '90s there was the derisiveness towards Lilith Fair, to the point that i doubt it was covered seriously as an event by the music press at the time. or the critical rehab of a lot of mainstream alt rock of the era but the relative silence that probably still greets a group like Belly who released at least two great albums, as opposed to the one good album a lot of acts managed to release.

there are probably better examples...

three if you count lovesongs for underdogs

RIGHT

maybe it was you repping for it on the Best Coast thread that made me check it out.

I keep reading this thread title as meconium

it is so great, beginning to finish, after the swan song EPs it's her best album imo (counting both belly albums)

katherine, I'm digging your argument generally speaking, and yeah tons of 90s rock acts, that at the time were sort of ghettoized and lumped together as ''they rock... but they're GIRLS!'', are still considerably short of the cred they deserve.

i just don't buy that in the case of this particular CD, the artists are of ''roughly equal quality and stature'' - quality's pretty subjective (i'd rate 4NB low-ish from this bunch but not any lower than blind melon or cracker), but stature-wise they are in the very bottom tier of acts on this CD, no? i mean even just in terms of chart performance, they are clearly out of their league alongside STP and sheryl crow or even hootie. they'd had a spree of singles that the public just did not go for, and here's another one. so yeah, the voters for the judge-a-book-by-its-cover poll went based on that track record and what they think of ''what's up?''

sheryl crow's positioning here gives a lot more credence to yr critique for me personally - perfectly good artist where the judge-book-by-its-cover-lol-poll result seems fishier. but idk. if this weren't a label-specific cash-in and we had indigo girls, breeders, belly, maclachlan, bikini kill and L7 here i really don't think they would soak up the votes like linda perry. people just really hate ''what's up?.''

the issue is this was a "least appealing song" thread, not a thread assessing the overall merits of each artist. and it was a cover song thread at that, and covers can notoriously go south, easily - the issue with the Crow track isn't "lol, girl trying to rock", it's that the production is tinny, the arrangement is fairly generic and bland, and this already started behind the rest of the pack because it isn't exactly a Zep favorite for many diehards (certainly not mine). i don't think her vocals fit the song particularly well either (whereas her voice worked nicely on her cover of "First Cut is the Deepest")...

idk i shd back off of this topic - defending manifest or latent dudebro tendencies on ILM is really not a hill i actually want to go to battle on. i just wanted to defend hating on 4 Non Blondes as a basically legitimate activity in and of itself but i think i've said everything useful i could say to that end.

yeah I realize I am not in the majority on that

I never got ILX's weird "What's Up" hate, song is great

ILX: "buh this 90s novelty song is bad but you know whats good is len's steal my sunshine"

Ew fuck that

I had to hear that garbage all the time in college on our campus vid station.

I thought "least appealing song" was kind of designed with the assumption that no one was actually going to listen to all this shit, and it's based more on what you hear in your head when you read the tracklist. For me that ranges from "sure, this makes sense even if I don't need to hear it" (STP, Blind Melon) to "this makes sense but sounds super annoying" (Cracker, whom I like sometimes, Hootie) to "ugh why" (4NB, Crow, Big Head Todd). But for the "ugh why" ones it's mostly a function of the songs they're doing, except Big Head Todd who I just assume are going to fuck up a nice song.

I never need to hear "What's Up" again but it never occurs to me as a notably terrible song.

A big memory for me of this album (aside from my local Rock station really priming the pump for its release--I think it even got a Album Network premiere) was seeing this EPK documentary thing about it that apparently is nowhere to be found online now. My local NBC station used to show random stuff after SNL, and one week this special popped up. It went over pretty much every artist, going over why they picked the song they did, behind the scenes recording session footage, memories of Zep etc. The strangest thing was I'm pretty sure this airing was at least a year or two after the album came out; somebody at the station must have found the tape on a shelf somewhere, saw that it fit an hour with commercials, and said "Oh, what the hell..."

Oh wait, that "Out On The Tiles" clip upthread is from that special!

Did Duran Duran decide to make the covers album that forever derailed their
commercial prospects in North America as a result of this project, or was this a horrifying
glimpse into what was already in the pipeline?

sheryl crow's positioning here gives a lot more credence to yr critique for me personally - perfectly good artist where the judge-book-by-its-cover-lol-poll result seems fishier. but idk. if this weren't a label-specific cash-in and we had indigo girls, breeders, belly, maclachlan, bikini kill and L7 here i really don't think they would soak up the votes like linda perry. people just really hate ''what's up?.''

― tales of a scorched-earth nothing (Doctor Casino)

sure, if it was just a runaway victory for linda perry - if all of the sheryl crow votes went to her, for instance - you could say it's just about her. but there is crow, and even though it's perhaps not statistically significant i am still a little flabbergasted that two voters genuinely decided that the amos/plant "down by the seaside" is the worst thing on the record. (almost want to do a "best song on encomium" poll to counterbalance - it's been twenty years since i listened to the whole thing but "down by the seaside" would take it in a walk for me.)

in some ways polls like this are perfectly designed to bring out people's latent preconceptions and prejudices, because god do _you_ want to listen to the entirety of _encomium_ again just so you can make an informed decision on the worst song on it? bringing up the breeders and bikini kill is kind of a red herring to this, because the issue isn't how excellent bands get treated critically. it's that in general, men seem to have been born with a license to suck, and women will get a lot more flack for doing something awful than a man does. and since any sort of creative work involves the significant risk that what you are doing will turn out to be unutterably awful, this is a pretty big problem.

Did Duran Duran decide to make the covers album that forever derailed their
commercial prospects in North America as a result of this project, or was this a horrifying
glimpse into what was already in the pipeline?

― beamish13

"Thank You" was already on the With Honors soundtrack, released in spring '94. My impression is they recorded the covers at the same time as The Wedding Album ("Femme Fatale is on it, recall) in '92.

wtf with the 4 non blondes revisionism in evidence here, they are terrible, what's going on is terrible, this cover is terrible.

I like Sheryl Crow and adore Tori Amos.

the amos thing is, if anything, more instructive to me because the way it gets justified is "just don't be awful like linda perry and people won't hate you". which, obviously, isn't fucking true.

I just think it's hilarious that Plant decided to sing on his own tribute

robert wyatt did the same! and his song was also great!

...yeah probably the best song on the cd:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRYHNPkGesQ

I should check out the rest of this. The Rollins Band cover is p much ruined by Rollins trying to sing

Was going to post exactly the same thing--looked at the results, was surprised that Rollins got zero ("Does he sing?"), gave it a listen. Twelve bulls in a china shop; he's so unsuited to something requiring subtlety, mystery, swing, and a million other things Led Zeppelin had going for them.

(Which doesn't mean the zero's not reasonable--I'm sure there are other horrors on there.)

All of these pale in the face of knowledge that a couple of years ago Train inexplicably covered Zep II in its entirety:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA8MykYXoq0

i like rollins' cover of franklin's tower, but on the other hand nobody in the dead could sing!

yeah see... like if 4 non blondes had not been on here, but Train had formed a little earlier and made it in, i feel pretty confident they would have taken this in a walk. i just learned they STARTED AS A LED ZEPPELIN COVER BAND so my god did we dodge a bullet there. i think most on ILM would agree they are a worse band than 4 Non Blondes and they kept...making...songs. but there are tons of mainstream 90s dude bands of this period that ime do NOT get a free pass or license to suck on ILM. Live, The Offspring, Collective Soul, Counting Crows, 311, Silverchair, Bush. all of those have folks here repping for this or that song, but all of them had more than one hit song. and yet generally they do not have cred on this board afaik. even considerably better bands like Smashing Pumpkins have more detractors here than fans. if Soul Coughing, a band i like a lot, were on here i am confident they would have attracted whole new voters to come out and slam them. i think people who hate soul coughing and the pumpkins hate them in a lot of the same ways/reasons people hate 4 Non Blondes - inescapably attention-grabbing and unconventional vocalist front and center, with painstakingly enunciated lyrics that come off as pretentious bullshit if you feel superior to the particular brand of 90s-ness being peddled.

i'm belaboring all this not because i want to prove that women in rock don't face all the asymmetrical uphill bullshit that's being pointed out. they totally do. but because katherine indicated the equal "stature" of the bands was an important factor here.... and as nitpicky as it probably seems, i think it's weird to suggest that STP and 4 Non Blondes are bands of the same stature. STP have sold forty million records and among their sixteen or so high-charting singles, have at least a dozen songs that are still in regular rotation. hootie were coming off their sixteen times platinum debut (including three huuuuge singles) and hadn't yet sophomore-slumped. 4 non blondes had had one moderate-sized hit two years before, and then four singles that did not make the hot 100, and had already broken up by the time this album was released. if one aspect of the poll is "which of these acts seems the most pitifully out of their league trying to cover zeppelin" then some of that does enter the picture and i don't think ALL of it is gendered.

that doesn't mean that the questions of who gets cred, who gets stature, who's seen as appropriate to sit at the big-kids' rock table, aren't profoundly gendered. they totally are and even as i'm typing the above i'm struggling to write it in a way that doesn't fall into tropes that are typically masculine rockist dudebro tropes. i think this is super interesting and important and i'm glad katherine brought it up as it's giving me some things to think about and challenge in my own assumptions. i just, still, sincerely question whether a single-vote radio button poll, with so many other variables in play, can really be that revealing. or again if it's THAT noteworthy that a notoriously hated one-hit wonder band would take a particular beating on a label cash-in album thread, especially when their song is one of the two singles/videos that people are likely to have actually heard, and the other one of those two (STP) took third place.

the two tori amos votes could be people who don't like tori amos or people who think the idea of robert plant showing up to his own covers record is gross, who knows... but it got less votes than hootie and the same number as duran duran and big head todd. if a plant-free tori - surely the actual best artist here, by some distance - had won this by the margin 4NB did, then i would be a lot more "wtf ILM."

Thing about STP too is 70s-flavored hard rock was a thing they dabbled in a lot. DeLeo loved his slide guitar (which he used much more later on) so I get the pick.

I think this is one of the few Zep songs they wouldn't fuck up because Weiland always seemed more suited to 70s glam than wailing bluesy hard rock, but this isn't a very demanding song vocally...no Plant wailing, few ad libs, straightforward as hell.

Imagine STP doing "Immigrant Song" on the other hand

which would actually be GOOD casting for 4 Non Blondes!

they STARTED AS A LED ZEPPELIN COVER BAND so my god did we dodge a bullet there.

they released an album last year on which they covered the entirety of led zeppelin ii, so potentially we didn't dodge a bullet at
all

now she's back from the atmosphere
with drops of lemon juice in her hair

It's not actually horrible, but it's like paying to hear a tribute band

How soft your fields so green
Can whisper tales of gore
Of how we calmed the tides of war
We are your overlords

Tell me
Did the wind sweep you off your feet
Did you finally get the chance to dance along the light of day
And head back toward the Milky Way

this thread just prompted a "Zeparella" rabbit hole on YouTube - thank u thread

Kinda nice that Plant sings with Tori as Zeppelin was her favourite band as a child and inspired her playing in the conservatory.

IIRC, she asked him to join her, going so far as to let him pick the song. He picked DBTS because it was a track he felt he'd contributed a lot to, writing-wise, that was at the same time reasonably obscure and underexposed (did they ever even do it live?).

There's a Tori interview where she says she was asked to do the song via a phone call; don't think they've performed it live though.

IIRC, she asked him to join her, going so far as to let him pick the song. He picked DBTS because it was a track he felt he'd contributed a lot to, writing-wise, that was at the same time reasonably obscure and underexposed (did they ever even do it live?).

― to fly across the city and find Aerosmith's car (C. Grisso/McCain)

good pick, i think; i think the _encomium_ version of it is probably better than the zep version.

Well, speaking of Linda Perry and covers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_wtzVvstfA

Violent J has really shed some pounds!

wtf with the 4 non blondes revisionism in evidence here, they are terrible, what's going on is terrible, this cover is terrible.

still say the STP cover is p nice if not incendiary