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

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.

Heard (most of) this ONCE in a record store when it was newly released. Helmet and STP and even Rollins were surprisingly not bad. Big Head Todd & The Monsters were g-dawful, whoever the fuck they were. Just painful.

That's gotta be wrong re Yow because there's video of him talking about when he saw Zeppelin live back in the day, I think it was his first concert.

The Ordinaires instrumental cover of "Kashmir" is pretty damn good. In the "tribute to yourself" category, I always loved the Middle Eastern rearrangement of "Four Sticks" on the Page & Plant No Quarter album.

Actual good tribute albums:
- "Sing Hollies in Reverse"
- "Lynne Me Your Ears" 2-CD ELO/Idle Race/Wilburys/Jeff Lynne tribute (but I'm an unapologetic Jeff Lynne freak, so take this recommendation as you will)
- The all-Beatles "I Am Sam" soundtrack is a lot better than it has any right to be
- "Lowe Profile" 2-CD Nick Lowe tribute
- "The Sandinista! Project" 2-CD complete cover of the Clash album is pretty interesting and actually gave me a new appreciation of the original
- The Willie Nelson tribute "Twisted Willie"
- "Bleecker Street: Greenwich Village In The '60s"

Also, the 3 K-Tel tributes Pravda Records put out in the mid-'90s are a lot of fun:
- "20 Explosive Dynamic Super Smash Hit Explosions!"
- "20 More Explosive Fantastic Rockin' Mega Smash Hit Explosions!"
- "Star Power!" (I guess they ran out of adjectives)

hey, maybe he loved Zep but just never heard Physical Graffiti.

xpost

xpost etc. - also, the I'm Your Fan early-90s L. Cohen tribute.

Hideous L., I also like "Bleecker Street," particularly Marshall Crenshaw's contribution song and the John Cale/Suzanne Vega duet.

i think i mixed up the details a bit on that yow story, i thought it was something like him not having an idea what the custard pie lyrics actually were until he went into the studio and they gave him a lyric sheet and then he just sorta ad-libbed it. i dunno

hahah i used to own this record.

and 4 non blondes is probably the biggest atrocity of them all. a painfully annoying rendition of an already annoying song.

"Down by the Seaside" (Page/Plant), by Tori Amos with Robert Plant
"Down by the Seaside" (Page/Plant), by Tori Amos with Robert Plant
"Down by the Seaside" (Page/Plant), by Tori Amos with Robert Plant
"Down by the Seaside" (Page/Plant), by Tori Amos with Robert Plant
"Down by the Seaside" (Page/Plant), by Tori Amos with Robert Plant
"Down by the Seaside" (Page/Plant), by Tori Amos with Robert Plant
"Down by the Seaside" (Page/Plant), by Tori Amos with Robert Plant
"Down by the Seaside" (Page/Plant), by Tori Amos with Robert Plant
"Down by the Seaside" (Page/Plant), by Tori Amos with Robert Plant
"Down by the Seaside" (Page/Plant), by Tori Amos with Robert Plant
"Down by the Seaside" (Page/Plant), by Tori Amos with Robert Plant

that was bad, yes

Though I will say that before I saw that one I was tempted to vote Big Head Todd & The Monsters just because I hate that fucking band name.

ok, you guys are right. i just relistened to the amos/plant thing and it is absolutely awful

I thought that I'd bought this in high school, and I was correct- just found a copy of the CD in a box down in my parents basement. No case anymore, but the CD still plays. The songs are all pretty "eh" - I seem to recall that I bought it for the stone temple pilots and rollins band covers. Just played it, and that sheryl crow song is BAD.

Fuck you for not including an 'All Of Them' option.

Voted 4 Non Blondes.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Down by the Seaside is such a great song that I forgot about recently. Is that version any good?

That Tom T. Hall tribute record was damn good.

yeah. also sweet relief (victoria williams).

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

who is Never The Bride?

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

like not even fucking close

― jordan s (J0rdan S.), Wednesday,

didn't know sarge liked Zep!

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