Last month, local extraordinaire Sam Allingham, along with a crew of other roustabouts, organized a Valentine’s Day cover show of Magnetic Fields’ entire 69 Love Songs album at Chacharazzi. The best thing about this show — other than its shameless celebration of a 4-hour album about heartbreak — was that it invited anyone and everyone to come onstage and sing along with the band.
Germ and I were happily in attendance. Beer, song, and dance flowed freely; and the performances themselves were remarkably unabashed and heartfelt. True, much of the crowd was friends with the band and with one another, which contributed to the open atmosphere; but there was also a larger sense of campfire community that comes with any good singalong. The line between performer and audience becomes blurred; the event becomes not about watching and consuming, but about participating and creating. It is truly the best kind of show.
Admittedly, I’m a bit of a cover-show junkie. The day after gorging myself on all 69 Love Songs, I went to a riot grrrl cover show in Brooklyn and danced to local incarnations of Sleater-Kinney and Le Tigre. I’ve attended awesomely creepy Glenn-Danzig-based cover shows for the past two Halloweens. What’s more — and this is the kicker — I record my own acoustic covers in my spare time. My computer is full of them. I’ve got renditions of everything from Green Day to Eric Donaldson to Hank Williams, and my productivity — if you can call it that — shows no sign of slowing down.
I love covers because I believe that they gesture toward every song’s potential to achieve immortality. If a two-minute, three-chord punk song lasts as long as its creator’s music career — well, that will be pretty short. If it last as long as the vinyl and polycarbonate that it’s been recorded on — that’s a few decades, but still not a very long time. But if a song can find a new home in the guitars and voices of everyone who listens to it — and if those people go on to share their versions with others — now we’re talking about posterity. It’s a humbling, beautiful thing to think about. And it’s a continually refreshing challenge to discover and learn the songs that I love enough to try to make my own.
