Begin to Pretend to Pray: Eddie Hazel’s “California Dreamin’” by will hansen
Because It’s Fun to Play and Sing
Ultimately, asking the why of any cover is a little beside the point, at least from the musicians’ perspective. You enjoy playing. You like seeing what makes songs tick, whether they’re yours or not.
It is perhaps especially beside the point when talking about covers in many Black musical genres, which can involve combining space for creative improvisation with intricate patterned rhythms. And Funk is a fusion of Black forms (jazz, soul, blues, rock and roll).
I’m not a musician. I get to care about the why-bother of Eddie Hazel’s cover of “California Dreamin’,” and about the hows of its greatness.
Because People Will Buy It
There are seven tracks on Hazel’s 1977 album Game, Dames, and Guitar Thangs; two of them are “California Dreamin’” and its short reprise, which open and close the album. A third is another cover of a white band’s song, the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” There’s also a cover of “Physical Love,” which had just been released by Bootsy’s Rubber Band the year before. The covers make up about two-thirds of the album’s running time.
And yeah, part of the reason that this “California Dreamin’” exists is surely the same reason that we get a steady stream of utterly unnecessary remakes and sequels and prequels in film and television: it’s something people already know they like(d), so (the corporate thinking goes) they’re more likely to spend their money on it rather than an unknown commodity. The music business was ahead of just about everyone in the exploitation and exhaustion of popular IP.
But there’s a twist here, specific to the mid-century American pop music industry. White bands were constantly covering, appropriating, not to say stealing (er, um, “inspired by”) Black musicians’ songs and sounds—making them palatable for the larger white youth audience and their allowance- and gift-granting parents. Black musicians could flip that dynamic with covers of white songs. They could remind that any sort of mercenary buck-making had already been done to them; such a charge against them, by anyone in or out of the music business, would be ludicrous.
The Mamas and the Papas: biker slang, but also, and earlier, Black colloquial usage. Perhaps not beside the point in a band that clearly strived for soulfulness.
Because the Original Needs Covering
Though it’s not exactly a secret, it’s nevertheless often overlooked that the Mamas and the Papas’ version of “California Dreamin’” is itself a cover, or at least a pseudo-cover. The song was first recorded and released by Barry “Eve of Destruction” McGuire in early 1965, and even with (perhaps because of) the backing vocals from the M&Ps and a very similar instrumental arrangement to what the group would put together themselves a few months later, it’s a trainwreck, with McGuire sounding like a drunken, chain-smoking karaoke singer in a strip-mall bar on a Wednesday night:
Of course, some songs should be sung as though you’re drunk and chain-smoking in a strip-mall bar on a Wednesday night. “California Dreamin’” could be one of them, judging by the lyrics. If that’s the case, it’s those very pretty backing harmonies that wreck this version—the problem isn’t that it’s flat and grating, it’s that it’s not flat and grating enough.
The M&Ps single was recorded in November and released in December 1965, swapping out Denny Doherty’s vocals for McGuire’s and a Bud Shank flute solo for the original’s harmonica. The changes make the song less singer-songwriterly and gritty, more choral and folky and jazzy. The lead vocal strains, in both versions, and particularly in the verse set in the church passed along the way. In the McGuire version, the vocals convey a sense that any hope of the end of winter, and any faith (in one’s god, in one’s love, in one’s self), are already lost. In Doherty’s, there is a question in the delivery of “well I got down on my knees,” the only (and quintessentially) rock-and-roll moment in the whole song. Is there soul here, or not?
Because Anything Can Be Funkified
As with many things, there are technical, philosophical, etymological, methodological, historical, other definitions for funk. In Rickey Vincent’s book Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One, there’s a fascinating etymological discussion that discusses the many possible sources and resonances of the Black slang terms funk and funky. There’s the early English meaning, still in use, of a depressive state (derived from the Flemish fonck, and possibly resonant with the sometimes slower tempo of funk music). There’s the possible derivation from French terms for smoking and for a powerful smell—probably traceable to New Orleans’s jazz musicians, but Vincent also points to an evocative 1623 maritime usage that might be referring to the smell on the decks of a slave ship. Finally, there is the possible alternative derivation of Robert Ferris Thompson, who argued for the distinctive Black term’s derivation from the African Ki-Kongo language, with the term lu-fuki that referred to “strong body odor” in a positive sense—“the smell of a hardworking elder,” of “positive energy.”
Pretty much everyone seems to agree that James Brown is the starting point for technically distinctive aspects of funk—especially the focus on “the One,” which can refer both to the first beat of a measure and the locking-in of the entire band to focus on percussive rhythm, and the soul- or gospel-inflected singing that these undergird. That was what funk meant for James Brown; for George Clinton, it became an entire cosmological system. But Clinton himself said that a specific meaning could be elusive—“Funk is whatever it needs to be, at the time that it is.”
Eddie Hazel—on-and-off-and-on-again guitarist for Parliament-Funkadelic—was one of the greatest funk guitarists in history. He knew what it needed to be. Clinton’s expansiveness notwithstanding, there is certainly a particular, distinctive funk aesthetic, both sonically and visually. (The cover art for Game, Dames, and Guitar Thangs is an excellent example of the visual aesthetic.)
The material being performed is certainly not beside the point, not exactly. But its importance is secondary to the groove being worked into it. Its importance is precisely its malleability to a groove, a sound. Hazel heard funky possibility in the poppy harmonies of “California Dreamin’.”
Because You’re Better Musicians
Eddie Hazel handles guitar and lead vocals. Founding P-Funk member Bernie Worrell (who had a hand in an absurd amount of great music over the second half of the twentieth century) is on keyboards. Lynn Mabry and Dawn Silva—the Brides of Funkenstein—are on backing vocals. Tiki Fulwood on drums. It’s either Bootsy Collins or Billy Bass Nelson on bass—there seem to be conflicting accounts on that. Hazel produced it with an assist from George Clinton. This was an all-stars of funk lineup.
Are they better instrumentalists, better vocalists, than the Mamas and the Papas and their backing band? I’m reminded of the classic “Homer at the Bat” episode of The Simpsons, when Homer asks Darryl Strawberry if Strawberry is a better player than he is. Strawberry’s response: “Well, I don’t know you, but… Yes.”
This crew was going to make just about anything they cared to approach better. It’s an interesting funk cover, in that bass and drums do not make themselves known at first. It’s Hazel’s meandering, fuzzy, warm guitar and Worrell’s poignant, crisp piano that play off each other to create the emotional soundscape. But the drums, when they arrive, are wonderful, with the cymbal-splashes reminding you of the waves of the Pacific Ocean tumbling onto California beaches. The bass is supple and persistent, keeping those marvelous guitar lines from brooding too long, or wandering too far. And the Brides are majestic, their harmonies poised between gospel and blues.
Because Your Interpretation Differs
But about that verse in the church.
Michelle Phillips wrote the lyric, “Well, I got down on my knees, and I pretend to pray.” I don’t know about you, but I’d always heard “began” instead of “pretend.” And in fact, that’s what Mama Cass sang, too, in the backing track.
Hazel sings “began.” That just about sums up the whole cover, really: it takes us to church, it feeds the soul, in a way that the McGuire and M&Ps versions are ambivalent about. Funk can be many things, contain multitudes, but it strikes me as being, fundamentally, about movement and transcendence—about getting out of your own head and your own way. Getting down on your knees and pretending to pray? Funk is not without irony, but it is without imposture.
Eddie Hazel is, after all, the guitarist who took George Clinton’s prompt to play the feeling of being told your mother has died, and produced the magnificent, anguished, incredibly beautiful 10-minute solo for “Maggot Brain” in 1971. He could go to soul-shaking places and bring back treasure.
Because All the Leaves Are Brown and the Sky Is Gray
Unless you’re going for a fully satirical or critical rendition—and I don’t think Hazel is—to cover a song is to understand that, whatever its faults, it nevertheless says something that needs saying in a way that saves you the energy of starting from scratch.
“California Dreamin’” is a song that is too easy to dismiss. It’s soul-shaking. It’s a song about the shittiness of Northern winter and missing the sun, sure. But there’s that third verse—a repetition of the first four lines, but then, wait: “If I didn’t tell her / I could leave today.” Right at the end, it sends you back to the start. This is why he’s out for a walk in the cold he hates, why he stops into a church: he’s thinking of leaving her. He’s having something like an existential crisis. The preacher, like the cold, knows he’ll stay; morality and lethargy and entropy will keep him here, with her. Hazel does not keep the repetitions in the third verse. He skips to these two lines.
So maybe the winter and California can be seen as reflections of interior states. But they can also be winter, and California, not representations but realities, and in Hazel’s cover there’s added resonance there. Wikipedia will tell you, just like it told me, that Hazel was born in Brooklyn in 1950, and raised in New Jersey. His cover was recorded in Detroit, probably in early 1977. New York, Detroit, California; longing for warm places from the cold places you fled to; as sung by Eddie Hazel, this can also become a song about the Great Migration and its aftermath, about the promise and crushing disappointment of life in the cities that African Americans fled to from the South. California? Just another dream. The preacher—here, maybe of a Black church—knows he’ll stay because the reports are in from California, and it’s no better there (maybe worse, even).
And yet. In the last 90 seconds or so, Hazel interestingly shifts the scene: he’s in California, as he seemingly improvises new lyrics. “Searching for my mind, searching for something that leads me here,” he sings that “something’s holding me here in L.A.” And yet he is still searching—“did I leave something behind?” For the last thirty seconds, he sings, over the Brides, “Dream on.” It seems an encouragement.
Will Hansen is a librarian, currently Director of Reader Services and Curator of Americana at the Newberry Library in Chicago. His published articles include work on Moby-Dick, active learning with primary source materials, archives of “born-digital” materials, and other topics. He has led hundreds of hands-on instruction sessions with rare books and other primary sources, as well as teaching Adult Education Seminars at the Newberry. He has curated or co-curated library exhibitions on independence struggles in Latin America, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, the Bloomsbury Group, female writers of the Victorian era, Alexander Hamilton, and other topics.