round 1

(9) the ataris, “boys of summer”
OUTLASTED
(8) Roy Orbison, “i drove all night”
269-268
AND WILL PLAY ON IN ROUND 2

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/2/22.

temim fruchter on roy orbison’s “i drove all night”

To start, it must be said: When it comes to “I Drove All Night,” a song recorded by both Cyndi Lauper and Roy Orbison, the question of which is the cover and which is the original is ouroboric. (The song was also later dancified by Celine Dion for a car commercial, but that is, perhaps, for a different and more caffeinated essay.) Lauper’s version was released in 1989; Orbison’s version wasn’t released until 1992, four years after his death. The songwriters originally intended it for Orbison, but it was first popularized as a Lauper song, and so, at least in the public imagination, the Orbison version functions as a cover.
All of this said, I will be honest: It feels a bit like heresy to call Roy Orbison’s version a cover. I love Cyndi Lauper’s version of the song—and frankly, most everything that Cyndi Lauper does—but no one can touch the vastness of that ethereal croon, those hoofbeat drums, and that one (you know the one) impossible note, the one that kind of makes you believe in something you hadn’t before. I guess, then, for the purposes of this essay—and several other purposes, too—I’m kind of a heretic.

I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in suburban Maryland on a diet of mostly oldies radio and religious Jewish cassettes. On the latter front, we owned a wealth of tapes by a band called Shlock Rock, who parodied pop songs by giving them religious Jewish lyrics. “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You” became “I’ve Got My Own Seder, Too.” “We Belong” became “We Believe.” “Under the Boardwalk” became “Under the Chuppah.” And so on. As an ultra-sheltered teenager whose day-to-day was mostly confined to the cul de sacs of a small religious suburb, I became a consistently magical thinker. I was also a romantic of grandiose proportions; some degree of sensory—or at least cultural—deprivation meant that I was prone to outsized fantasies. I believed in my heart of hearts that John Lennon and Ricky Nelson had never aged and were still alive, and, somehow, I also—bless me—I believed that “I’ve Got My Own Seder, Too” was not a religious remake, but, in fact, the original version of the song. It wasn’t until one fateful day in my late teens that I heard the George Harrison version on the radio. I teetered in the strange doubling feeling that ensued. Which was which? But also, undeniably, the George Harrison version was the only version. I’d been duped.
In light of this, I began to wonder what else might be out there. In my late teens, on a dare to myself or God or both, I turned on a lamp in the middle of the Sabbath, and, notably, lightning did not strike; in my early twenties, I ate at my first non-Kosher restaurant; in my mid-twenties, I came wine-drunk and very late to my first kiss; in my late twenties, I joined a rock band and went to my first drag show; and by my thirtieth birthday, which I celebrated at a very treyf diner on Long Island on a Friday night, it became clear that the answer to what else might be out there was a whole lot. Some of it with explicit lyrics, some of it with tongue, some of it in drag, and much of it smothered in cheese.
The feeling of a whole lot shimmered just at the edges of me. All at once, the prospect of a world beyond my small Untamed-Heart-era-Christian-Slater-plastered lavender bedroom was a real one; no longer theoretical or imaginary. That a whole lot was a planet on whose surface I had only just landed and whose pleasures and textures lay only ahead of me was a heady feeling, a feeling of perpetual longing so intense it was only ever reflected back to me in love songs.

There must be a Yiddish word for the sense of the cover is the original and the original is the cover. It’s a kind of at once-ness I don’t know how to otherwise describe. Thanks to Shlock Rock coming first for me, I’m no stranger to it. The feeling that something is so familiar—has-always-been-here-familiar—but also that you’ve never heard it before quite like this in your life. It’s a backward double take. A chicken-egg reversal. A doubling feeling.
In some ways, Orbison was always himself was a kind of doubling. For someone whose voice at once defied figurative description and was also somehow almost literally earth-shaking in its easy grandeur, his physical presence was static, stock-still. In photos and footage, he always seems a little bit caught off guard by the light. Famously, Orbison rarely moved onstage. His performances were ventriloquistic, like there were two discrete parts of him—the body of the shy and shrouded performer onstage, and the voice of the godly beyond he managed to throw from said body without seeming much surprised by its presence. They may well both have been men in black, but while Johnny Cash had swagger, Roy Orbison was essentially swagger-free. What he did have was something far less embodied; something ineffable.
And actually, since we’re being heretical: In some ways, “I Drove All Night” is actually a cover of a sort-of Roy Orbison song slash a beyond-the-grave collaboration between Orbison and his Traveling Wilburys bandmate, Jeff Lynne. The song was written by Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg, who infused it with intentional Roy-grade drama, having idolized the singer in their youth. Story goes, they met Roy after a show one night and played him the song, which he actually liked so much he even recorded a demo version of. For years, this casual Roy version sat untouched, until after he died, when Lynne took his friend’s vocal track and built a whole song around it; an entire state of which Roy’s voice would be made capital. Lynne was already intimate with Roy’s voice, knew how to build a musical backdrop hospitable to Roy’s exalted vocal singularity; so Lynne is the cover artist. Roy, then, is both doubled and the double—at the center of it all, he’s singing; but he’s also entirely somewhere else, accessory to something now much larger than he is.

It likely goes without saying that I made to adulthood with no swagger, and, once I got there, I badly needed some. The Orthodox Jewish suburbs don’t much prepare you to realize you’re queer, let alone to realize you’d like to be the image conjured when someone says suitor, generally dressed to kill and downright handsome. Think the couture and one-liners of Ducky Dale with the thirdhand James Dean energy of Brandon Walsh, but queer. Was that asking so much? I’d managed to get to twenty-four without so much as a kiss, and had moved to New York with my eye on total reinvention, wearing tall boots, tall hair, and the drag of someone who’s Been Around. If you like, I walked around pretending I was the George Harrison version, when really, deep down, I was always and forever the Schlock Rock version.
Then, at twenty-six, I finally crossed over: I taught myself to play the drums and joined a queer rock band. This turned out to be a brilliant shortcut to the elusive swagger I needed: Even just walking into soundcheck on a Thursday night made me feel so hot I mistook myself for Matt Damon in cloudy barroom mirrors on the regular.
One night on tour, a friend told us there was a song we needed to hear because, he insisted, we simply had to cover it in our set. We gathered around his phone as he queued up “I Drove All Night.” The drums had me immediately. In true punk spirit, I was still remarkably ill-versed in the technicalities of drumming, but I listened to the song over and over again, trying to figure out how to play what I kept calling ‘gallop beat.’ Propulsive, rolling, urgent, but never once relenting from that solid, driving eighth-note groove. Explosive pop fills at every turn into and out of the chorus. All that delicious slithery eighties hi-hat. A horse. Horses; many.
But mostly, pouring like a golden syrup over that stacked solid rock ‘n roll foundation, there was that voice, those desirous and purely unpretentious words. All of the want in it made me giddy.
For someone who needed to quickly make up for lost time, “I Drove All Night” was a drum lesson, but it was also a crash course: Here was what you could accomplish with a voice and a pompadour inside of four minutes. Roy may not have been dynamic as a performer, but his voice was undiluted desire, a sincere and saturated expression of the lengths he’d go to in order to sweep us all off our collective feet. The song itself is simple, lyrically elemental. There is nothing complicated about it. It simply follows untenable longing (“I was dying to get to you”) to its natural conclusion: the perfect, straightforward execution of a grand gesture (“I drove all night to get to you”). The driving is grand, sure, as is the all night, but in some ways, it’s Orbison’s voice that is the real grand gesture here. It’s bravado, but without artifice. It’s declaration without qualification.

And, in fact, the lyrics explicitly resist a kind of brazen machismo (and perhaps borderline creepiness) when Roy asks permission. I drove all night to get to you, he sings. And then: Is that all right?
Of course, instead of preceding the action, the question comes right alongside it. He asks is that all right but he is already driving, he has already driven. He’s at his lover’s window, he’s creeping inside; or maybe he’s just pulling out of his driveway, maybe even still in bed; it’s a jumble of desirous simultaneity, the theoretical meeting the actual. It’s, he hopes, all right. In the music video, Orbison is a mere sunglasses-clad specter as Jason Priestly convertibles and motorcycles and windblown-hairs and tortured-eyebrows his way through the night to Jennifer Connelly. Time folds and expands; he’s already at her window the moment he revs up the bike. At a certain decibel of longing, time works differently. Inside of a love song, time is not told but folded, spun, unfurled like a scroll or a story. It’s at once nonexistent and neverending.
I’m going to be honest: I have grand gestured with the best of them, but I don’t think I’ve ever driven all night to get to someone. I do remember the first time (and okay, maybe the only time) someone drove all night to get to me. A long-distance someone of whom I was wholly enamored; someone in advance of whose arrival I always found myself holding my breath. We’d been late-night joking the way you do with someone new and far away. You should just come over, I’d said. A few hours later, I got a call from some exit on the Jersey Turnpike. I’m on my way to you. Did you mean it? When faced with the actual question, I remember, I wasn’t sure what to say. Had I been too rash? Was it questionable that I made ballad-grade decisions in my real life? Should I have said wait or no or I need to sleep? Yes, I said, and it felt like a song coming out my mouth. The hours between permission and reunion passed like years.

Look, in some ways, I’m not a heretic at all. As my sister, a rabbi, likes to say it: you don’t keep kosher but you’re tight with god. And music, for me, has always been a kind of prayer. My kind, anyway: What is prayer if not unadulterated longing? As my best friend, a musician, likes to say it: music is as close as we can get to the divine. And to my mind, that voice—that impossibly high reach, that entire highway mile of Roy’s sustained inside—is pretty darn close.
I like to tell anyone willing to listen that queer desire bends time, too, refracts and crystallizes like time in a love song. Queer time is slippery, shapeshifting, wide. All night is forever and all night is a tiny explosion of right now. Roy, an unwitting companion in my definition of my own queer bravado as I forged my gentlemanly way into queer courtship. I led with hey stranger and hey handsome and spoke in code. I sent people envelopes full of scraps and feathers. I drew them maps and hid them treasures. I mailed confections, bouquets, handwritten clues. I showed up in disguises of my own making—colors and beads and paint and jangles and lace. I have always been fond of doubling.  

No terrain is better suited for a suffusion of longing than the all night.
I remember a particular drive my band took once, trying to get quickly from a show in a Olympia to a show in Minneapolis. We drove all night all right. Twice. We weren’t driving to get to anyone, particularly, but that feeling was still there. Those hours stretching across time and space. That sense you get in the thick of the dark that’s so much like levitating, all those driving clichés you’ve heard begin to make sense. State after state, the radio humming through phases of light and shadow, time bending and refracting as we drove. The future hung ahead like a city I’d only ever pretended. Songs blurred into sleepy backdrop, until, every now and then, inside of a late-night hour, a perfect song came on, sharp and clear through all that haze. I was underslept, careening, susceptible to the elements. Quietly, I sang. I was so porous. The music lifted the top of my head just slightly off. I saw things that weren’t there; people I’d only ever manifested who were still coming into focus. A heady feeling. A sustained accumulation of longing so intense it was still only ever reflected back to me in love songs.
I was dreaming while I drove the long straight road ahead, sings Roy. He gets it.

But outsized fantasies don’t really go away, nor does grandiosity or magical thinking. Much like energy, they really just change shape. I may long have learned my way around the scandalous aftermath of a hungry first date and may have toured the US and Europe banging the drums so hard I frequently broke my sticks, periodically even thinking I had the whole thirdhand James Dean thing down, but to this day I’m still dazzled by everything out that car window. Consistently struck by my own capacity for longing.
I still sometimes forget that Ricky Nelson is dead. I still sometimes flick on a light on Saturday afternoon and feel half-surprised that lightning doesn’t strike me down. I can still make a killer playlist, and I will still surprise you with a bouquet of ephemera that will sweep you off your feet. I still joke that distance is a heteronormative construct and that by force of sheer will, I might be able to dream myself all the way to you by morning. I still legitimately giggle when I hear “Every Breath You Take,” remembering, despite myself, every last lyric to “Every Bite You Take,” Shlock Rock’s balladic treatment of the laws of keeping kosher.
And the thing about “I Drove All Night” is, I can never just listen to it once. Always at least twice. Once for the verse and once for the chorus. Once for the drums and once for the vocal. Once for the familiar version that came second and the brand-new version that came first. Once for the right here, the right now, the so close it spins me. And once for that long straight road, the ineffable possible, the never quite there yet.

Temim Fruchter is a writer who lives in Brooklyn where she makes queer mischief and lives for a good beltable karaoke ballad. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and Vermont Studio Center, as well as a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award.

In Their Ruin: jason nafziger on the ataris’ “the boys of summer”

The story of any cover song is really the story of two songs, and that may be even more true for “The Boys of Summer.” Don Henley’s original has been covered over 60 times, by Roger Daltrey, Night Ranger, and KT Tunstall among others. But the only rendition to approach the original’s success is The Ataris’ pop-punk take from 2003, and for good reason.
But let’s start at the beginning.
By which I mean the end.

I: Don’t Look Back

The Eagles, one of the most popular rock bands of the 1970s, broke up in 1980 after tempers raged at a benefit concert for Democratic senator Alan Cranston. They released Eagles Live three days after Ronald Reagan’s election and went their separate ways. The Reagan era would provide ample fodder for their solo output, with ex-drummer Henley in particular producing a string of hits that slyly criticized both the president and the culture his policies and actions enabled. Among these subtle protest anthems was “The Boys of Summer,” a song whose very existence is a domino trail of coincidences.
While writing material for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Southern Accents album, guitarist Mike Campbell brought Petty a rough instrumental track he’d put together, but the singer didn’t think the heavy synthesizer sound was right for his vision of the album and turned it down. Discouraged but still convinced of the song’s potential, Campbell made a few tweaks and took it to Henley, who was working on his second solo album, Building a Perfect Beast.
Henley listened, and when the song ended, he nodded. “Maybe I can do something with that.”

There is a specific moment in “The Boys of Summer” that announces itself as the thematic center, the seed from which the rest of the lyrics grew:

Out on the road today
I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac

The incident was not invented. “I was driving down the San Diego Freeway,” Henley told NME in 1985, “and got passed by a $21,000 Cadillac Seville, the status symbol of the right-wing upper-middle-class American bourgeoisie—all the guys with the blue blazers with the crests and the grey pants—and there was this Grateful Dead ‘Deadhead’ bumper sticker on it!”
He saw the encounter as a microcosm of a wider cultural shift: ex-hippie Baby-Boomers frolicking in the capitalist playground of the Reagan ‘80s. His generation had abandoned the idealism that once bound them together as the planet’s potential saviors and traded it for leather-wrapped steering wheels and Bose sound systems.
Henley wove that image into a tale of missed opportunities in life and love, the depressing irretrievability of the past. He took the title from a 1972 Roger Kahn book about the rise of the Brooklyn Dodgers and their eventual departure for Los Angeles. It’s impossible to say what connection Henley made between his song and the book, but this line stuck out to me: “Is that the mind’s last, soundless, dying cry? Who will remember?”
Yes, “The Boys of Summer” cries out for remembrance. Not for some fictional bygone utopia invoked by Reagan’s Make America Great Again campaign slogan. But for a spirit of community, of prioritizing art and love and empathy over money and power and war. “I can see you,” Henley promises, ostensibly to some lost lover but maybe really to his fellow citizens, to himself. This isn’t who we are, he’s saying. Am I the only one who remembers?
Roger Kahn had also borrowed the title, from an early Dylan Thomas poem that begins: I see the boys of summer in their ruin. When asked what he meant, Thomas told a friend: “Well, you go down to the beach in Swansea on a summer evening... and the city man, the office worker and so on, they'd strip off there... and get into a pair of the old-fashioned bathing trunks and waddle down to the sea.” Despite the poem not being a direct influence on the song (as far as I know), it’s easy to envision a guy fitting this description driving Henley’s metaphorical Cadillac.
A few weeks after accepting the track, Henley called up Mike Campbell. “I just wrote the best song of my life to your music,” he gushed.

II: You Can Never Look Back

“The Boys of Summer” was a massive radio hit, and it struck a chord with young Kris Roe who, while visiting his grandparents in Florida, bought the album because of that song. “[It] captured totally the moment for me: traveling by myself for the first time, seeing these beautiful sunsets … I realized traveling was what I wanted to do with my life.”
Roe is from Anderson, a small city outside Indianapolis that benefitted from a late-nineteenth century natural gas boom. Its heyday mirrored larger Midwest cities, attracting dozens of businesses and earning nicknames like The Pittsburgh on White River and Queen City of the Gas Belt and Puncture Proof City—a reference to the prominent rubber industry as well as an unintentional bit of ironic foreshadowing.
It all started sputtering in 1912 when the gas ran out, due in large part to Anderson’s recklessness. City lights were left on around the clock, and a gas pocket in the river was frequently lit just because it looked cool. Some businesses remained and in 1950, the city was an unlikely home to one of the NBA’s first franchises. The Anderson Packers had a successful season, making it to the semifinals. A year later, the team folded.
The Anderson that Kris Roe was born into in early 1977 was already in long-term decline and didn’t get any better during the ‘80s, when much of the Midwest was financially devastated by deindustrialization and the savings and loan crisis (which would also end the political career of the same Senator Cranston who’d hosted that doomed Eagles performance back in 1980.)
In 1996, Roe did what a lot of frustrated Rust Belt kids did in the post-Nirvana alternative explosion era: he started a band. Their story unfolds like a Cameron Crowe script. Roe and guitarist Jasin Thomason recorded bedroom demos with a drum machine; Thomason slipped their tape to a roadie at a show in Cincinnati; the roadie gave it to bassist Joe Escalante of The Vandals, who owned Kung Fu Records. The Ataris had a record deal before they had a proper band.
Roe wasted no time swinging a lyrical wrecking ball at his hometown, recording a track called “Anderson” for the band’s debut album (titled …Anywhere But Here after this song’s chorus), calling out the “gun-totin’ losers [and] beer swillin’ hicks” in “this Anderson hell.” The song didn’t appear on the album’s initial release (possibly because Roe still lived there) but was added to a 2002 reissue.
In 1997, Roe moved to California and Thomason left the band to stay in Indiana. Over the course of two more albums with Kung Fu, The Ataris were getting noticed for their blue-collar approach to that ubiquitous brand of post-grunge pop-punk that would bridge Green Day to Fall Out Boy. They landed a spot on the 2001 Warped Tour, playing New York City one month before 9/11.

III: Those Days Are Gone Forever

Like Henley, Roe homed in on the Cadillac bumper sticker image when reworking “The Boys of Summer” for the band’s major label debut, So Long, Astoria. As much as the original was a product of the early 1980s, The Ataris’ reinvention was a product of the early 2000s. When every day’s anxiety is a color-coded homework assignment from the government and war coverage looks like a high-def bomb commercial directed by David Fincher, you’re probably not going to catch the attention of young listeners with a Grateful Dead reference. Recognizing this, Roe didn’t want to settle for a purely faithful cover, but he also knew a simple timeline nudge wouldn’t be enough. Any number of modern band names (Misfits, Pearl Jam, Green Day) could’ve worked rhythmically, but Henley had noticed the Deadhead sticker because it was a Deadhead sticker, and because the juxtaposition with the Cadillac said something dark and sad and poetic.
It’s tempting, with the benefit of a finished product, to say the choice was obvious, but that’s too reductive. Let me say instead that Roe gave the choice its due attention. Black Flag were not only musically influential, but spiritually influential to the punk scene that would follow, forging a work ethic and DIY attitude now emblematic of the genre.
This careful choice elevates the Ataris’ song over typical punk covers that remediate their subjects with art-thief efficiency and bike-thief attitude. Their version is not just a funhouse reflection of the original; it’s a companion piece. If Henley is telling us that everything pure is corruptible if we let our guard down, Roe’s corollary is that we will inevitably let our guard down. We can’t help ourselves.
There’s a direct path from the Grateful Dead fan in Henley’s song to the Black Flag fan in Roe’s song. They could easily be parent and child, each chipping away at the culture that had been built for them, each eventually succumbing to the necessities of consumerist existence, the bumper sticker an ironic souvenir from an alternate reality. Generation after generation, churning out revolution so slowly we can barely feel it.
The Ataris never intended to release “The Boys of Summer” as a single. In fact, they were already producing a video for “My Reply,” a deeply personal track written for a fan who was contemplating suicide and later credited the song—which Roe wrote and immediately sent to her—with saving her life.
Then, Entercom’s influential K-Rock stations in New York and L.A. started playing “The Boys of Summer” instead. It caught on and, as Roe later told MTV, “We just had to go with it.” The video concept for “Reply” was reworked for “Summer” instead. The song would become the biggest commercial success of the band’s career. Ironically, it is followed on the album by a song criticizing the inanity and influence of corporate radio.
Two weeks after So Long, Astoria hit shelves, the United States invaded Iraq. Within a year, the Ataris would break up, though Roe would continue to perform under the name with a variety of lineups. The Eagles reunited in 1994 and performed together for five years before another rift that eventually led to a lawsuit.

Jason Nafziger is a writer from Ohio, where he currently lives with his wife Heather and dogs Sloopy & Heidi. He currently has six separate playlists consisting entirely of cover songs. Follow him on Twitter @JasonNafziger for opinions he’ll just delete later, retweets you’ve already seen & Wordle scores (unless NYT has paywalled it by the time you read this.)