round 2

(5) cowboy junkies, “sweet jane”’s
aim was true, beating
(13) LINDA RONSTADT, “ALISON”
449-144
and will play in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/11/22.

“Anyone Who Ever Had a Heart: lorraine berry on cowboy junkies’ “Sweet Jane”

1.

“Sweet Lorraine,” recorded in 1940 by Nat King Cole, was the song that inspired my dad to name me. My mother had wanted to call me “Colette.” But in her northern English home, the sophistication of such a name left folks scratching their head. And while I love my name, its long “a” sound makes it feel much less delicate than all of those girls’ names that feature the breathy soft “a” of names like Angela or Ashley.
Sweet Jane is a girl whose name features that same harder a.

2.

When I heard Velvet Underground or later, Lou Reed, sing Sweet Jane as a kid, even though I didn’t understand the lyrics, the song sounded gritty, maybe even dangerous. When I heard it as a teen, still not listening closely to the lyrics, I assumed Lou Reed was singing about drugs.
The scenes of street life in NYC were what made the song cool for me eventually, but even then, I never really heard it as a romantic love song. It wasn’t until Margo Timmins emerged from the shadows of the video playing on MTV that Sweet Jane suddenly became a sensory caress that felt like it was ushering me into the slow-motion erotic catastrophes that was love in the 1980s.

3.

As a child in the 1970s, I would listen to my radio for hours in my room. The goal was to capture the new song I loved so much on my cassette recorder. Each song that wasn’t “it” was great, but in that space between songs when the DJ would be stepping on the intro of the song I wanted, I’d hit the record button. The blackout bingo were those sweet moments when two songs were played back-to-back without interruption, and the second song was the object of your quest. No voice breaking up those first few notes that you knew by heart.  
Watching MTV in the 1980s was the visual component of Radio-Cassette Bingo. Certain images could get you to love a video even if you didn’t like the song or the pretty boys who performed it.  Duran Duran taught me that.
The first time I heard “Sweet Jane,” by The Cowboy Junkies, the shadows pulled me in. That, and Margo Timmins’ ethereal Rapunzel waves of hair, something my own curly head would never accomplish.
It’s only now as I rewatch it that I see the things I missed. The moments when Timmins appears in color. The thorns. The chains. The things you don’t see about love when you’re in your mid-20s.

5.

I asked my husband a few weeks ago to watch Lou Reed perform “Sweet Jane” and then the Cowboy Junkies version. As someone whose music transmits itself in words, I wanted to hear what the guitar player heard.
The next day he unpacked his ivory-colored Taylor electric and sat down with me. “So,” he said, making sure he was tuned, “Lou’s live [“Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal”] version is in E,” and he plays the progression. “That’s where that chesty growl comes from. The studio version—like Mott the Hoople’s, like Cowboy Junkies—is in D, and more bouncy.
“Mott the Hoople added some pop to it with that ascending riff in the chorus....”

6.

In the 17th century, Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit and polymath, formed the connection that intervals in music convey colors. Others built upon his theory. In 1742, Louis Bertrand Castel developed a direct correspondence between specific notes and colors, and suggested the creation of a “le clavecin oculaire“ an instrument that would throw colored light out as it was played. Following his theory, DAG becomes green-violet-red. DABmG, however has the addition of agate, a gemstone that is known for the differently colored variants it produces.
My own synesthesia is not consistent, and disappeared for a long time after childhood. But in the past few years, it’s been back. Textures and tastes align with color. On a recent flight across the Rockies as I journeyed home to my beloved Cascades, toasted marshmallow flooded my mouth as I beheld the endless pillows and pillars below me.
With music, however, I don’t see color. I feel it in my body. Not the ways that a piece of music can cause you to resonate and set off the tinkling of bells in your spinal column. Or the way certain pieces of music make you weep.
I have somatic reactions to music, as if the emotions it sparks create their own physical manifestations. Suffusions that sometimes feel as if a rush of adrenaline has numbed my legs or set off the physiological responses that lead directly to migraine. Some songs inspire anxiety that becomes the sensation of panic attack.
But some songs I feel like an ache.
The Cowboy Junkies’ cover of “Sweet Jane” is one of these.

7.

Lou’s live version does not, however.
Instead, coming in as it does after what might be one of the best intros in live rock history, that one floods me with the razor blade blood pumping out of my heart.

8.

CJ was not the first band to cover the song, and there have been many more versions that have followed. “Sweet Jane” or “Sweet Jane covers” as a search term on YouTube yields dozens.
Diana Gameros and Los Refugios Tiernos, Mott the Hoople, Phish, Hollis Brown, Two Nice Girls, Brownsville Station, and Lone Justice are just some of the many artists who have interpreted the song. (There’s also a lullaby version I wish I had never heard.)
The song always seems to capture an emotion, or a moment in time that the artist was experiencing. It is pliable, labile that way. The most recent version I’ve heard is the one by Miley Cyrus and it scorches like a torch in a nightclub.

9.

Margo Timmins’ soft voice and the sweep and tap of the brushes were not the band’s original mode of play. But after receiving noise complaints about their rehearsal space-garage, they softened the playing and found their sound. In a 2001 article for No Depression, “We realized we had to tone down,” Michael Timmins explained. “One thing fed into the other: Margo began to realize that her singing voice was more effective quiet. We began to realize, if we can get down underneath Margo, the sound will be more effective. Pete picked up brushes – he was just learning to play drums at that point. Everything sort of came down. We learned to play with less volume."

10.

I met Yves in 2006. I’ve told the story elsewhere, but after a week of intense communication, I traveled to Montreal to spend Veteran’s Day Weekend with him. Our first several hours had us both convinced that we had discovered a serious love, but my last hours with him were spent tending to him while he suffered a fatal brain aneurysm.
The night before I met Yves, we talked on the phone. He told me that he was listening to a lot of 80’s music—that that was his mood. He would tell me later that he had been so nervous about meeting me that he had just wanted to get lost in old, familiar tunes. On the phone, I could hear something playing, but it was too faint to be anything other than background noise.
Later, after the events had transpired, I would find the playlist of what he had listened to that night. He was the Web master for his housing cooperative; he maintained a site that contained news about the co-op and playlists of music that the group’s members could stream. Those playlists would remain on the page until he posted whatever new songs had appealed to him. He always entitled his playlists “Playing while we hack.” If you happened to check the page while he wasn’t online, you’d find the most recently archived list, but where a new list should be, it would simply say, “Nothing… Our desktop’s speakers are silent.”
Nick Cave. Tom Waits. Gang of Four. X. Porno for Pyros. The stuff of a “working” song list that you might expect to hear from a man born just a few months before me in 1963.
He was a sound engineer, and I would meet many of the bands he had recorded at his memorial service.

11.

One of those songs on that list was the live version of “Sweet Jane,” recorded in 1973 and included on 1974’s Rock and Roll Animal.
I can’t listen to that version without instantly feeling an ache underneath my breastbone, the faint echoes of a trauma that made 2007 a rough year.

12.

CJ’s complete rearranging of “Sweet Jane” breaks my heart but in much different ways. It reminds me of the way love feels in your twenties, and the casually cruel boys who batter your faith in yourself.
The visual artist who invited me, who had been his lover, down to Berkeley to stay with him for a week. Then he made me sleep on the couch after he changed his mind about his intentions in asking me to fly down to him. Or the photographer who was more angry about the fact that a close friend and I had figured out that he was sleeping with both of us. “You two had no right to talk about our sex life.” As if the spilling of secrets far outweighed the breath-taking act of infidelity that neither of us had expected.  Or the musician who would let himself feel vulnerable with me for a week, and then disappear for weeks at a time in order to emotionally disengage, only to show up again and again at my place of work.
When I finally found a man who wanted to make an emotional commitment, he was a man of science, of facts to quantify, but a man whose connection to the muse came in kitchen chemistry—literally—but in no other way. I married him. And divorced him twelve years later.

13.

Margo Timmins once explained that CJ had originally intended to include “Sweet Jane” on their first album, Whites Off Earth Now! Problem was Timmins’ brother Pete the drummer had only been playing for a short time. When trying to hit the “stop” just before “heavenly wine and roses,” the two of them could not get the timing right.  
The best part of recording the song, she recounts in the video, was getting to meet Lou Reed. She looks starstruck as she recounts it. “Meeting Lou Reed was probably the highlight of my career.” She hesitates at the cliché, and then decides to go ahead. “Lou Reed gave me the soundtrack to my life.”

14.

When Lone Justice fronted by Maria McKee sang “Sweet Jane,” they turned it back into the hard-edged banger that more closely resembles Mott the Hoople’s version turned up to 11. As if Maria is kicking her boots at the CJs, telling them that they may have captured the sweet longing beneath the words with their version, but Sweet Jane was a salty woman, not the dreamy girl Margo channeled. When the song continues into “Walk on the Wild Side,” it’s clear that it’s Lou to whom Maria’s swearing her allegiance.

15.

In CJ’s video of the song, the thorns and chains appear as they are dragged across a bed. It summoned the eroticism of the famous photograph by Imogen Cunningham. I first saw the photograph The Unmade Bed when the artist who would later turn Berkeley into a sad space for me asked me to go to an exhibition with him. I remember being struck silent by the image, the hairpins, the shadows, the feeling that the lovers have just arisen and left love behind.
In the video, thorns, a heavy chain, a necklace, a rose crushed. And the woman’s hand clutching the side of the mattress, that sweet moment when one is the only object of your lover’s attention.
Sometimes, when Margo sings, sweet Jane sounds like sweet chain.
The CJ version whisks us away from the crowded New York City street and plops us right into the emotional territory.

And anyone who ever had a heart
They wouldn’t turn around and break it
And anyone who ever played a part
Oh wouldn’t turn around and hate it.

The CJ song starts with a verse much later in the original song, as if you’ve caught it being played for the thousandth time somewhere. But Margo Timmins’ voice catches your attention, and you hear the song anew.
It sounds like a plea from someone who is chiding a lover for not saying “I love you” more often. I’m not minimizing that sentiment. Unrequited love is debilitating, especially in those years when every emotion feels like the most important emotion you will ever, ever have.

16.

When Lou sings that verse, it’s right after a list of things that “evil mother(fuckers)” will tell you. And he grows angrier as he recounts the list. He blasts those who tell him that “And life is just to die!”
The song is narrated by Jack, who is driving his car, and Jane is in her vest. He’s talking to Jim, standing on the corner, who is really in a rock and roll band. Jack is recalling the past times; he’s a banker, after all, and Jane is a clerk. He has advice for the protesters: ignore the haters who tell them that they’ll never change anything.
Those folks who say that shit never had a heart anyway.

And there’s even some evil mothers
Well they’re gonna tell you that everything is just dirt
Y’know that women never really faint
And that villains always blink their eyes, woo.
And that, y’know, children are the only ones who blush!
And that life is just to die!

17.

It would take four years from age 38 to age 42 before I met Yves. In that time, I had discovered that the same types of men who had been unable to handle their emotions in their twenties were no closer to getting it right in their 40s. Only now, they wanted to “blame me for the rocks and baby bones and broken lock on the garden.”
I hear the heart weariness that Margo Timmins carries as she sings the song. She was 27. It sends its strum straight down to my lower belly, wondering if this time, erotic attraction is going to be enough to keep this goddamned relationship together. Because anyone who ever had a heart wouldn’t turn around and shit on the person with whom they had just made love.

18.

Everyone knows the story of how the Velvet Underground’s version of “Sweet Jane,” recorded on its fourth album, was not the song Reed had meant. The usual issues among band members meant that he wasn’t even in the studio when the song was recorded. But in 1973, he performed the song in all of its glory.
In the video of the performance, his band plays an intro that goes on for nearly four minutes, a demonstration of the players’ virtuosity that lifts the mood. Then Lou starts to sing.
Turns out that the VU didn’t get the intro right.  
Lou Reed once explained to  Elvis Costello that people often get the chord riff central to “Sweet Jane” wrong. And then he pulled out his guitar and showed the chord progression with the “secret” Bm chord. And despite the fact that it’s been repeatedly claimed that Cowboy Junkies version was his favorite cover, it lacks the hidden Bm chord.
It doesn’t make the song any less powerful. It just hits different.
A sweet ache. Not pain.

Infinity.
The guitar player and I met in 2008. We’re still together, finally deciding in 2019 that we should get married. He is a writer, too, and I finally found a man who combined being creative and being stable that had eluded me all those years.
I watch Cowboy Junkies now and I remember those years of the careless boys who broke my heart. Then watch Lou Reed rail against those who would strip us of our hopes and dreams.

You know, those were different times
Oh, all the poets, they studied rules of verse
And those ladies, they rolled their eyes

I like our cover best.

After 23 years of living on the other side of the continent, Lorraine Berry finally made it back to the Pacific Northwest, the place where she grew up. On her Twitter account (@BerryFLW), she frequently posts photos of trees and mountains and has recovered her sense of being right-sized. When not writing about books at various outlets, she is at work on a novel manuscript set in Seattle in the early 1980s. She lives in western Oregon with her husband, two dogs, and three cats. Her current goal is to learn to identify the 1980+ lichens of the PNW. 

LINDA, MY AIM IS TRUE: CHERYL GRAHAM ON LINDA RONSTADT’S “ALISON”

If you were in your early teens in the late 1970s and had an inkling you might be gay, and if pop music was a repository for all your adolescent angst, and if you wondered, as a budding musician yourself, where you might fit in among the hyper-heterosexual milieu of the music industry, you would have had to perform considerable feats of mental contortion. And when I say you, I mean me.
As a girl, I found it especially confusing. I wanted both to be the subject of the song and the object of it. I wanted to sing silly love songs to other girls but wasn’t entirely comfortable when that attention turned toward me. I wanted my picture in the paper, but I wasn’t keen on it being rhythmically admired. I wanted to have a thing going on with Mrs. Jones, but I also wanted to be Mrs. Jones.
While there aren’t as many closeted pop stars now as there were 40 years ago, gay music fans still develop a highly-attuned ear, open to a turn of phrase, a dissonant chord, an unintelligible line—anything to suggest that things are not as they seem. Seventies raconteur and 21st-century thirst-trap Fran Lebowitz said being gay doesn’t make you artistic, being gay makes you forced to observe. Those of us high on the Kinsey scale cultivate a sort of aural gaydar, listening for the slightest possibility that while a given song wasn’t written about us, there could be something in it for us. In short, to inhabit the dominant culture and see ourselves reflected therein, we have to queer it.
Covering a song is a way of queering it, in the original sense of the word: to alter it, to mess it up. The word can do double duty when a gay or lesbian singer covers a song but leaves the pronouns intact. That is, when the artist takes on the opposite-sex persona of the original narrator and sings it straight, so to speak. Melissa Etheridge brings a cheeky twist to Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” while Calum Scott’s soulful rendition of “Dancing On My Own” gives Robyn’s pop confection greater depth. Patti Smith’s epic reimagining of “Gloria” plays with gender in ways that left certain listeners (hi there) blindsided and exhilarated.
Straight artists can also queer heteronormative songs when they flip the script by simply staying true to the originals: think White Stripes’ cover of “Jolene,” or Amy Winehouse’s “Valerie.” These faithful renditions honor the song as well as their audience. When Ed Sheeran sings “Be My Husband” he doesn’t need to throw in a “have I mentioned I’m heterosexual today?” to reassure his fans.
Then there are the cowards who distort the lyrics to an embarrassing extent. I’m still mad at Shawn Colvin for “Every Little Thing He Does is Magic” and at Sheryl Crow’s wholesale pronoun changes on “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” And I definitely want to speak to the manager about Michael Bublé’s no homo reworking of “Santa Baby.”
Maybe calling someone I don’t know a “coward” is a bit harsh, and I will concede that the examples above are extra annoying because I loved the originals. Maybe I should give artists the benefit of the doubt when they change pronouns to make a song more personal to them (except for Bublé—he should go to singer jail). It’s certainly within their rights to recast the song so they can better identify with it if that helps their performance. Though I remain skeptical, I shouldn’t assume Colvin and Crow, et al, were intentionally straight-washing songs lest they lose fans. They may have simply wanted it to align with their own sensibilities. After all, queer listeners have always done just that.
In a 1980 Rolling Stone interview, Linda Ronstadt was asked how she chooses songs. Nearly all of Ronstadt’s catalog is composed of material written by others; as an interpreter of song, nobody does it better. “I pick them because something will happen in my life and I want to describe that situation,” she recalls, “Peter [Asher, her manager] heard this Elvis Costello record and said, ‘This is a hit song for somebody.’ I really loved the song but I didn’t see any way I could do it. Then I met a girl like Alison who became a real good friend to me. … I had a reason to sing it, so then I had to do ‘Alison.’”
This year the head honchos at Faxness let the writers choose our own songs. Their rules stipulate: Cover songs must have been previously popularized by another artist on a commercial release. Many of Ronstadt’s hits like “You’re No Good,” or “Heart Like A Wheel,” don’t fit the bill. Those songs were written and performed by others, but the originals were sufficiently obscure that Ronstadt’s renditions were the first most people heard. She also recorded songs that were previously well known but became forever associated with her. “Blue Bayou” isn’t a Roy Orbison song, it’s a Linda Ronstadt song. The Eagles wrote “Desperado,” but Linda made it hers. Especially during her late-70s run of consecutive multi-platinum albums, songwriters like Smokey Robinson, Buddy Holly, and even the Rolling Stones got the Ronstadt treatment—and the attendant boost to their bank accounts.
In 1978, Elvis Costello was the beneficiary of Linda’s royal(ty) touch when she recorded his song “Alison” for her ninth solo album, Living In the USA. It would be her third LP to top the Billboard 200 album chart, and the fifth in a row to go platinum. In fact, it shipped that way— such was her power and popularity at the time, that 2 million vinyl slabs were pressed and ready to roll in September of that year.
I wouldn’t say “Alison” had been popularized by its writer (don’t disqualify me, Megan and Ander!). Not on a widespread scale, anyway. Costello’s debut album My Aim Is True, (which borrows a line from “Alison” for its title), was a hit with critics, appearing on Rolling Stone’s 1977 year-end list, an exquisite corpse of artists that included the Sex Pistols, Fleetwood Mac, and Muddy Waters. But with listeners, not so much. His notorious SNL appearance in December 1977 exposed him to the insomniac audience, but he had yet to ply the waters of the mainstream. For many people in the US, Linda’s recording of “Alison” would be the first song they’d ever heard written by one Declan Patrick McManus.
In 1978, I already knew “Alison.” I owned a copy of My Aim Is True I’d borrowed from a girl in marching band and never gave back. By then I’d switched my musical allegiance from the peaceful easy feeling of California country-rock to the spiked mohawk anarchy in the UK. I have a distinct memory of driving down Tucson Boulevard in the family Oldsmobile when I heard Ronstadt’s “Alison” on the radio. My reaction was that most singular of American sounds: Hunh. It was like seeing an old acquaintance who’s sporting a radical new haircut. Or like finding out your one weird friend and your secret crush are friends with each other. A curious choice, but kinda cute.
My crush on Linda Ronstadt was no secret. After she became hugely popular I would tell people, with the practiced nonchalance of a serial name-dropper, that my dad used to play basketball with her older brother. It’s true, we lived on the same street as the Ronstadts in Tucson, and it’s true that my dad joined the occasional pickup game with her sibling. Linda’s family lived in a modest ranchlet a half-mile from my family’s cinder-block apartment complex, but I wouldn’t know Peter if he walked in the front door. While I was ruling the tetherball court at Holoway Elementary, Linda had been from Tucson to Tucumcari and beyond, well on the road to superstardom. As an Old Pueblo native, I claim her as a hometown hero, but we’re on a first-name basis in my mind only. Nevertheless, my love for her remains immutable.
My ardor grew stronger when I first saw Linda live, in a homecoming concert of sorts, at the Tucson Community Center in 1976. My mom took me, opting for the mid-priced mezzanine tickets at $5.50 each, but let me rush the stage during the encore. I braved bouncing beach balls and Columbian cannabis for a close-up look at my idol. When she belted “Heatwave,” “That’ll Be the Day,” and “When Will I Be Loved,” I didn’t know those were old songs, I only knew they were her songs.
In a 1980 Playboy interview Linda says, “I have to be emotionally connected to a song or I can't sing it.” She relays an anecdote about a Saturday Night Live cameo appearance in which she backed Gilda Radner on a song about saccharine, and had to imagine life without Tab before she could remember the words.
It begs the question, then, where did Linda find a connection in songs like “Willin” and “Carmelita”? Does anybody really picture her driving a big rig and snorting speed when she sings the Little Feat song? Or on “Carmelita,” can you imagine her “all strung out on heroin,” playing Russian roulette in Echo Park?
I love Linda’s rollicking cover of Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” (SynDrums, FTW!), but when she sings “He picked me up and he threw me down/He said ‘Please don't hurt me Mama’” instead of ‘she picked me up’ and ‘I said’ — well, it just doesn’t make sense. Why would the person throwing down also be afraid of getting hurt? Not to mention the other changes she made to the original, including removing the hint of sadomasochism and other shenanigans on the Sunset Strip. (As an aside, how fun would it have been had Terri Clark, who basically covered Linda’s version, reverted to the original lyrics? My gaydar’s needle, already oscillating into the red, would slam to the right so fast it would break the glass.)
Linda made one minor but significant edit to the lyrics on “Alison.” “I changed it around a little bit in the gender,” she says in a 1978 Rolling Stone interview, “I made it like I heard the girl had run off with some guy. And I was hoping that she would stay away from my particular property.”
To that I say, fair enough. But also, what?
Costello’s lyrics are notable for their wordplay. “Alison” is no exception. At the end of the first verse he sings, I don't know if you were loving somebody/I only know it isn't mine. “Somebody” can be heard as one word or two; the lyrics are full of ambiguity, but the one thing our narrator knows for certain is that Alison isn’t loving his body. And he’s bitter about it.
When Linda changes the line to “I only hope he wasn’t mine,” it fits with the narrative she invented so she could sing the song. Even if that story changed slightly from one interview to another. Is Alison a friend who’s going down the wrong path, or is she an updated Jolene, threatening to run off with Linda’s man? In any case, those two altered words fail to negate the song’s fundamental emotions of heartache, resentment, and regret. It’s interesting how Linda kind of elides the altered words so you might not even catch the change. Perhaps she wasn’t fully committed to it. Or perhaps I’m looking for something that isn’t there.
I just can’t hear “Alison” as a message to a friend, or even a rival. “I’m not gonna get too sentimental, like those other sticky valentines” is not something you’d say to either. “I heard you let that little friend of mine take off your party dress” comes across as sour grapes when sung by Costello—a snide comment made by a wounded lover. But when Linda sings it, ostensibly to a friend, it almost makes her complicit. Friends don’t let friends take off women’s party dresses.
David Sanborn’s saxophone part, which is a magnitude of cheese greater than the guitar flourishes on the original, almost tanks the song. It’s no worse than other soft-rock saxophones of the 70s, though, and I do love that one note that meets Linda’s last crystalline “true.” It gets me right in the feels, even as the rest of the outro slithers away.
Smooth-jazz saxophone notwithstanding, it’s Linda’s voice that redeems this cover. I don’t care if she missed the subtlety and subtext of the song when she “reduced it to friendship,” as she explains in Rolling Stone. I’d prefer if she—and everybody else, for that matter—kept the lyrics as they were written. But for this particular blind spot in my musical pantheon, in the end, the words are immaterial. Linda could sing a song in Pig Latin and still reduce me to tears (“Esperanto, why don’t you come to your senses…”). It’s the sound of her voice, across the decades, that allows me to overlook her lyrical trespasses. Just as I and other queer kids did all those years ago, she found something to connect with in her songs, something that resonated with her own life. And we are the richer for it.
Someday I’ll make one of those crazy conspiracy boards. It’ll have all of Linda’s songs, with yellow Post-it notes on the ones that change the pronouns, and pink for ones that don’t. Ballads will be on one side of the board, upbeat songs on the other. Thumbtacks and string will be employed, until every verse is scrutinized and cross-referenced against the others. Just like that teenager in her bedroom, I’ll pore over lyrics on every inner sleeve of every album, looking for hidden clues, trying to figure out where I fit.

Cheryl Graham circa 1979, in a transitional phase evidenced by black skinny tie and Birkenstocks. Plus cat. Twitter: @FreeTransform