Here’s a thing. REM was a great band. (Are they still a band? If so, they’re a great band.) But REM was a cover band. They covered Big Star, and they did the best they could, bless their hearts. I like REM. I like Big Star better.
There’s a documentary about Big Star on Netflix. If you don’t have a subscription to Netflix, get one. Then watch the Big Star documentary.
Every artist, every group, inhabits at least two places in time. One is the place wherein the person or persons what was doing the recording did the recording. The other is the place when I heard the recording. Or you heard the recording. Or they heard the recording. So, there could be multiple, or infinite places, in time. One of them is always fixed. The other varies depending on where you are right then.
I first listened to Big Star not long out of college. I had ears, but I did not hear. Later, much later, I heard. And there they were, summoning up Memphis in 1973, and the parts that they were summoning up looked pretty much like Nashville in 1983. I was standing with them under the lights of Jumbo Little’s Big Star. That was a place.
So they got their place right and the place I was in when I heard them, really heard them, was right. It’s easy to take a place and time and make it into a time that was right or happy. I’m kind of doing that here. It happens. But I can also give you some empirical evidence that it was right. Not that I’m going to.
Because will proving it to you take me back there? Is back a direction in which I want to go? Or rather, can we look at what was then and see how it might inform what is now?
Maybe that’s what REM was trying to do with “Everybody Hurts.” I think it is a decent attempt to cover “The Ballad of El Goodo,” but it’s not the same thing.