Various Artists
Crash Course for the Ravers: A Tribute to the Songs of David Bowie
Undercover Records
Release Date: 1996
Like Neil Young, Patti Smith and yes, even Cheap Trick, David Bowie's alternative rebirth is complete.
Ever since Bowie once again overhauled his image as part of a tour with angst-monger Trent Reznor, budding bands have realized their debt to the incredibly durable Bowie. Now that alt-rock superstar Trent has paid his dues to The Man Formerly Known As Ziggy Stardust, it's time for the young and the loud to put flowers at Bowie's altar.
On Crash Course for the Ravers: A Tribute to the Songs of David Bowie, 14 bands do just that, and with pretty impressive results. On these punked-up covers of Bowie classics, '70s songs take on a '90s edge. But there's also something confusing in the whole concept. Wasn't punk rock a reaction to the showmanship, the hype and the glamour of the mega-bands of the disco generation? Didn't fights used to break out between leather-clad punks and skinny, effeminate white Brits like Bowie? What the hell is going on?
The kids on Crash Course for the Ravers are more than happy to tell you. In fact, over the course of the album it becomes pretty clear that Bowie helped spawn a lot of what we listen to today.
Tree People, for example, walks the line between punk and metal on their searing cover of "Andy Warhol," while Capsize 7 aims to confuse with a rendition of "Queen Bitch" that marvelously twists a Bowie number into a Velvet Underground tune. In the Bowie spirit, the Dambuilders provide a hefty dose of sexual tension with their boy-girl call-and-response on "Boys Keep Swinging," and Magnetic Fields' brooding take on "Heroes" flows so naturally that you may become convinced that David Bowie really was the first gothic rocker after all.
The key to the album's success is that it knows when to stop and where not to go. No one even attempts "Ziggy Stardust," the definitive and unsurpassable cover version already pulled off by Bauhaus years ago. And Golden Delicious, charged with reworking "Suffragette City," takes a daunting task and performs it with brilliant results. No one -- not even if they have green hair and a rusty safety pin through their septum -- can match Bowie's snarl on the original, so Golden Delicious takes an entirely different tact, turning the song into an acid-bluegrass number complete with fiddle. It's a brilliant cover -- true to the spirit of the original despite its drastically different dynamics. I only wish Undercover Records had found someone brave enough to give "Let's Dance" a shot as well.
Janel Jurosz (a.k.a. J. Hell) exercises similar restraint on her version of "Moonage Daydream." While the Bowie original is driven by spacy atmospherics, Jurosz gives the song a pretty acoustic sheen. But her floating vocals, harmonizing with themselves through the magic of modern technology, give the song a suitably lunar quality.
Crash Course for the Ravers is a remarkable effort, and it's hard to imagine how a larger label with the budget to hire some real star power could do much better (except to axe Spurge's sludgy cover of "Width of a Circle"). Perhaps the greatest tribute to the album is that it works both as a tribute and as an album you can listen to beginning to end. Your parting thought almost has to be that David Bowie was one damn good songwriter.
-- Chris Schwartz
schwartz@outersound.com
