Today’s playlist celebrates the November 13 birthdays of Booker T., Buffalo Springfield’s Neil Young, Blue Öyster Cult’s Buck Dharma, Bikini Kill/Le Tigre’s Kathleen Hanna, Darlene Edwards (a/k/a Jo Stafford), Hot Chocolate’s Errol Brown, Brian Hyland, Bay City Rollers’ Les McKeown, The Mello-Kings’ Jerry Scholl, Tevin Campbell, and Grace Kelly; and the November 13 birthdays of Timmy Thomas, The Teddy Bears’ Carol Connors, Cass McCombs, Onyx’s Sonny Seeza, and Idris Muhammad.
Inspired by the November 12 birthdays of Neil Young, Bay City Rollers’ Les McKeown, Blue Oyster Cult’s Buck Dharma, Booker T. Jones, Hot Chocolate’s Errol Brown, Brian Hyland, and Tevin Campbell.
Around ten years ago, while I was working at Warner Music, we were trying to think of catalogue projects that may engage Prince. One of my suggestions was a two-disc set in which one disc consisted of Prince songs recorded by others and the second disc was Prince’s demo versions of songs made famous by others.
Two weeks ago Warner released on Tidal Prince’s Originals, demo versions of songs Prince
wrote that were recorded by other acts. (It hits others streaming services
tomorrow, with CD and vinyl releases coming as well.) I’m not saying Warner
took my idea without giving me credit; I’d be surprised if I were the only
person who thought of it.
Today’s Tunes du Jour playlist is the concept of the other
disc of my proposed set – songs Prince wrote or co-wrote performed by other
acts. It’s not exactly what I envisioned that disc to be, as many (MANY!!) of
the songs I would choose are not available on Spotify. There’s all the Paisley
Park material that reverted to Prince (Vanity 6, Apollonia 6, Mazarati, Jill Jones,
The Family, Ingrid Chavez, etc.), as well as commercially-released covers that
for whatever reason are missing, by artists such as Foo Fighters, Robyn, Jesus
and Mary Chain, Mavis Staples, Eels, and Living Colour.
Even with those limitations, not a bad list. Enjoy!
