In the 1950s, the practice of an artist or band covering a song associated with another performer was commonplace as labels rushed covers into the marketplace in order to compete with the original cut on the charts to lessen its impact. This initial piratical motivation behind cover songs has faded away and replaced by different impulses: an act of tribute to the original artist or as a way to jumpstart one’s own creativity.
The most engaging and fascinating covers draw from the latter category. Not only does the artist performing the cover make the song their own, but utterly transforms it into something that could have only come from them. A few examples of radical adaptation are now deemed as classics, including Talking Heads inserting their distinct herky-jerky groove into “Take Me to the River”; Cowboy Junkies slowing down “Sweet Jane” so that it becomes a smokey, sexy meditation; and Johnny Cash inviting listeners to a painful living funeral with “Hurt.” Arguably the most famous groundbreaking cover is John Coltrane instigating a revolution with his take on “My Favorite Things.”
Back in 2009, the musician Beck started a series of album-length covers, calling it his Record Club. He explained that it was “an informal meeting of various musicians to record an album in a day. The album chosen to be reinterpreted is used as a framework.” The overriding Record Club rule was that there was no pre-production, rehearsal, or arranging beforehand. Everything was conceived of and recorded on the spot. Albums covered by Beck and a rotating crew of musicians were The Velvet Underground & Nico by The Velvet Underground, Leonard Cohen’s debut album, Skip Spence’s Oar, and Kick by INXS. Musicians who participated in these cover albums included Nigel Godrich, Devendra Banhart, Leslie Feist, Jamie Lidell, the guys from Wilco, St. Vincent, and many more. Record Club sessions were filmed and one song a week from each album were released on Beck’s website.
In a 2010 Pitchfork interview, Beck said that the genesis of the Record Club was his lack of record contract at the time and that he had a desire to work with a wide range of artists, stating:
“I’ve known and toured with a lot of these bands for years, but there’s this almost unspoken law that you’re not supposed to interact musically. It’s funny. I’ve even ridden on tour buses with bands and there’s no musical interaction. There was a point about eight years ago where I realized, “Why don’t we take advantage of this?” Seeing something like Rock and Roll Circus or The Last Waltz or scenes from Motown culture or different golden periods of music, there was always an interaction happening with bands playing together or writing songs for each other. I may be wrong, but I feel like that might have something to do with why music was so good in those periods– because there was such an intimate interaction.”
The last offering of the Record Club was certainly the most bizarre selection of the entire series: a take on Yanni’s 1994 blockbuster Live at the Acropolis. The second best-selling music concert video of all time (behind only the video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller), it presents Yanni and his band alongside the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performing 11 of his classical/jazz/New Age compositions inside the Acropolis. This dramatic backdrop alongside the narratives of Yanni returning to his home country and financing the entire endeavor himself fueled the success of Live at the Acropolis, buoyed especially by PBS stations seemingly airing it on repeat throughout the ‘90s.
Live at the Acropolis was a departure for the Record Club, a swerve from the rock-based core of the other selections, though not without precedence in Beck’s body of work. Yanni gets a shout-out on 2005’s Guero at the very end of “Qué Onda Guero” as a voice says, “Let’s go to Cap’n Cork, they have the new Yanni cassette.” The Quietus asked Beck in 2014 about the decision to cover Live at the Acropolis and his Yanni fascination:
“With Record Club we did do some kind of, uh, cornerstone records, these undisputed great classics, and I liked the idea of it not being about paying tribute to these great records… I wanted it to be more about musicians interacting in a spontaneous manner. My fascination [with Yanni] started with seeing clips of his on public television in the 90s. He did these concerts and it was this kind of grandiose, strident performance with a big orchestra and these big banks of synthesisers… It was kind of the antithesis of everything that was happening in my area of music. It was sort of the extreme other end of things, which I find interesting.”
Beck’s key collaborator for the Record Club take on Live at the Acropolis was Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth fame. Beck and Moore had known each other for years, but, to that point, had never recorded together, though there was this “interview” that Moore conducted of Beck for MTV’s 120 Minutes just before the release of the latter’s Mellow Gold in 1994:
Coming from the likes of these two jokers, who appear to be incredibly high on MTV, it’s fair to speculate before listening if the Record Club cover of Live at the Acropolis would be a put-on. There’s certainly opportunity as Yanni’s concert video offers plenty of easy targets, namely distinctive ‘90’s apparel and stylings such as Yanni’s flowy tuxedo top with no jacket, his single black band as a tie, the can’t-miss-it mustache, and the abounding hair. Despite the striking Acropolis setting all around them, there’s a video screen hovering over the audience and the stage, cycling through a series of screensaver-esque graphics, including a supposed-to-be mystical image of rotating interlocking rings. Oooooo!
Rather than the mostly faithful renditions heard throughout the rest of the Record Club catalog, the cover of Live at the Acropolis by Beck, Moore, and company is a study in deconstruction. Some tracks feature motifs from the original music, some sample Yanni’s voice, while most sound nothing like Yanni’s work, save for perhaps a whisper of a thought. Beck and his accomplices use Live at the Acropolis as a jumping off place to inspire new music. “Santorini” incorporates the central piano riff from Yanni’s piece but centers itself on a Moore vocal part with lyrics about fire, heat, and roasted pigs. Tortoise joins Beck and Moore for two tracks to create a mishmash of sounds and jarring rhythms. It seems like Beck purposefully doesn’t want Tortoise to break into a patented Tortoise groove. Instead, the two covers with Tortoise sound remarkably similar to Beck’s early career collage experiments from Stereopathetic Soulmanure. For example, the Record Club interpretation of “Keys to the Imagination” is built around a sample of Yanni stating, “I don’t like a lot of noise around,” and then the musicians proceed to put a lot of noise around Yanni, mostly courtesy of Moore and Tortoise’s Jeff Parker (Aside: Have Thurston Moore and Jeff Parker ever worked together before or since? We deserve a full album collaboration!).
The highlight of the Record Club’s take on Live at the Acropolis is the final track, “Reflections Of Passion.” The Live at the Acropolis version of the song possesses a gentle, melodious, pastoral feel with lush, sweeping strings that builds to a crescendo of trumpets and big drums. After the peak, Yanni makes a big show of handing the piano part over to a woman sporting enormous earrings. He then walks over to a bank of synthesizers to play a new melody, which sounds like a loud, crying harmonica. The performance comes to a close with smiles all around. None of this music is necessarily bad. It’s pretty, inoffensive, and instantly forgettable. Yanni’s “Reflections of Passion” is perfectly fine background music for hotel waiting rooms and elevators; or a lounge in that same hotel with furniture that looks comfortable but isn’t and a fireplace with a fire that looks like it’s giving off heat but doesn’t.
The Record Club version of “Reflections of Passion” is a radical adaptation as Beck, Moore, and the other musicians transform the track into something entirely new:
The song begins with Moore strumming his guitar. Moore is famous for his extremist guitar tunings, and it’s hard to tell where this one falls on the matrix, if it’s one of his go-tos or if it’s his first time ever using this particular tuning. Regardless, the guitar part is instantly compelling, containing both melodic and drone elements, in other words classic Thurston Moore guitar. Moreover, he doesn’t stick to one riff but cycles through different parts, improvising runs, discovering new variations, and pushing the song into strange, unexplored territories. His solo guitar can serve as an entire band.
Soon, Beck joins in to sing along with Moore’s undulating guitar. Of course, there’s no singing or lyrics in the Yanni original so this is another new component to this realization of “Reflections of Passion.” In the same 2010 Pitchfork interview, Beck commented on Moore’s “improvised vocals,” saying that the heat that Moore sings about in “Santorini” and the other Record Club songs are “one-take vocals.” Furthermore, Beck says that “he didn’t write anything down. That’s just straight out of the mind of Thurston. I’ve done a lot of that when I’m frustrated, but it probably doesn’t come out line-for-line like his does.”
Beck must be channeling Moore’s improvisatory vocal creations during “Reflections of Passion.” There are snippets of phrases with stray yet similar ideas: “No voice with outcome”; “No more noise without passion”; “What do we try to forget?”; and “We have reflected nothing against nothing.” At times, Beck seems to be commenting on Moore’s guitar: “All flatline” and “Eclipse the night.” Though everything sounds made up on the spot, most importantly, Beck understands the essential factor is how the sound of the words he sings work in relation to Moore’s guitar. The faraway effect on Beck’s voice adds further mystery to the vocal-and-guitar combination. Despite the spontaneous feel of Beck’s words, they come back to the theme of the Yanni song title: “No reflection of passion / I heard it in your voice / I heard it in the noise.” By the end, Beck simply repeats the phrase “No passion” a few times, serving as a reminder to himself and the listener about the importance of dedication and intensity in music.
At around the 3:00 minute mark, drums and bass burst in and the band moves into a gorgeous, surging Velvet Underground/Sonic Youth groove with Moore’s guitar waling away and Beck singing “You’ve got to notice.” Just as this gathering of kinetic force seems like it might be unconquerable, everything stops and it’s just Moore’s guitar and Beck’s voice working in tandem. There’s another stop and the guitar shifts into a new deviation on the musical theme with the bass and drum at full intensity and Beck’s wordless vocals soaring into the stratosphere. There’s another break, returning then to Moore’s guitar all by itself again. This unrelenting guitar force finally relents, sounding like a generator winding down, losing power, and bringing “Reflections of Passion” to a conclusion.
Are there any similarities in the two versions of “Reflections of Passion”? Perhaps the stops and starts of Moore’s guitar are supposed to reflect the different sections of the Yanni original, maybe even aping the moment when Yanni hands the reins to the large-earringed woman. But in this adaptation, Beck, Moore, and the other musicians have fundamentally shifted the perspective of Yanni’s song.
In an instantly classic scene from Steven Spielberg’s 2022 film The Fabelmans, Sammy, the young, wannabe film director main character, meets the masterful John Ford, director of over 130 films, including Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Played memorably by David Lynch, this curmudgeonly, grumpy old man Ford with lipstick on his cheeks takes as long as possible to light a cigar and decides to give this young buck a lesson. He tries to warn him about the dangers of the “picture business.” When he sees Sammy won’t be deterred, Ford asks, “Whattaya know about art, kid?” and asks Sammy to describe a landscape painting hanging in his office. As Sammy begins to talk about the men on horseback, Ford interprets him and yells, “No! Where’s the horizon?” Sammy says it’s at the bottom. Ford then directs him to go to another painting in the office and once again asks him where the horizon is. Sammy says that it’s at the top. Finally, Ford gets impatient or takes pity on Sammy and tells him the secret to his own filmmaking and, in his mind, all of art: “Now remember this. When the horizon is at the bottom, it’s interesting. When the horizon is at the top, it’s interesting. When the horizon is in the middle, it’s boring as shit. Now. Good luck to you and get the fuck out of my office!”
The Record Club’s act of adapting “Reflections of Passion” is about moving the horizon line away from the middle of the Live at the Acropolis version. This alteration widens the perspective of the Yanni song, showing the full expanse and range of what it can be. Beck recognizes it when he refers to Moore’s guitar as “all flatline.” The Record Club ensemble converts the song from a pleasant dalliance to something of interest, something of value, a song that can be listened to endlessly, not because it’s indistinguishable but because it is ceaselessly fascinating.
The radical adaptation of Live at the Acropolis is the last installment of the Record Club to date. Most likely prompted by their collaboration on the Yanni cover, one of the next projects for both Beck and Moore was the former producing the latter’s 2011 album Demolished Thoughts. The concept for this album is apparent on first listen: it’s Moore in ‘70s singer/songwriter mode à la Beck’s Sea Change. Embellished by violin and harp, Moore’s voice and acoustic guitar are right out in front. The songs are good; the production is top notch; the sound is immaculate. Demolished Thoughts is a pretty album but, give or take one or two moments, forgettable. It’s as though Beck and Moore forgot about the horizon and put it right in the middle. To put a fine point on it, they made a Yanni record.
In fact, this assessment could be applied to all of Beck’s solo work since the Record Club. After Demolished Thoughts, Beck continued working in the same zone with his own material on 2014’s Morning Phases. Like the Moore album, it was pleasant, soothing and sounded like Sea Change 2.0, but lacked the desperation and, well, passion of the earlier album. Although it won Grammys for Best Rock Album and Album of the Year, this industry recognition seemed to be acknowledging how much they really loved the 2002 record. Beck’s next two albums — 2017’s Colors and 2019’s Hyperspace — were sonic departures from the Sea Change sound, but instantly forgettable (despite an absolutely boss album cover design for the latter). The music felt deliberate rather than light; all head and no heart. This work is well made, but inoffensive and uninspired; the same kind of criticisms that could be lobbed at a big target like Yanni. If the act of covering other artists for the Record Club series was supposed to be an exercise to jolt Beck into inspiring new work, then it was a failed experiment. It’s harsh to say, but Beck has been stuck in the middle horizon since that time. Perhaps it’s telling that Beck no longer features the Record Club on his own website anymore. The “making of” videos for each album are widely accessible on YouTube, but it’s as if Beck has turned his back on the project.
What shouldn’t be forgotten is the Record Club version of “Reflections of Passion.” It stands amongst the best examples of a cover as radical adaptation. The participants took a Yanni song as a starting place and cajoled each other into a voyage into the flatline, subsuming all force and energy, and entered into a new plane of musical existence. Beck needs to return to that musical space again and stare into the void of “no passion” to inspire new ways of operating and to find how to put the horizon line of his music at the top or at the bottom.
Recliner Notes 
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