Betsey and Harry had the kind of hi-fi set-up that involved loud-speakers all over the place, so you could hear the percussion from here and the strings from there. All that Betsey and Harry ever used it for, however, was off-colour stories and Presley. To be able to hear off-colour stories and Presley from several sides of the room at once did not seem quite worth the expense necessary to make this possible. (18-19)

A blip is a combination of 1) a song and 2) a short message that accompanies it. The way you create a blip is to first search for a song that you want to hear (or a song that you want your listeners to hear), then add a short message (under 150 characters), finally you submit it. Submitting a blip is also referred to as “blipping”, so from here on out, when you read “he blipped my favorite track” it means “he submitted a blip that had my favorite song attached”.

In the first sentence, a blip is defined as a song plus a comment. Hence the example in the last sentence should read something like “he submitted a blip that included my favorite song”. The song is not attached to the blip, it’s one of two constituent parts. The example as written says “he submitted a [song plus a comment] that had my favorite song attached”.

One could, of course, leave the comment field blank, but there would still be a song plus a comment of zero length making up the blip.

Dear Randy:

I just listened to your Sept 16 Vinyl Tap show “Revolver Reloaded”. I was born in 1966, so I can’t say I remember much about how Revolver was initially received, but it’s been one of my favourite albums since I discovered it when I was 12. I really enjoyed listening to the show, and I thought the format of playing the original followed by lesser-known covers was a lot of fun.

I have to say I agree with you that most of the covers you played ranged from boring to insipid. However, I have to quibble with you on your criteria. Maybe I am misinterpreting your comments, but you seemed to say that the covers you didn’t like were, generally speaking, not enough like the originals. You stated a number of times that the songs didn’t have the spirit or the energy of the originals, that it wasn’t a good idea to change the tempo or mess with Paul’s melody.

The key to a good cover is to make the song your own. An angry song can become a sad song, fast can become slow, melodies and even lyrics can change, as long as the artist doing the cover is able to add something or create something new and interesting. Jimi Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower is a perfect example of a genius covering a genius. The song is radically different from Dylan’s original, but Jimi is able to find things in that song that know one else could have found. The Violent Femmes do an awesomely quirky version of Do You Really Want to Hurt Me, Sonic Youth bend Get Into the Groove almost beyond recognition, and both are examples of outstanding musicians making interesting work out of formulaic crap.

And it seems to me that the cover artists you played generally understand this. They tried, in some cases too hard, to make the songs different and new. The problem wasn’t that they weren’t enough like the Beatles, it was that in most cases, they were unable to wrest the song from the Beatles’ grip. It’s relatively easy to make a song different, but another thing entirely to bring those differences to life. The bands you played couldn’t make us forget the original, couldn’t make us feel that what they were doing wasn’t somehow wrong. Which I guess isn’t really that far from where you were at.

Thanks, again, for a great show.

Peter Zimmerman
Windsor, Ontario

There you have it. I’ll update here if I get a reply.