V04-T09 September Song

.....I've used a large number of covers over the course of this compilation series, but this one has nearly half a century between the original and the recording here.

Volume 4: "THE LITTLE BROWN ONES ARE THORAZINE, GEORGE", track 8

• 04:18 "SEPTEMBER SONG" (lyrics: Maxwell Anderson, music: Kurt Weill)
• performed by Lou Reed
• original source: VALP LOST IN THE STARS A&M SP9 5104 (US) 1985
• and my source: VACD LOST IN THE STARS A&M CD5104 (US) 1985(?)

.....If Americans know Kurt Weill at all it's probably for the song "MACK THE KNIFE" from the musical "Threepenny Opera", written in Europe with Bertolt Brecht. When the Nazis began rising to power Weill's productions became targets of their vandalism and he immigrated to the United States in 1935. Soon after, he met Maxwell Anderson. In Anderson, he not only found a new friend in an unfamiliar country, but potentially a prolific collaborator. They each bought a house in an artists' enclave in upstate New York and began working, but Weill was increasingly being offered lucrative work on Hollywood soundtracks he would have been foolish to pass up. He spent the last third of his relatively short life (1900-1950) in America and his only two collaborations with Anderson form bookends to that period. The first musical was "Knickerbocker Holiday"(1938), the source of the song "SEPTEMBER SONG". The second musical was a musical adaption of Alan Paton's "Cry The Beloved Country" that they called "Lost In The Stars"(1949), the source of this album's title track.

.....Producer Hal Willner made something of a cottage industry out of tribute albums, beginning in the early eighties and continuing into the past decade. Following this one and SGT PEPPER KNEW MY FATHER, a non-Willner production using post-punk British musicians in 1987 to recreate the Beatles' album track by track for its twentieth anniversary, there was a flurry of artist tributes on small labels like Communion on which current alt-rock acts acknowledged their (sometimes obvious) debts to then-under-exposed acts like Captain Beefheart, Syd Barrett and the Velvet Underground. After the flurry came the deluge. I have actually lost count of the number of reggae-only tribute albums there are to Pink Floyd (I think it was four when I stopped paying attention). Willner's were almost always superior. He had an uncanny knack for matching just the right performer to the material, usually a performer you never would have thought to consider yourself but who, in retrospect, seems perfect. For instance, on the 1989 Disney tribute STAY AWAKE he paired Sinead O'Connor with "SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME" and Tom Waits with the Seven Dwarves' "HEIGH-HO", both adapted from "Snow White". At the time Lou Reed recorded this he had been working professionally for 20 years (almost 30 if you count the singles he made as a teenager) and almost never recorded covers. (Just after this was an ill-advised remake of "SOUL MAN", but that's rarely heard outside the soundtrack album of the same name.) Whatever possessed Willner to enlist Reed to interpret musical theater was something that can't be adequately described by trite phrases like "thinking outside of the box". It requires not only an intimate familiarity with the material to be covered but also with the panoply of artists available from which to choose (and then persuade to participate).

.....Say, I mentioned a tribute to Disney earlier. There's a whole different kind of tribute coming up next.