FOOTLOOSE REIMAGINED Doveman
Aug 21, 2008
Kenny Loggins-powered soundtrack to Kevin Bacon teen flick finds life anew.
BY CHRISTIAN KIEFER
In some ways, death is the same for us all. It equalizes us as human beings, sending us to our knees in anguish and despair and despite the constancy of death around us we are so often bereft of the ability to understand it.
One assumes that it was much the same for Gabriel Greenberg when, as a young child, his teenage sister died tragically. There must have been years of confusion at her absence and as he grew up, illustrating some album covers for his friend Thomas Bartlett and entering graduate school, he continued to hold the small cup of loss that had entered him the moment that his sister had departed.
Then he discovered one of his sister's old cassette tapes: the soundtrack to the 1984 film Footloose. It was like a key that opened his sister's world to him. As Greenberg himself writes: "I couldn't stop listening: it was a portrait of ‘80s love, desire, pain, freedom, and frenzy; of being a teenager in a time of change."
Greenberg asked his friend Thomas Bartlett-aka Doveman-to rerecord the entire album. Perhaps it was a way to re-envision his sister's life, to bring it somehow into his own life, to bring her back to him in some way that was useful or significant.
Bartlett did re-record the album-all of it-and it is something to behold, particularly when one considers the source material (Greenberg, incidentally, is credited as "producer" on Bartlett's new version). 1984 was a year that the pop charts were dominated by names like Culture Club, Phil Collins, Lionel Richie, and Duran Duran. Footloose represented the big money studio dreck that had come to dominate the culture machines of the entire decade. The fertile mid-1980s underground was burbling somewhere deep under the surface but if one tuned in the radio one only heard Kenny Loggins' irritating yelp about, of all things, the need to dance. The Replacements' Let It Be, the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime, and Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade all appeared in 1984 as well, but what role could they play in Reagan's America except as reactionary material to exactly the kind of mainstream fodder that Footloose represented. What other position was possible for art?
Having made that point, it must also be acknowledged-nay admitted!-that despite this writer's obvious snake hatred of the mainstream culture he grew up in, it's undeniable that those songs do have a tidal pull on his soul. It's likely this way for many of us: Good or bad, the mainstream music of our teen years forms the backdrop to much of our lives regardless of our desire to have it be otherwise. So many high school dances with blaring top 40 music we despised, knowing all the while that our claims that we abstained from dancing (or from attending at all) because the music was so awful was merely a feeble excuse for a serious lack of teenage courage.
What Doveman does with this material is something akin to a reinterpretation via outsider art (even though Bartlett himself is an in-demand session keyboardist; far from being an outsider to the music scene). His voice is a high, warbly creature just on the verge of being out of key but never actually dropping, much like Mark Linkous' breathy quietude on his Sparklehorse albums. With Doveman, Bartlett's breathing is nearly as loud as the singing itself and the end result is a breathy, lo-fi tenderness that might drive the listener to want to put on the pumping dance music of the original just to get the blood flowing again.
The listener might want to do that, but he or she likely won't because Bartlett, somehow, manages to pull it off. With Loggins' title track he takes the lyrics and dispenses entirely with the music, reimagining the song as a sad piano ballad, a form that works amazingly well and accomplishes much of what Mark Kozelek does with his reimagining of AC/DC classics as slow folk ballads. In fact, the tempo throughout the album is slow, but there are enough instances of drums and rhythm and occasional blasts of noise to keep things interesting. Case in point: "The Girl Gets Around," originally recorded by Sammy Hagar for the soundtrack, which Bartlett has turned into a Chris Whitley-style dirge grind.
The best covers (if that's what these are) accomplish what Doveman seems to do with ease: revealing the hidden beauty of the source material, uncovering something new about a song or a melody or a lyric, bringing something new to the listener's ears. If that can be accomplished with source material that the listener has heard hundreds of times, that's quite an accomplishment, and especially so if the listener actively dislikes the original (which I imagine to be the case for many, many contemporary listeners of Footloose). The breathy tenderness might not be every listener's cup of tea; consider yourself warned.
The best part of the story is that the album is not for sale. Doveman and his label Brassland Music (www.brassland.org) had been offering it as a free download until quite recently when they received a cease and desist order and had no choice but to remove it, proof that the major labels still behave much as they did back in 1984 (Sony Is Watching You!).
However, you can still hear the whole thing as a stream at Doveman's official website. Do so before it's gone.
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