HINDU LOVE GODS - Hindu Love Gods (1990)

Released in 1990, but actually recorded on a whim by Zevon and the non-Stipe R.E.M. guys during the Sentimental Hygiene sessions.  If I'm a little cursory in my exploration of Hindu Love Gods, well, the material kinda demands it.  The quip about this record is that they recorded it in less time than it takes to listen to, or something to that effect.  So it's entirely possible that I'll spend more time and effort composing this post then went into recording Hindu Love Gods.  Not everyone involved even agreed to have the session released to the public before it happened.  So... yeah.  I'm never tremendously enthusiastic about covers records in which I don't know most of the originals, but let's dig shallowly in.

Track One:  "Walkin' Blues" [Robert Johnson]

It's worth noting that most of these songs are blues standards.  My knowledge of the blues is mostly confined to the fact that I lived in Chicago for about ten years and had a phase of dropping by the clubs down the street.  For me, speaking from a place of ignorance, the full-band electric sort of blues (Hindu Love Gods recordings are much closer to Chicago-style blues than to Delta blues) is the sort of music for which recorded versions rarely match up to the live experience.  You've got just a few standardized chords, a very standardized way of composing the verses, repetitious parts that bore on record but probably kill live, and the masters of the style can use that simple toolbox to make something special whilst the rest of us... really can't.  Anyway, I quite enjoy Chicago blues... in a live setting, ideally while drunk.  But beyond that... place of ignorance.  My understanding is that in general, the blues was a very cool thing to be into if you were a young adult in the early '60s.  So it's not hard to imagine where Zevon got it.  

Since I'm mostly writing about Zevon here, "Walkin' Blues" highlights that Zevon's not a bad blues singer.  His voice is appropriately raw and ragged.  He's got an instinctive sense of how to sing the phrases, when to go for the high note, when to throw in a little whoop or ad-lib.  The fit makes total sense but it's still not something I would have thought of had he not recorded this record (and thrown in Bo Diddley songs into his live sets).

Track Two:  "Travelin' Roadside Blues" [Robert Johnson]*

Same basic approach as with the other Robert Johnson cover; better riff but less going on musically.  Kind of a nothing song.  The part when it seems like it should be over and then comes stomping back is fun enough... same few notes over and over, but I bet it'd kill live.  I don't understand the fade-out during a verse.

Track Three:  "Raspberry Beret" [Prince & The Revolution]

Well, this is something different.  A cover of a nearly new song by a bunch of musicians from a completely different part of the musical world.  I don't know if it should work, but damned if it doesn't rule. 

A truly great cover brings out what's great about the original but puts some new spin on it.  I adore the reinterpretation of the song's melody as a hefty yet quirky R.E.M. style riff; could listen to that all day.  Zevon knows he can't project effortless cool like Prince could circa 1985, but he projects... well, Zevon-ness instead.  Ragged intensity in a nice comfortable baritone.  Total commitment to the bit.  The original song's affable, chill sleaziness is transformed into a kind of triumphant drunken sleaziness.  Lines like "he didn't like my kind" just have a totally different feel coming from our man here.  Being a bit of a rockist, I have toyed with claiming that I actually prefer the Hindu Love Gods cover.  What can I say, I like a good electric guitar riff.  I don't know if I can quite go that far; I listened to the Prince version a bunch before putting my hot take into writing, and it's pretty unimpeachable.  Suffice to say, I find the Hindu Love Gods take to be a perfect complement.  Exactly what you want in a cover.

Let's be honest, "Raspberry Beret" is the one and only reason anyone remembers the Hindu Love Gods record.  No discussion of the Zevon discography would be complete without this song.

Strange choice not to include the third verse.  Wouldn't lines like "if I had the chance to do it all again, I wouldn't change a stroke" fit Zevon like a glove? 

Track Four:  "Crosscut Saw" [Tommy McClennan]

Peter gets to have a little fun with the percussion.  The song is kinda there; decent groove, not something I expect to ever get a real desire to listen to.  If I'm listening to a blues song and noting that the lyrics seem unusually bad/dumb for the genre... well, that's probably not the best.  At least it's short.

Track Five:  "Junko Pardner" [Bob Shad by way of James Wayne]

I like the shuffling drive.  I've been emphasizing the Hindu Love Gods record for how atypical it is for Zevon, but who'd have thunk this coming from R.E.M.?  Since I wasn't there, I've never drawn as much of a distinction as those who were between R.E.M.'s indie years and their major label years.  They always sounded like R.E.M. and nobody else.  Yet I think it's worth noting that they started out life as a really weird band.

Track Six:  "Mannish Boy" [Muddy Waters]

At its worst, the blues can devolve into just "da-DA-da-dum" over and over for seven minutes paired with atonal bravado from the vocalist.  Well, this version of "Mannish Boy" is something like seven minutes long.  I get that everything actually was loose and freeform in the studio and that the standards are standards for a reason, but I feel like this song has maybe more baggage than the group is really capable of handling in a gloprified jam session.  They can't lean into the racial angle, they can't speak to whatever the issue was between Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley...  I vote we leave attempts at covering "Mannish Boy" to the professionals. 

Track Seven:  "Wang Dang Doodle" [Willie Dixon]

Such a fun little riff, punched up here by the harmonica part.  I feel like this particular rendition of the song is raised by Mike Mills going to town - I feel like he never gets to do that.  Sadly, I feel WDD is let down by Zevon going a little too shticky with the vocals.  Overall, I dunno.  Look, I've gone to the extensive research lengths of one listen/relisten each to some more famous versions of "Wang Dang Doodle," and this thorough investigation has led me to conclude that Howlin' Wolf's take on the song hits hard and gets to the point with no fluff, whilst Koko Taylor's version has an androgyny to it that I really enjoy.  Compared to those, Hindu Love Gods finish a pretty distant third.  It's fine, though.  It's fun.  Needs more harmonica!

Track Eight:  "Battleship Chains" [The Woods]

I believe BC is the newest song covered on the record.  That's one catchy chorus.  Especially when they do the "fade out the band for the first few bars of a late chorus" thing.  Guitar tone is a the closest that Hindu Love Gods gets to what I expect from early R.E.M.

Track Nine:  "I'm A One Woman Man" [Johnny Horton]

Very pleasant song that's over before one can formulate many deep thoughts.  I like it.  And I feel like as a low key folksy/twangy number, IAOWM is positioned perfectly on the record to serve as a bridge from the big blues-rock/just regular rock sound to closing with a Woody Guthrie song, so, well played there. 

"I'll never love another, even if I can."  Sure, Warren, you're definitely the stuff of a monogamous life partner.  I bet he used that one a lot.

Track Ten:  "Vigilante Man" [Woody Guthrie] 

Vigilantes have a lot of different connotations in different sorts of stories, but here they're going for the mythic, romantic of the hero of a certain type of western; they nail it.  I like the melody that Zevon finds to carve out of what was quite a sparse tune originally.

Just to show my musical background a bit more, on my first listen to "Vigilante Man" I spent trying to figure out what the tune reminded me of.  Then I realized that my main exposure to offbeat guy-with-a-guitar-often-straining-for-notes folk songs mostly come from Beck's youthful dabblings in the form.  Fun to actually, in a roundabout way, hear the sort of thing he was riffing on.

Overall thoughts

- To the extent that I can make a narrative out of what's essentially a jam session that happened to be mic'd up, I guess it'd be this:  Where Sentimental Hygiene occasionally tried to convince us that Zevon was still a totally unhinged ball of id but wasn't very successful in doing so, Hindu Love Gods does actually capture that feeling on uncontainable raw energy.  Listening to this record, I definitely still hear the guy who yells about hurling himself against the wall.

- It's weird that I have in my head that Zevon is a master of covers, given that outside of his work with Hindu Love Gods, I think his studio records contain a total of like five covers, every, and one of them is the cringeworthy "Iko-Iko."  He just knew exactly what to do with "A Certain Girl" and "Raspberry Beret."  I wonder where he picked it up.  

- Gods ends with banter that they left in, just to show how lo-fi and relaxed everyone is being.  "Is that the end?"  "It is now!"  I gotta admit, I find that a little precious, although maybe that's exposure to several more decades' worth of it talking here.

- I don't have the bandwidth to write about the "Gonna Have A Good Time Tonight"/"Narrator" single, whose existence I discovered just now.  Can't say I'm impressed, but that's one listen.  I can justify the omission either by saying that if Zevon just played keys and didn't sing, then a song doesn't belong in my writing project... but more to the point, if the guys wanted to their tossed-off side projects to get entries in some guy's lightly trafficked blog forty years later, they should've made them a major release.

- Don't let the relatively low rating make it seem like I didn't enjoy my time with Hindu Love Gods.  But other than "Reaspberry Beret" it's kind of the definition of an inessential project.  As such, it won't go onto my running list to be compared with "normal" studio records.

Favorite track:  "Raspberry Beret"

Runner up:  "Vigilante Man"

Least favorite track:  "Mannish Boy"

Rating:  2.5/5

On to Transverse City whenever I get around to it!

*Just to emphasize the whole "place of ignorance" thing, I did a brief double-take at the "going down to Rosedale" verse, since I hadn't realized that this song was the source of that particular stanza used by Cream in "Crossroads," a song that's otherwise derived from Johnson's "Cross Road Blues."