Auditory Hallucination?
Can someone please tell me if I hallucinated this?
I could swear that sometime in the late ’60s, a folk-rock group or solo artist recorded a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” with electric (maybe twelve-string) guitar, prominent bassline, drums — everything you’d expect would pulverize such a delicate melody and lyric…except, it didn’t. Somehow, it actually worked.
Does anyone else remember this record? Can anyone tell me the name of the singer or group?
Or am I remembering a record that never existed?
June 11th, 2006 at 7:26 PM
there were several versions- the first rock version was by Fairport Convention – and it is probably the version that you’re thinking of. Spanky and Our Gang also did a version, as did a few others.
Do you need to know what CD to find the fairport convention version on?
June 11th, 2006 at 8:01 PM
Tower Records has a pretty good song search feature on their website, with 30 second samples from many albums. “Suzanne” is a vague search term, so a lot of these won’t be covers of the Cohen song, but check here for a starting point (including several of the Fairport Convention version). You can go back and limit by genre, year or other options. You might also want to check eMusic.com, a pretty good music download site ($10 for 40 songs a month, straight mp3 with no DRM, good search engine and sample clips).
June 11th, 2006 at 9:18 PM
My girlfriend, a Cohen fan, tells me that Neil Diamond did a cover of Suzanne that’s not half bad. Is that it?
June 11th, 2006 at 11:02 PM
This page has a table of every artist who’s ever done a cover of any Leonard Cohen song, what song they covered, and when:
http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/covlist.html
There seem to be over sixty entries for Suzanne…
June 13th, 2006 at 12:30 AM
>> My girlfriend, a Cohen fan, tells me that Neil Diamond did a cover of Suzanne that’s not half bad. Is that it? << No, thank god. (I didn't want to have to admit there was a Neil Diamond record I liked.) He gives the song his typical Mrs. Butterworth treatment.
June 28th, 2006 at 2:40 AM
As StevenR sez, probably the Fairport Convention version, on their compilation Heyday. A version I heard long before encountering the original, which left me to mutter, “This guy doesn’t sound at all like Sandy Denny and Ian Matthews.”