Anyone Who’s Ever Had A Dream

Another Velvet Underground on Sunday post today. In 1988 Toronto’s Cowboy Junkies rescued Sweet Jane from the countless butcherings it had received at the hands of the man who wrote it. Their album The Trinity Sessions was recorded in a church and somewhere in that building the people involved and the church’s natural echo and reverb summoned up something magical. Margo Timmins’ voice, her brother Michael’s guitar and the rest of the band, all gathered around a single mic, recast Sweet Jane in the mould of the 1969 Live version rather than the Loaded one, retrieving the earlier lyrics and the ‘Heavenly wine and roses/seem to whisper to me when you smile…’ section (some lyric sites have this line as ‘heavenly widened roses’ but I’ve always heard the former and that’s what I’m sticking with). Lou Reed later said that Cowboy Junkies had made his favourite version. Mine too.

Sweet Jane

Numbers Add Up To Nothing

Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions album was one of those records that came out of nowhere and obsessed people for a while. A friend of mine and myself listened to little else for what seemed like ages. The follow up, The Caution Horses, wasn’t too bad either but it missed the church that the previous album was recorded in. This accordion led version of Neil Young’s Powderfinger is good in all the right places.

In 2004/5ish my brother-in-law’s band (then called Bocca) played above a bar in Leicester (The Lamplighters I think). Long after the evening and gig had finished three of the band and myself were standing at the bar talking and we decided, seeing as the gear was still set up, to play an impromptu version of Powderfinger there and then to an audience of the barman and three bikers who’d surely ended up in the wrong bar. Emboldened by alcohol and a very small and indifferent audience we staggered/swaggered through it. I managed to remember most of the words. At the end the barman told us that was it, he was closing. As we walked past the bikers one of them said ‘That was shit lads. Enjoyed it though’.

Powderfinger