MARK HEARD got “Nod” right, the first time

His drum beat reminds me so much of  Mumford’s Going Back to Kansas City, only much better 

The late Mark Heard’s “Nod over Coffee” is a much-covered classic : and they’re all dreadful.

Some are done by some pretty big names in the biz, great friends of Mark  : still awful.

This tune seems that rare exception where no cover has come close to the original , let alone surpass it.

I mean their singing is okay, the lyrics come through clearly.

But they lack that wonderfully fractured drumbeat - that originated from Mark’s guitar playing.

Laid back and funky ; perfect ! And oh so very important to the prosody of the lyrics.

Lyrics, even singing alone, isn’t enough : the surrounding bed of sound mustn’t just be danceable : it must support the ultimate, the deepest, meaning of the lyrics.

I say this because I learned most of what little I know about music and recording through the study of different versions (covers) of songs.

Before Youtube it was a hit and miss : one mostly heard different HIT versions of a tune.

But  with YouTube one could hear the non-hit versions : as may as four or five credible artists with sizeable recording budgets might take a serious crack at a tune, knowing it had to be a hit, before one finally got it right.

And no, it was almost never that the successful artist was the best known or backed by the biggest promo push.

They all got the lyrics down right, got the melody aced : but it was the perfect blend of feel and lyrics they missed : the best possible prosody.

Since we are talking about drumming reflecting perfectly the deep prosody of a song, let’s get specific.

In the early 1970s, actress Farrah Fawcett - in LA - made a casual throwaway remark to a casual football friend of her squeeze Lee Majors, a singer-songwriter called Jim Weatherly, that she was taking the ‘midnight plane to Houston’ , to visit family.

Jim liked the phrase a lot and wrote a song about someone becoming a star in LA but not really liking the LA lifestyle.

He  recorded it on his first album. It went nowhere but his publisher sent the song about and a producer in Atlanta (that’s Atlanta, Georgia, you’all) wanted to cut it on his R&B artist Cissy Houston as a single.

 But please could  he change it, for her,  for her poorer and more south eastern target audience , to a train ? and to Georgia ?

Sure,sure said Jim —- thinking : anything for a cut.

 It was like Jim’s version - a nice version, but not a hit, nothing special.

Then an obscure white producer, Tony Camillo, from nowhereville in New Jersey (Sommerville), in his own small studio and with some other equally white bread musicians cut some of the funkiest  R&B tracks ever made.

Frankly Gladys and her bros could have phoned their vocals - Tony’s intro alone sells the song - and that is because it is not just highly danceable but because of its perfect prosody : the drums and brass sound like a train (a steam train) slowly but powerfully pulling out of the station when rail was the only way to travel.

Nostalgia you could eat with a spoon.

I think because Tony was older than the other people in this saga - he got that the sense of the song - ’heading back to a simpler place and time’ - really needed to be via a slower and simpler mode of transport, as well - not a jet plane, not even a fast diesel electric but an old slow steam puffer.

He was so right - he got the prosody right enough to laugh all the way to the bank.

But there is more, much more, because the second big hook in this song of the year cum classic cover version is Glady’s inspired ad libs at the end.

Except that she doesn’t ad lib, never has, can’t ad lib.

But her elder brother Bubba (co-producer with Tony-from-New-Jersey) put her in the vocal booth in Detroit during the overdub session and whispered to Gladys her amazingly lively ad libs.

He also decided for this tune, the Pips were really going to sing, not just dance - sing up high in the mix, really responding dynamically to Gladys as she got more and more impassioned.

Like testifying in church with the congregation spurring you on.

Yes sir, Bob, you can learn a heck of a lot by just following this classic from Farrah to Bubba.

But check out Mark Heard’s amazing Nod over Coffee for some equally funky drumming anyone can do —— if they don’t over-complicate things. The try his “Worry Too Much” either by Mark himself or by Buddy Miller.

There’s a reason why the latter version was song of the year - its even more laidback funky than Mark’s....