Three Times That Same Song

In the November ’05 issue of The Wire, Alan Licht writes about his history of interpreting other people’s songs, starting with an EP of Moondog covers that his first band, Love Child, recorded.

Forced Exposure, still a magazine/label back then, had commissioned us to do it. Neither Love Child bassist Rebecca Odes nor myself had heard Moondog, but they sent a tape of Moondog 2, an album of rounds, and we loved it. It was sharp thinking on their part: like Love Child, the Moondog album featured child-like vocals, and balanced musical sophistry and simplicity. Plus, everything clocked in between one and three minutes, much like our songs did back then. But [in the Love Child version] “All Is Loneliness” was stretched to nearly seven minutes as a psych guitar jam inspired largely by Spacemen 3’s live take of The 13th Floor Elevators’ “Rollercoaster” – the canon and the 5/8 metre went out the window and we concentrated on the fuzz guitars, with a cheap Casio winding in and out of the mix.

It’s always a thrill to be reminded of how much forgotten & undiscovered country there is out there – undiscovered by me, anyway. On reading this I realized (a) that I actually had a dub of Love Child’s “All Is Loneliness” on an old mixed cassette, and (b) that I’d come across this “Moondog” name here and there for years without ever bothering to learn who he/she/they is/was. Turns out Moondog was Louis Hardin (1916-1999), an eccentric composer known for performing on a Manhattan street corner dressed as a Viking, and the maker of many records. “All Is Loneliness” is a popular cover choice – Big Brother & the Holding Company did it back in the day, and Antony & the Johnsons have been doing it live recently.

Anyway, here’s Love Child’s version, sounding a little rough for the ride from vinyl to cassette to WAV to mp3, but still eerie & entrancing. (I’d recommend both the full-length Love Child albums – spry Beat Happening-style stomps & moody guitarscapes, with more of the former on the first record and more of the latter on the second.)

Here too is the Moondog source version, plus another take on the song by those crafty Norwegians, Motorpsycho. Theirs is more conventional polished-up neo-psychedelia, but holy moly that track kicks.

• Moondog, “All Is Loneliness”
• Love Child, “All Is Loneliness”
• Motorpsycho, “All Is Loneliness”