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I’ve been feeling a little burned out on rock & roll lately – the rhythms have been seeming clunky, the instrumentation same-old same-old, the march from verse to chorus predictable. But I was thumb-wheeling around the iPod today and passed this –

• Alex Chilton, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (buy 1970 at out-of-print prices here)

– and went back to it & listened again & loved it. Which is funny, because it’s pretty much emblematic of all those above qualities. The Stones’ original always seemed to me to slither in the shadows; there was something blurred & hard to apprehend about it. (And I mean that as highest praise, not as criticism.) But the Chilton version announces that THIS is the tempo and THIS is the end of the bar and THIS is the one-two.

Which is maybe why it sounds so refreshing. And while I sometimes wonder if I’d listen to this quite so much without that frisson of playing off the original, it does have its own swamp boogie vibe (which really accentuates the ominous maraca hiss).

In a similar vein, this –

• The Neats “Angel”

– has a little touch of swamp boogie, too. I was looking for this one in the Interether for a long time (pretty sure you can’t buy a “real” copy anywhere anymore), and once I finally had it in my virtual grasp it was a little disappointing – it seems really foursquare – but it still has a great chorus. (Read about the Neats here.)