Cover Art #1. Seaweed - "Go Your Own Way"

While the movie soundtrack album was by no means a new invention in 1994, as The Big Chill and Saturday Night Fever had proved, they were near ubiquitous at the time. Nearly all studio released comedies and tentpoles had an accompanying album of the songs featured in the film (and ones written for it). Some were great (Empire Records), some were terrible (Airheads) and many were superior to the movie they were made to promote (The Crow: City of Angels, Mallrats, Judgement Night).

More often than not, these albums were made up of 4 types of tracks:

1. A song inspired by the movie, written by the flavor of the month in order to help sell both CD and movie (The Smashing Pumpkins - "The End is the Beginning is the End" from the Batman & Robin soundtrack)

2. A b-side from a popular band that for one reason or another didn't find its way onto an album, but was a quality song nonetheless and often received airplay (Weezer - "Suzanne" from the Mallrats soundtrack)

3. A song intended to break the "next big thing" but ultimately becomes a "whoa, I remember this song" while perusing the used soundtracks section at your local record store (Neve - "It's Over Now" from The Faculty soundtrack)

4. A cover, sometimes a tribute and sometimes a joke but usually uninspired, of a popular song, often from the 70s, by a band of the day.

For the first installment of Cover Art (how clever!), we'll take a look at the Tacoma, Washington band Seaweed's cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" from the Clerks soundtrack.



As legend remembers it, the Clerks screening at the Sundance Film Festival was a watershed moment for independent film, and the movie grossed over $3 million domestically despite never playing on more than 100 screens at a time. Legend also has it, and is probably true, that the music rights for the film cost more than it did to make it, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of $28,000. Cheap, cheap, cheap.

The soundtrack featured a number of popular and less-so bands of the time: Alice in Chains and Soul Asylum (type 2 above), Bash & Pop and Supernova (type 3) and Golden Smog and Seaweed, both of whom contributed pure Type Fours: the aforementioned Fleetwood Mac cover and Golden Smog's version of Bad Company's "Shooting Star".

While the Golden Smog track is good example of bland take on a mostly bland song, Seaweed's version of this Fleetwood Mac classic is one of the best covers of the 90s. The song starts with the same simple chords of the original, but singer Aaron Stauffer, bass player John Atkins and drummer Bob Bulgrien give it a sense of urgency that is missing from it's predecessor. For the first 38 seconds, you're on the edge of your seat, less so from the familiarity of the upcoming chorus, and more because the band puts you there. Finally, when the chorus kicks in at the 0:39 mark, they launch into it with the punk abandon that separated them from the grunge brethren in Seattle. This song is played with passion from it's opening guitar strums and when the chorus finally kicks in, you're rewarded with the catharsis the band has been promising.

From there, they don't let up. Instead of keeping the double-time beat of the chorus throughout the song, the band uses the "Nirvana dynamics" (though to a lesser degree) and dials it back just enough in the second verse to keep you on the edge of your seat.

Later, the guitar solo kicks in and takes us through the end of the song, with the anthemic repetition of the song's hook repeated in true punk rock style: everyone yelling at once, fists no doubt pumping in the air. However, Seaweed never turns the song into a typical punk rock cover of the era, which usually featured a sneering, nasally singer making a joke out of a great song while the band plays it twice as fast as it was written. Theirs instead is a great moment, and Seaweed breathes new life into the song, introducing it to a generation of music-goers who no doubt shunned Fleetwood Mac because it's something their parents like. Me included.

Unfortunately, Seaweed never gained the notoriety of their peers, despite having one of the best singles of the alternative rock era, "Start With" from their 1995 album, Spanaway. But that's for another entry.

Whatever.