(5) Cowboy Junkies, “Sweet Jane”
strolled by
(1) RUN DMC/Aerosmith, “Walk This Way”
406-200
and will play in the elite 8

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/19/22.

The Song That Almost Didn’t Happen: Allison Renner on “Walk This Way”

It seems strange to write an essay about a cover song done by the original artists. It’s even stranger to step up to bat for a song I didn’t like when I first heard it. But when I say I was a teenage Aerosmith diehard, I’m not exaggerating. I worshipped Aerosmith in their purest form, and other artists diluted this song.
Picture this: I had so many Aerosmith t-shirts that I could wear a different one every day for two weeks. And that’s excluding the one that featured a virtually-naked Joe Perry centaur and the one with the Toxic Twins skull and crossbones. The latter guaranteed I’d get pulled out of line to walk through the metal detectors at the entrance of my high school.
I bought singles, imports, and the Steven Tyler issue of Playgirl through eBay back when “buying online” meant mailing concealed cash and crossing your fingers that the other person cared about their seller feedback.
Despite owning every album, I listened to the classic rock stations and recorded the tail end of Aerosmith songs. I wanted to hear the DJ say “Aerosmith” because it gave me a thrill—that’s my band! I eventually utilized the dual cassettes of my stereo to record each mention of Aerosmith onto its own compilation tape. Because obsessing is what you do when you’re thirteen and in love for the first time.

* 

I’d argue “Walk This Way” is as much of a cover as when Aerosmith performed the Beatles’ “Come Together” for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In their autobiography, Walk This Way, there’s a story about Steven Tyler not recognizing “You See Me Crying,” a song from the same album as “Walk This Way.” Aerosmith was plotting their comeback in the early ‘80s, listening to old tracks when Steven said, “We should cover this. Who is it?”
“It’s us, fuckhead,” Joe Perry replied.
My theory is that, if Steven wanted to cover a song that was his own without knowing it was his own, it’s not far-fetched to posit that he might not have remembered “Walk This Way” was his just a few years later.
And it’s not like the lyrics are personal enough to be memorable. It was written when the band hit a roadblock in the Toys in the Attic recording process. They took a break and went to see Young Frankenstein. So delighted with the joke of Igor telling Dr. Frankenstein to “walk this way” using his cane, the band told Tyler to use the phrase as the song title and write the lyrics from there.
Despite being an Aerosmith devotee (I mean, I own the previously mentioned Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on VHS), I didn’t see Young Frankenstein until I was in my twenties. When I rewatched it as “research” for this essay, I pictured a group of twenty-something boys, likely high, watching it in the theater. I imagined them fixating on this one line—was it really that funny?—and taking it home to put to music. That movie-going experience created one of the most recognizable rock songs, which eventually became crucial to bridging the divide between rock and rap.

*

 Though “Walk This Way” was never my favorite Aerosmith song, I appreciated that I could turn on any classic rock station and have a 75% chance of hearing it. Despite being well-known, “Walk This Way” never topped the charts. But the cover came close.
Aerosmith recorded Toys in the Attic, their third album, at the end of 1974. “Walk This Way” was released as the album’s second single on August 28, 1975, and didn’t make the charts. “Sweet Emotion,” the album’s first single, was the band’s breakthrough Top 40 Hit and pushed them to re-release “Dream On,” a song from their debut album in 1973.
On November 5, 1976, Aerosmith re-released “Walk This Way,” which peaked at #10 on the Billboard charts. (Aerosmith never had a #1 single until “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” in 1998, which was written by an outside songwriter who had Celine Dion in mind so we’re going to back away from this little digression.)
Almost ten years later, on March 9, 1986, Run DMC, Steven Tyler, and Joe Perry got together to re-record “Walk This Way.” Call it a cover, call it a collaboration, call it coercion—it was released as a single against Run DMC’s wishes on July 4, 1986 and shot to #4 on the Billboard charts.

*

It’s not surprising that “Walk This Way” bridged the gap between rap and rock. A lot of Steven Tyler’s vocals are as clever, sly, and rapid-fire as rap lyrics. He uses his voice like percussion on countless songs.
“Eat the Rich” comes to mind, mostly because I chose to rap it as a final project for my freshman Social Studies class. No, I didn’t use it to make a commentary on social injustice or unfair taxation. I wrote lines about weather patterns to rap over the song.
To this day, I can’t explain why. It just felt right, the way things feel when you’re young and obsessed and want to inject this delightful part of your life into something mundane. I wanted everyone in that 6th-period class to know that I loved Aerosmith.
Except… I couldn’t stand the idea of rapping in front of my classmates. I was a mere freshman, a cripplingly shy one at that, and there were sophomores in there!
I decided to record myself the night before and bring in a portable tape player. But when I tried to rap alone in my room, my voice shook with nerves. It seemed like there was no solution, and no time to start and complete another project. I was going to fail.
My mother came to the rescue, volunteering my brother’s vocal cords. He had escaped the torture of high school and was safe in college. He recorded the rap without worrying what people would think of him.
That night, lying awake in bed, I felt good about my project. Bringing Aerosmith and rap together again, in a way no one would expect. I felt like a trailblazer—almost (aka not at all) as cool as Run DMC.
None of those good vibes were with me as I stood in class, listening to my brother rap:

Well I woke up this morning
On the wrong side of the bed
And how I got to thinkin'
About the rain on my head
About all the weather patterns
And how they make you sick…

I cannot express how awkward it was to stand there with my face burning, trying to ignore all the blank stares of my classmates. Thankfully, the combination of rap and rock by true professionals turned out much better, changing the scope of the music industry. But if you watch the MTV coverage of the actual recording, you’ll get a good sense of the awkwardness that seems to encompass the blending of these two genres.
The VJ is asking questions no one really knows the answers to—but they also know they can’t be honest. By now, both acts understand how huge this could be. So of course the guys on Run DMC’s team will exclaim that Aerosmith is their favorite band. Steven Tyler, on the other hand, will say “Yeah, we’ve heard ‘em,” when asked if he likes Run DMC’s music.
“I guess I called up Run…” Tyler says, though they all just admitted it was the first time they met. “He asked Joe and I to come down and do a cameo thing.”
There are several different versions of who contacted whom to make this thing happen, but it’s pretty obvious that Steven Tyler didn’t call up a rapper and suggest collaborating. And Run DMC wouldn’t have gotten in touch with Aerosmith, because they didn’t even know who was behind the song. All they knew was that they liked to rap over the first few seconds of “track 4, Toys in the Attic,” which could have been the band’s name, for all they cared.
Run DMC didn’t even want to cover the song. They were done recording Raising Hell when Rick Rubin mentioned it to them. They figured they’d use a sample and riff over the rest. But Rubin insisted the rappers learn the original lyrics, so they listened to the song over and over, transcribing the words by hand. Before they knew it, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry were in the studio, ready to record.
“Is this something that you might want to do again?” the VJ asks.
Run DMC answers as diplomatically as you would if someone you’re not into asks you on a second date. “We just trying to make this one work right now. We ain’t thinking about the future.”
Nowadays, DMC says he doesn’t think the song would have been as big if they just sampled it and wrote their own rap, or even if they covered it without Aerosmith. “Because we did it with them, changed everything,” he says. And you can’t argue with that.

*

I have five live versions of “Walk This Way” on my iPod. I know all the words, even when Steven Tyler yells “Get the fuck off of the fence!” over the drum beats on the one from A Little South of Sanity. Or “What are ya tryin’ to say?” as he holds the mic up to Joey Kramer’s drums on the bootleg copy of their New Year’s Eve 1999 performance in Osaka, Japan.
But I only have one version of “Walk This Way” with Run DMC—the studio version. And I don’t know all the lyrics, though I know Run DMC changed some because they deemed it “country bumpkin bullshit” and “hillbilly gibberish.” I don’t even have the Run DMC single of “Walk This Way,” where the B-side is an instrumental version with Steven Tyler randomly singing one chorus.
It feels weird to be a 30-something white woman, once a die-hard classic rock fan, now dipping her toes into ‘80s rap, but here I am. I’m defending a song I didn’t originally like. I didn’t understand its impact because, by the time I heard it, “radio rap” was mainstream. I was familiar with Juvenile, Nelly, and Sisqó. I could hear rap booming from the speakers of my high school classmates’ new Jeeps as I walked by the parking lot every morning. (I’d argue that they didn’t like rap either, but rather the counterculture it represented in our little bubble.)
Which is exactly who Russell Simmons was aiming to hook when he proposed Run DMC cover a rock song. He wanted to bring rap into the mainstream—and he did.
DMC has since gone on record saying this experience taught him to “always be open to try something new because it might not just change your life, it could change the world.”
Which is certainly a beautiful sentiment. But I keep picturing those 22-year-old rappers huddled in the corner, eating McDonald’s. They’re more interested in their Big Macs than the 30-something rock legends standing nearby. Thirteen-year-old me couldn’t believe their audacity, but now I’m older. I get it. They were pushed to do something they didn’t want to do, and they just wanted to eat their burgers. If that’s not a #mood, what is?

Allison Renner, pictured here with Steven Tyler’s outfit from the “Love in an Elevator” video, is an editor for Flash Fiction Magazine and the Publicity & Reviews Manager for Split/Lip Press. Her fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Daily Drunk, Six Sentences, Rejection Letters and Versification. She can be found online at allisonrennerwrites.com and on Twitter @AllisonRWrites. And yes, she still owns the homemade cassette of local DJs saying “Aerosmith” over and over. Because why not.

“ANYONE WHO EVER HAD A HEART: LORRAINE BERRY ON COWBOY JUNKIES’ “SWEET JANE”

1.

“Sweet Lorraine,” recorded in 1940 by Nat King Cole, was the song that inspired my dad to name me. My mother had wanted to call me “Colette.” But in her northern English home, the sophistication of such a name left folks scratching their head. And while I love my name, its long “a” sound makes it feel much less delicate than all of those girls’ names that feature the breathy soft “a” of names like Angela or Ashley.
Sweet Jane is a girl whose name features that same harder a.

2.

When I heard Velvet Underground or later, Lou Reed, sing Sweet Jane as a kid, even though I didn’t understand the lyrics, the song sounded gritty, maybe even dangerous. When I heard it as a teen, still not listening closely to the lyrics, I assumed Lou Reed was singing about drugs.
The scenes of street life in NYC were what made the song cool for me eventually, but even then, I never really heard it as a romantic love song. It wasn’t until Margo Timmins emerged from the shadows of the video playing on MTV that Sweet Jane suddenly became a sensory caress that felt like it was ushering me into the slow-motion erotic catastrophes that was love in the 1980s.

3.

As a child in the 1970s, I would listen to my radio for hours in my room. The goal was to capture the new song I loved so much on my cassette recorder. Each song that wasn’t “it” was great, but in that space between songs when the DJ would be stepping on the intro of the song I wanted, I’d hit the record button. The blackout bingo were those sweet moments when two songs were played back-to-back without interruption, and the second song was the object of your quest. No voice breaking up those first few notes that you knew by heart.  
Watching MTV in the 1980s was the visual component of Radio-Cassette Bingo. Certain images could get you to love a video even if you didn’t like the song or the pretty boys who performed it.  Duran Duran taught me that.
The first time I heard “Sweet Jane,” by The Cowboy Junkies, the shadows pulled me in. That, and Margo Timmins’ ethereal Rapunzel waves of hair, something my own curly head would never accomplish.
It’s only now as I rewatch it that I see the things I missed. The moments when Timmins appears in color. The thorns. The chains. The things you don’t see about love when you’re in your mid-20s.

5.

I asked my husband a few weeks ago to watch Lou Reed perform “Sweet Jane” and then the Cowboy Junkies version. As someone whose music transmits itself in words, I wanted to hear what the guitar player heard.
The next day he unpacked his ivory-colored Taylor electric and sat down with me. “So,” he said, making sure he was tuned, “Lou’s live [“Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal”] version is in E,” and he plays the progression. “That’s where that chesty growl comes from. The studio version—like Mott the Hoople’s, like Cowboy Junkies—is in D, and more bouncy.
“Mott the Hoople added some pop to it with that ascending riff in the chorus....”

6.

In the 17th century, Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit and polymath, formed the connection that intervals in music convey colors. Others built upon his theory. In 1742, Louis Bertrand Castel developed a direct correspondence between specific notes and colors, and suggested the creation of a “le clavecin oculaire“ an instrument that would throw colored light out as it was played. Following his theory, DAG becomes green-violet-red. DABmG, however has the addition of agate, a gemstone that is known for the differently colored variants it produces.
My own synesthesia is not consistent, and disappeared for a long time after childhood. But in the past few years, it’s been back. Textures and tastes align with color. On a recent flight across the Rockies as I journeyed home to my beloved Cascades, toasted marshmallow flooded my mouth as I beheld the endless pillows and pillars below me.
With music, however, I don’t see color. I feel it in my body. Not the ways that a piece of music can cause you to resonate and set off the tinkling of bells in your spinal column. Or the way certain pieces of music make you weep.
I have somatic reactions to music, as if the emotions it sparks create their own physical manifestations. Suffusions that sometimes feel as if a rush of adrenaline has numbed my legs or set off the physiological responses that lead directly to migraine. Some songs inspire anxiety that becomes the sensation of panic attack.
But some songs I feel like an ache.
The Cowboy Junkies’ cover of “Sweet Jane” is one of these.

7.

Lou’s live version does not, however.
Instead, coming in as it does after what might be one of the best intros in live rock history, that one floods me with the razor blade blood pumping out of my heart.

8.

CJ was not the first band to cover the song, and there have been many more versions that have followed. “Sweet Jane” or “Sweet Jane covers” as a search term on YouTube yields dozens.
Diana Gameros and Los Refugios Tiernos, Mott the Hoople, Phish, Hollis Brown, Two Nice Girls, Brownsville Station, and Lone Justice are just some of the many artists who have interpreted the song. (There’s also a lullaby version I wish I had never heard.)
The song always seems to capture an emotion, or a moment in time that the artist was experiencing. It is pliable, labile that way. The most recent version I’ve heard is the one by Miley Cyrus and it scorches like a torch in a nightclub.

9.

Margo Timmins’ soft voice and the sweep and tap of the brushes were not the band’s original mode of play. But after receiving noise complaints about their rehearsal space-garage, they softened the playing and found their sound. In a 2001 article for No Depression, “We realized we had to tone down,” Michael Timmins explained. “One thing fed into the other: Margo began to realize that her singing voice was more effective quiet. We began to realize, if we can get down underneath Margo, the sound will be more effective. Pete picked up brushes – he was just learning to play drums at that point. Everything sort of came down. We learned to play with less volume."

10.

I met Yves in 2006. I’ve told the story elsewhere, but after a week of intense communication, I traveled to Montreal to spend Veteran’s Day Weekend with him. Our first several hours had us both convinced that we had discovered a serious love, but my last hours with him were spent tending to him while he suffered a fatal brain aneurysm.
The night before I met Yves, we talked on the phone. He told me that he was listening to a lot of 80’s music—that that was his mood. He would tell me later that he had been so nervous about meeting me that he had just wanted to get lost in old, familiar tunes. On the phone, I could hear something playing, but it was too faint to be anything other than background noise.
Later, after the events had transpired, I would find the playlist of what he had listened to that night. He was the Web master for his housing cooperative; he maintained a site that contained news about the co-op and playlists of music that the group’s members could stream. Those playlists would remain on the page until he posted whatever new songs had appealed to him. He always entitled his playlists “Playing while we hack.” If you happened to check the page while he wasn’t online, you’d find the most recently archived list, but where a new list should be, it would simply say, “Nothing… Our desktop’s speakers are silent.”
Nick Cave. Tom Waits. Gang of Four. X. Porno for Pyros. The stuff of a “working” song list that you might expect to hear from a man born just a few months before me in 1963.
He was a sound engineer, and I would meet many of the bands he had recorded at his memorial service.

11.

One of those songs on that list was the live version of “Sweet Jane,” recorded in 1973 and included on 1974’s Rock and Roll Animal.
I can’t listen to that version without instantly feeling an ache underneath my breastbone, the faint echoes of a trauma that made 2007 a rough year.

12.

CJ’s complete rearranging of “Sweet Jane” breaks my heart but in much different ways. It reminds me of the way love feels in your twenties, and the casually cruel boys who batter your faith in yourself.
The visual artist who invited me, who had been his lover, down to Berkeley to stay with him for a week. Then he made me sleep on the couch after he changed his mind about his intentions in asking me to fly down to him. Or the photographer who was more angry about the fact that a close friend and I had figured out that he was sleeping with both of us. “You two had no right to talk about our sex life.” As if the spilling of secrets far outweighed the breath-taking act of infidelity that neither of us had expected.  Or the musician who would let himself feel vulnerable with me for a week, and then disappear for weeks at a time in order to emotionally disengage, only to show up again and again at my place of work.
When I finally found a man who wanted to make an emotional commitment, he was a man of science, of facts to quantify, but a man whose connection to the muse came in kitchen chemistry—literally—but in no other way. I married him. And divorced him twelve years later.

13.

Margo Timmins once explained that CJ had originally intended to include “Sweet Jane” on their first album, Whites Off Earth Now! Problem was Timmins’ brother Pete the drummer had only been playing for a short time. When trying to hit the “stop” just before “heavenly wine and roses,” the two of them could not get the timing right.  
The best part of recording the song, she recounts in the video, was getting to meet Lou Reed. She looks starstruck as she recounts it. “Meeting Lou Reed was probably the highlight of my career.” She hesitates at the cliché, and then decides to go ahead. “Lou Reed gave me the soundtrack to my life.”

14.

When Lone Justice fronted by Maria McKee sang “Sweet Jane,” they turned it back into the hard-edged banger that more closely resembles Mott the Hoople’s version turned up to 11. As if Maria is kicking her boots at the CJs, telling them that they may have captured the sweet longing beneath the words with their version, but Sweet Jane was a salty woman, not the dreamy girl Margo channeled. When the song continues into “Walk on the Wild Side,” it’s clear that it’s Lou to whom Maria’s swearing her allegiance.

15.

In CJ’s video of the song, the thorns and chains appear as they are dragged across a bed. It summoned the eroticism of the famous photograph by Imogen Cunningham. I first saw the photograph The Unmade Bed when the artist who would later turn Berkeley into a sad space for me asked me to go to an exhibition with him. I remember being struck silent by the image, the hairpins, the shadows, the feeling that the lovers have just arisen and left love behind.
In the video, thorns, a heavy chain, a necklace, a rose crushed. And the woman’s hand clutching the side of the mattress, that sweet moment when one is the only object of your lover’s attention.
Sometimes, when Margo sings, sweet Jane sounds like sweet chain.
The CJ version whisks us away from the crowded New York City street and plops us right into the emotional territory.

And anyone who ever had a heart
They wouldn’t turn around and break it
And anyone who ever played a part
Oh wouldn’t turn around and hate it.

The CJ song starts with a verse much later in the original song, as if you’ve caught it being played for the thousandth time somewhere. But Margo Timmins’ voice catches your attention, and you hear the song anew.
It sounds like a plea from someone who is chiding a lover for not saying “I love you” more often. I’m not minimizing that sentiment. Unrequited love is debilitating, especially in those years when every emotion feels like the most important emotion you will ever, ever have.

16.

When Lou sings that verse, it’s right after a list of things that “evil mother(fuckers)” will tell you. And he grows angrier as he recounts the list. He blasts those who tell him that “And life is just to die!”
The song is narrated by Jack, who is driving his car, and Jane is in her vest. He’s talking to Jim, standing on the corner, who is really in a rock and roll band. Jack is recalling the past times; he’s a banker, after all, and Jane is a clerk. He has advice for the protesters: ignore the haters who tell them that they’ll never change anything.
Those folks who say that shit never had a heart anyway.

And there’s even some evil mothers
Well they’re gonna tell you that everything is just dirt
Y’know that women never really faint
And that villains always blink their eyes, woo.
And that, y’know, children are the only ones who blush!
And that life is just to die!

17.

It would take four years from age 38 to age 42 before I met Yves. In that time, I had discovered that the same types of men who had been unable to handle their emotions in their twenties were no closer to getting it right in their 40s. Only now, they wanted to “blame me for the rocks and baby bones and broken lock on the garden.”
I hear the heart weariness that Margo Timmins carries as she sings the song. She was 27. It sends its strum straight down to my lower belly, wondering if this time, erotic attraction is going to be enough to keep this goddamned relationship together. Because anyone who ever had a heart wouldn’t turn around and shit on the person with whom they had just made love.

18.

Everyone knows the story of how the Velvet Underground’s version of “Sweet Jane,” recorded on its fourth album, was not the song Reed had meant. The usual issues among band members meant that he wasn’t even in the studio when the song was recorded. But in 1973, he performed the song in all of its glory.
In the video of the performance, his band plays an intro that goes on for nearly four minutes, a demonstration of the players’ virtuosity that lifts the mood. Then Lou starts to sing.
Turns out that the VU didn’t get the intro right.  
Lou Reed once explained to  Elvis Costello that people often get the chord riff central to “Sweet Jane” wrong. And then he pulled out his guitar and showed the chord progression with the “secret” Bm chord. And despite the fact that it’s been repeatedly claimed that Cowboy Junkies version was his favorite cover, it lacks the hidden Bm chord.
It doesn’t make the song any less powerful. It just hits different.
A sweet ache. Not pain.

Infinity.
The guitar player and I met in 2008. We’re still together, finally deciding in 2019 that we should get married. He is a writer, too, and I finally found a man who combined being creative and being stable that had eluded me all those years.
I watch Cowboy Junkies now and I remember those years of the careless boys who broke my heart. Then watch Lou Reed rail against those who would strip us of our hopes and dreams.

You know, those were different times
Oh, all the poets, they studied rules of verse
And those ladies, they rolled their eyes

I like our cover best.

After 23 years of living on the other side of the continent, Lorraine Berry finally made it back to the Pacific Northwest, the place where she grew up. On her Twitter account (@BerryFLW), she frequently posts photos of trees and mountains and has recovered her sense of being right-sized. When not writing about books at various outlets, she is at work on a novel manuscript set in Seattle in the early 1980s. She lives in western Oregon with her husband, two dogs, and three cats. Her current goal is to learn to identify the 1980+ lichens of the PNW.