I Found Some Blog...by Cher Scholar

Songs Cher Should Cover (of Lindsey Buckingham)

Last Saturday, as you may recall, I was melancholy about being a David Foster Wallace fan and his (really) tragic suicide the day before. But I did have a positive fan experience the next day to sort of balance it out. I was able to see the first show of Lindsey Buckingham’s new tour at Royce Hall in support of his new album Gift of Screws.

I’ve seen Buckingham live with Fleetwood Mac and I contend he is ridiculously absent for the top 100 Rolling Stone's list of best guitarists in rock music. Not only are his guitar contributions detailed and inhumanly energetic but his live arrangements and stamina are really jaw dropping to see. The show was unbelievably amazing. I'd put it up there with Prince for single performances (although a Prince show is a much bigger audio-visual affair so it's hard to compare - but if you strip down everything...).

Except for Buckingham's was probably the worst light show I’ve ever seen. First, let me say Buckingham is so good, he simply only requires a spotlight. The spotlights he did have (too many) sat on stage pointing out into the hall, forcing fans in the balcony to squint in discomfort and hold their hands up to block the light. In front of us, audience members moved in significant numbers to find new seats. It almost looked like a mass exodus except they were dancing as they were relocating.

Of his solo hits he sang "Trouble," "Go Insane" and "Don’t Look Down." He did not do "Holiday Road." From his hits of Fleetwood Mac he sang "Go Your Own Way," "Second Hand News," "Never Going Back Again," and "Tusk." From the Gift of Screws album he did "Treason," (a good election song by accident), "Right Place to Fade" (I think - not sure he did this one), "Love Runs Deeper" and "Time Precious Time."

I downloaded his new album from iTunes and the highlights are "Great Day," "Treason," "Right Place to Fade," and "Love Runs Deeper." "Great Day" he co-wrote with his son.

Gift of Screws is actually a reference in an Emily Dickinson poem dealing with the pain of decay (and the song is basically a jam of the poem):

Essential Oils -- are wrung --
The Attar from the Rose
Be not expressed by Suns -- alone --
It is the gift of Screws --

The General Rose -- decay --
But this -- in Lady's Drawer
Make Summer -- When the Lady lie
In Ceaseless Rosemary –

Cher could do an awesomely rockin version of “Right Place to Fade,” a song written by Buckingham that contains some shades of her recent tour themes (Never Can Say Goodbye and all) and has a playfully rocking guitar at the beginning and end, some fun mini-bridges, bam-bams and whoo hoos Cher could slap down pretty well. It’s in-your-face the way old Fleetwood Mac/Buckingham used to be. Awesomeness.

How long how long
How long we wait
Wait for the light that might light our way
Wait for the right place to fade

Come along, lay down and talk to me
Tell me all your fear will allow
It doesn’t matter who we thought we were
We ain’t got time for it now

He’s under-appreciated, this one.
  

Sonny & Cher Musicians and Cher in a Movie Alert

Here’s a link to a story on a new documentary about The Wrecking Crew, a gang of studio musicians who for Sinatra, Streisand, S&C and many others and included both a young Glen Campbell and a young Leon Russell.

Coincidentally, I just made Mp3s of three songs from my only Leon Russell album:

• Tightrope" – which is why I picked up the album in a used record store in St. Louis back in the 80s.
  
  "I’m up in the spotlight
  Oh does it feel right
  Whoa, the altitude seems to get to me"                        
             
• "Stranger in a Strange Land" - which I can actually hear Elijah covering nicely in my head. Or Cher too for that matter.
     
• And the oft recorded "Song For You" – Russell wrote this song so I feel this should be the definitive version, not The Carpenters’ or Ray Charles'. However, I do think Cher’s version is great, far better than The Carpenters version because she sounds more experienced to Karen Carpenter’s voice of innocence. I feel the inverse applies to their dual recordings of “Superstar” – the innocence in Karen Carpenters voice here serves the song better. As for versions of “Song For You” I also really like the R&B/rap group City High’s version (I love their song “What Would You Do.” I really do). Actually, I think I take umbrage with the words 'definitive version'. What does that mean anyhow? The version that quintessentially defines the song? What the hell? Is that even possible?

But I digress. There’s this documentary out on The Wrecking Crew:

“The stars, he said, were accommodating, including Cher, Dick Clark and Campbell,” said producer Denny Tedesco, 47-year-old son of Wrecking Crew guitarist Tommy Tedesco. “As big as Cher is, she was very giving. It brought her back to that period when she was 16 years old. It was a wonderful time for her. And it was a lot of fond memories for Glen. He said he missed not having to be 'the guy.' Tedesco, a Woodland Hills resident, grew to admire his father even more after all the research and filming.”

Visit http://www.wreckingcrew.tv/upcoming.html to find a screening in your town.

Here's another Wrecking Crew interview that includes another S&C musician, Hal Blaine: http://www.modernguitars.com/archives/004300.html

As, you may know many S&C band members from the early 70s went on to form the band Toto and as I was starting to convert my vinyl to MP3s recently with my new turn-table, I came across these Chicago liner notes from Chicago 16(yes I bought it for “Hard to Say I’m Sorry” in 1983 when I was 13, I’m not ashamed of it!). I found many familiar names in the liner notes: Steve Lukather guitars; David Paich synthesizer, Steve Porcaro synthesizer programming. And I can’t shake this feeling that I’ve seen Chicago’s own Bill Champlin on a Cher album credit somewhere. Am I crazy? Please don’t answer that. Does this ring a bell with anyone?

Jimmy Dean also alerted me last week of Jerry Wexler’s passing. Wexler was a famous Muscle Shoals producer for many landmark albums of Aretha Franklin and Dusty Springfield among many others. The awesome Dusty in Memphis was recorded the same year as Cher's unheralded 1969 album 3614 Jackson Highway which Wexler was one of the producers on. Jimmy Dean also mentioned that no news reported his brief association with Cher. I searched google in vain to find such a reference myself. However, I did find this exert of a bio of David Geffen (scroll down and click the link "The Operator") that claimed Wexler was Geffen’s long-time nemesis. The excerpt covers details of the night Cher met Geffen and the general gist of his involvement and substantial aid to Cher in her time of mid-70s legal crisis, which is quite important in considering where she is today. You could almost say there would be no Sonny & Cher without Sonny and there would be no Cher solo without David Geffen. And possibly no Cher into the 21st century without Cher herself. She’s been svengali-less for decades now!

    

Songs Cher Should Cover & 18 Things That Happened While I Was On Vacation in New Mexico

1.  I became a fan of The Eels. I know, they’ve been around for over ten years. But better late than never, no? I’ve been listening to Essential Eels and in some alternate universe I think it would be good to hear Cher sing “Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues” (the one that goes “God damn right - it’s a beautiful day!”) or “That Not Really Funny.”

And that made me wonder about what kind of rock album Cher plans to do next. I mean, what is a rock Cher album in this post-grunge world?

2.  I gave a speech at my parents’ 50th Wedding Anniversary and I didn’t cry like my two older brothers did. I think this is because I was the first to give speech and my mother hadn’t started bawling yet, although she had her little travel pouch of tissues ready to start in. Either that or maybe sometimes I do have a heart of stone.

3. My sibs and I gave my parents a Hopi wedding vase as a gift. My first-born brother also gave a speech about family togetherness, which surprised me because we are usually fighting but he did bring up some funny stories, including the one about how they always used to fight over pieces of my mother’s fried chicken, including the livers. My other brother did a video about my parents and their friends which was very good and touching. He and I previously had a fight about who was going to say what about how my parents met (which was the whole subject of my speech). He called "dibsies" on me and I called his dibsies retarded (in a sibling skirmish and not handicapped sense), which pissed him off. Lots of therapy fodder here.

4.  Our dog Franz Alonzo regressed while we were away and chewed up his nanny’s mattress. He ended up back at the kennel for that. 

 5. While visiting the famous church at Chimayo, the Lourdes of America, my car ran over a big rusty-looking object of a very solid nature and from then on my car started making funny sounds. Luckily it was only a bent exhaust pipe hitting a heating shield. Maybe the dirt at Chimayo truly is miraculous and Bluebelle had some of it stuck on her tires. My bf drew out a cartoon drawing of what he remembered the object looking like as we hit it and later my father could only surmise from the cartoon that we must have hit a very small UFO.

 6. Northern New Mexico truly is the land of enchantment. Only there, could majestic rock formations, looming mountains, thousand-year old pueblos and quaint adobe casitas be overshadowed by awesomely choreographed cloud formations.

7. I can drive 12 hours in one day. Needles, California (“I only made it out to Needles” from "Never Been To Spain"/Cher, Foxy Lady, 1972) is hot and gas is expensive there.

8. At the reunion, my bf was a definite hit with the distant relatives (including two who never usually come up and talk to me but made a point to tell me how much they liked him) as well as with the nuclear family, mostly for making a good gazpacho and steak-sandwich dinner one night at our Santa Fe casita.

9. I miss New Mexican red sauce already.

10. At my parents’ anniversary party, I spoke to the parents of my first childhood friend (he died of Leukemia when I was about 8). Back in the 1970s, when I would visit him on their ranch, I was always kind of scared of his dad, a tall and skinny cowboy with a big mustache who mostly leaned up against walls and looked like he could kick your ass just for the sport of it. But 30 years later I was surprised to find myself chatting with him and his wife and when they found out my bf and I were engaged, they told us their secret to a long marriage was sleeping in the nude.  Which was possibly TMI but I can top that because, (whisper) to be honest with you, sleeping in the nude makes me itchy.

11. My brother found some of our long lost family friends The Padillas on the Internet and he surprised my parents with them at an anniversary party and it made my mother cry again.

12. The tram from Albuquerque up the Sandia mountains is the world’s longest tram. 

13. There is a big awesome crack in the earth made by the Rio Grande river and you can see it from Taos, New Mexico. Click open the picture to the left and look closely. Then look at it from the Taos Gorge Bridge below.

14. When my bf and I drove my parents to Roy, New Mexico, where my Dad spent his summers with his grandparents and cousins, he told us a story about how his grandfather would drop him off on the ranch with an axe to cut down prickly pear trees all day. My dad said that years later it occurred to him that by cutting down all those trees he had actually been spreading hundreds of prickly pear seeds all over the property. My bf later told me he enjoyed hearing all of my Dad’s funny stories about growing up on the ranch, which is what I love about my bf b/c he likes the same quirky stuff I do.

  

15. I got stopped by a New Mexico cop for speeding through Cimarron with my bf and my elderly parents in the car.

16. You can eat a gelato in Santa Fe called sage and another called Strawberry Habanera. 

17. My Dad’s former babysitter on the Hopi Indian reservation is now a famous potter named Olive Toney. We tried to find her on our way home through Arizona but were too shy to knock on her door at the first mesa to buy a pot.

18. I am lousy at picking out motels. On our drive back I insisted on a run-down Howard Johnson in Flagstaff to save money and they over-flattered us and then over-charged us for a room right next to the train tracks where trains whistled by all night long. To add insult to injury, its restaurant served inedible french fries, practically a culinary impossiblily. Luckily we were able to eat at our favorite Flagstaff breakfast place the next morning, Let’s Eat.

  

Danny Boy and the Thirteenth High School Confession

I'm back from my bittersweet high school reunion. The trip was great. Gave my bf a big hometown tour of me. Don’t worry, he didn’t suffer. There were plenty of river boats, historical re-enactors and pre-historic mounds to keep him happy. Story and pics coming soon.

In the meantime, Cherworld has posted an amazingly unusual Cher interview (it’s European, of course). Give it a looksee. Something about it will relate to my high school reunion story.

For my bf’s birthday last year I gave him two Laura Nyro CDs. He had expressed interest in my Nyro/LaBelle CD which I bought because I love Patty LaBelle. Still, he didn’t like Laura Nyro at all (although since yesterday, I discovered he secretly has been listening to one of them at work) and these two CDs have been on my list of things to listen to for about a year. Two days ago I finally put on Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, her breakout album on the Columbia label with then-manager David Geffen.

First of all, I had placed Nyro in the mid 70s, not late 60s. Knowing this tid-bit unlocked a door for me. I can say I finally get it: her fluid genre-melds are pretty amazing for the time and her lyrics are poeticly playful. I’m still not very fond of her soprano voice. It’s too shrill for me most of the time. But I love “Sweet Blindness” and “Stoned Soul Picnic” and “Poverty Train” has really grown on me. And best of all, I finally see from where came Nelly McKay!

I’m a bit overwhelmed with catching up on Cher news this week but I did join my first Facebook Cher group: If You Don't Love Cher, You Are A Dirty Dirty Communist. Good questions are not really brewing there yet but I did see a good question on the Yahoo!Chergroups list posted by daniel martinez:

What Cher song has the most meaning to you and why?

This is a particularly difficult question for me. I’m not very sentimental about Cher songs. I’m much more academic and cerebral about my love of Cher music. Her albums do notate the timeline of my life but mostly as a background soundtrack. For instance, we used to yell the chorus of “Laugh at Me” before doing belly bombs into our neighborhood pool. I also remember re-enacting the storyline of “Send the Man Over” from Cherished. However, I was only 8 years old and the major sexual innuendos in the song went over my innocent five-foot head. I guess the two songs that tug on my heart-sleeves would be "Somebody" and "Danny Boy."

"Somebody" reminds me of being five or six years old in the mid-70s, listening to Sonny & Cher on my parents phonograph in our front living room – lots of New Mexico sunlight, the jump rope as my microphone. Groovy times. I love Cher’s vocal on that song. And "Danny Boy" always makes me vaclempt. The sadness in her voice. Speaking from beyond the grave. It’s all there. You can read more about my top 10 favorite Cher songs on Cherscholar.

      

Hallelujah

I’m feeling under the weather this week so I’ll just leave you with just one question. I used to avoid Leonard Cohen songs because I thought he was so Chelsea Hotel. Then I fell in love with Jeff Buckley’s version of "Hallelujah." What was I thinking?

No, that’s not the question. The question is "Hallelujah." Could Cher pull it off? The soaring bird of its melody and its exciting silences. Snuff Garret once said Cher’s voice could cut through a cement orchestra.

Could it stand up to one lone piano?

 

Cher-Its and Bits

Toodle-loo

My Cher Friends, you will be getting four posts this week. This is because I’m leaving Saturday for nine days of vacation bliss in Amish country, Pennsylvania. The bf and I are visiting my family there for small-towney 4th of July celebrations in Lititz, which is near Blue Ball and Intercourse. You’ve all heard the joke; now I’m living the dream. Actually, Amish country is very interesting, not just for the Amish, but for the other old, alternative religious orders that flourished there in Pennsylvania during the early American centuries. Read previous Ape Culture reviews about Amish country.

Cher Site of the Month

I have been remiss in doing my Cher site reviews for months. But someone on Chergroups found this one recently. It has a Myspace feel but a great catalog of pictures:
http://www.bebo.com/Profile.jsp?MID=367137231&MemberId=3668384741

Anniversary of an Ending

Tyler from Chergroups reminded us all that June 26, 32 years ago, was a sad day in Cher history: it was the day in 1975 that Sonny and Cher's divorce was finalized in a courtroom in Santa Monica, California.  Happy day for Cher who was preparing to marry Gregg Allman…but what about us???

Songs Cher Should Cover

If Cher were my bf, she'd say "Don't should on me!"

However, I’d really love to hear Cher go spiritual. Her songs of late, like "Human" and others from her last three Warner Bros albums, indicate Cher’s picking of more introspective material. She’d do a groovy gospel  (1971s "Somebody" is a testament to that). She could even give it a California twist. Two songs would easily accommodate: Allen Toussaint's’s recent gem “We Are One” and a song from the last Norah Jones album, “Humble Me.” Not quite the wailers you'd hear in church, but contemplative little pieces about brotherhood and humility. She could still sing them in a unitard with sequins. God can get jiggy with it.
   

From One Snow Queen to Another

It’s a busy week this: Just saw David Sedaris read at UCLA's Royce Hall and the Los Angeles Times Book fest is coming up this weekend. This is my favorite literary event….ever!! I can’t wait. I just wish the poetry panels were more substantial – like the groovy fiction and non-fiction panels are. Instead they put out quaint, watery sessions, like this year: Poetry: Inspiring Lines and Poetry: Chapter & Verse.

Fiction get panels like Los Angeles Fiction: Living In Paradise or Writing Science. How about Science in Poetry or Poetry and Place? Feminism in Poetry would be great seminar.

Anyway...it’s also been a great week for Cher scholarship. I Found Some Blog commenter Rob emailed  an MP3 of an old Elton John song called “Snow Queen” which appears to be a none-too-approving disrespect on Cher circa the mid 70s.

This single apparently was the 1976 UK B-side for "Don’t Go Breaking My Heart" and even Kiki Dee makes an appearance singing backup.  The credits listed Elton John, Dave Johnstone, Kiki Dee, David Nutter for music and Bernie Taupin, per usual, as lyrics. You can find the lyrics here at Elton John Lyrics Site.

The song has a confusing object at first. It begins directed to a “you” person.: “You remind me so much / of her when you’re walkin.” Then in the chorus the song starts jumps to the Snow Queen suddenly, presumably one who reminds the writer of being like the "you" person.

Exactly who reminds Bernie Taupin of Cher, I'd like to know. Is that even possible that someone else could be anything resembling Cher? I don’t think so. Just what are the odds?

Early descriptions include “You’re a cushion uncrumpled / You’re a bed that’s unruffled.” Is this talking about the Snow Queen aka Cher here?  “The finest bone china / bone china around”? Is this a poetic reference to Cher’s great cheek bone structure?

Hey now, the snow queen sounds a bit chilly so far. The lyrics state “she’s got the world on a string / like white wine when it’s chilled.” More chilliness again. And why does white wine have so much power over the world…when it’s chilled?

“I believe the Snow Queen / lives somewhere in the hills.” Had Cher moved from Carolwood to Malibu then (because that's a beach) or to the hills of her Egyptian palace by 1976? Didn't that house take years to  build? But at least that one is in the  Benedict Canyon  Hills.

“The snow queen reigns in warm LA / behind the cold black gates.” So the gates of Carolwood were black. But they weren't in the hills. See the gates of the Carolwood and Benedict Canyon abodes. (Don’t ask me why I have these picks.)

The best lines of the song are "Arms are spread like icicles / upon a frosted cake.” Yet more chilliness. Are they insinuating Cher is a cold beeotch?

“Your talons are tested / they’re polished and they’re shaped.” The lyric sheet replaces the first talons   with talents but I think Elton is singing and referring to her nails or talons. “Your talents are wasted / on men who have no tasted” (Gregg Allman?)

And here is where we get in to real evidence that the song is indeed about Cher. “…passion means more than /a wardrobe of gowns, TV ratings /a fragile waist and a name.” Why a fragile waist; I mean, it’s tiny, but fragile?

Then fade out clinches it when Elton sings "I Got You Babe" three times, "Bang Bang" three times and then “aAnd the beat goes on.” I had to turn my iPod volume up to hear the last bit but it's there.

Honestly, Cher had a lot going on in 1976...even Elton would agree. I’d be a beeotch too if I was pregnant on national television, the father was a drug-addled Chia Pet, and my TV ratings and records were stalling like an Edsel.

It sounds like someone didn’t get their invitation to a Cher soirée. I don’t know much about Cher’s relationship to Elton John back then. He was a guest on the debut of the Cher Show back in 1975; but I believe I read somewhere that Cher wanted to open for Elton John when she was promoting Black Rose and he refused. Rumor? Fact? I dunno. She showed up at his Audience with Elton John in 1997 acting pretty chummy.

I actually really like this song. There’s an odd moment at the end where the bongos go crazy but I think it’s a lovely contemplative piece and would be really pleasant for a couples skate.

It also reminds me of Barry Manilow’s early 70s song “She’s a Star” from the album Tryin to Get the Feelin Again. The song was supposedly about Bette Midler.

It would be fun to hear Cher cover “Snow Queen.” It could be a  sort of F.U. peace-offering. She could keep most of the lyrics but sing "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," "Rocket Man" and "Sorry Seems to Be"…at the fade out.

And speaking of talons and the lovely 80s Interview cover picture I talked about last week, my Richard Bernstein photo book came today. Whoo hoo! Bernstein did those Warhol-esque Interview covers for many years. In the book, Bernstein calls himself a “thoroughbred New Yorker and his photo looks like it fell the wall of an  80s hair salon.

Inside there’s a short essay on Cher that attempts to conceptualize her stardom. It says she’s somewhere between the invention of the Barbie Doll and the Valley Girl, “a money-to-burn celebrity,” and “someone every Jewish princess, Dry Wasp bitch, valley girl from Tuxedo, South Carolina and Hi Hat, Kentucky, can relate to.” I don’t quite get that, but okay.

“Today [this is the early 80s, remember] Cher’s famous claws for nails are clipped. So is her windfall of glossy black hair…Her nails were like falcon’s talons, a mighty two inches long and dipped in sanguine crayon. Cher's eyelashes still flap like porch awnings.”

“She wants to be an ordinary high-serious actress so she's moved to New York...”

Ah yes…so pedestrian to be an award winning actress when you can be a cultural icon. With that I agree.

Songs Cher Should Cover

Since my first thought of having a Cher blog, I’ve wanted to include a feature called “Songs Cher Should Cover.” You run into so many songs here and there that you think have that special stamp of Cher-potential. I always thought Elton John’s “Take Me To The Pilot” would really kick ass and I felt a self-satisfied sort of delight when finally seeing her sing it with the Pointer Sisters on a re-run of her mid-70s Cher Show. However, in my fantasy it was a Sonny & Cher cover for some reason. I could see them arm in arm, rocking to the chorus: “Take me to the pilot; lead me to the chamber. Take me to the pilot; I am but a stranger. Na na na. Na na na!” (See picture to the right.)

I feel the same way about the song “Best Imitation of Myself” by Ben Folds Five. Not only does the song rock hardy, but Ben Folds’ lyrics seem truly written about Cher, like those Prisoner songs back in 1979, only smarter. (I mean we all know Cher loves to shop, but I’d like the few-and-far-between biographical numbers to be more informative than she buys one in every color.

I feel like a quote out of context…withholding the rest so I can be free what you wanna see.
I got the gestures, sounds, got and the timing down …it’s uncanny. Yeah you’d think it was me.

Did I make me up?
Or make this face ‘til it stuck?
I do the best imitation of myself.

It’s a song that says both “Impersonators out there, take heed – you can’t do this better than me” and  “Everyone else, I am the master of my show; stop judging me and piss off!”

To fully disclose, I’m a Ben Folds fan. I’ve seen Ben Folds Five play in New York City and I saw Ben Folds play alone at the Coachella Music Festival a few years ago. He was amazing without a band, just him pounding away on his piano. I love “Brick,” “Eddie Walker” and “Rockin the Suburbs.” Even the line

“I take the check and face the facts as some producer with computers fixes all my shitty tracks”

makes me smile like Bette Midler might before saying something snarky about “Believe.”

Ben Folds Five also mentions Cher in a cover of the Flaming Lips song, “She Don’t Use Jelly”

“I know a girl who reminds me of Cher. She’s always changing the color of her hair.”

My Dad just sent me the Tom Waits’ album Orphans. I know many pop-fans find Tom Waits un-listen-able. My Ape Culture co-hort Julie Wiskirchen said “[Waits] sings and acts like a crazy person on the subway.” In many ways Waits is the anti-Cher. He’s so anti-image, this is his image. So anti-artifice, that’s his artifice. He’s the pinnacle of rock 'n' roll credibility and would never be caught dead on dance-floor speakers. He dresses down – way, way down. No wigs (as far as we know) and no glitter.

I had the Waits CD once with “Downtown Train” on it. I don’t know what happened to it, which means the CD found its way to the Salvation Army store. A scoundrelish Irishman I used to date re-introduced me to a few Waits tunes which I passed on to my Dad who is now a fan. I didn’t realize Waits sang “Ole 55.” Back then he sounded more like Gregg Allman than the smoking, hard-drinking, gnarly voice we’re hearing today. (Yes I know, Allman has a gnarly voice too; but there's really no comparison.)

I love the new album. The lyrics are stand-out poetry and the pieces are very melodious -- if some of you can get past his voice. Which if you’re acclimated to Sonny Bono shouldn’t be a problem. In fact, I think if it were not for Waits' rough-and-tumble image, these songs would be considered pop songs, they’re so catchy. The album has three CDs. Brawlers is bluesy, Bawlers is more about standards. I haven’t gotten to the last one, Bastards, yet.

But from the blues-infused Brawlers CD, two songs would be great to hear Cher cover: “Lowdown” and “Lost at the Bottom of the World.” They are lyrically strong (like her later Warner Bros material) and they offer contrast to her musical oeuvre, such as the ballads of It’s a Man’s World did. Those ballads gave Cher “a slow moment” in the overall show.

To this point, it was tragic when we lost “The Way of Love” from the set of Cher’s Farewell tour because that was the only quiet moment in a frantic, non-stop show. Just like Celebration at Caesars had “Take It To the Limit” and “On My Own,” the Farewell needed a ballad or two. We need a quiet, melodic contrast to all the lights and color, just as a visual design needs a contrast between light and dark or rough and smooth.

Plus, Waits would be a respectable choice for someone interested in amping up their rock 'n' roll street cred. In fact, “Ole 55” would be a great cover too.

And now the sun’s comin up
I’m riding with lady luck
Freeway cars and trucks…
Freeway cars and trucks…

If my mind’s somewhere else, you won’t be able to tell…
I do the best imitation of myself.