Everybody wants some! A loose interpretation of the musical genius of Van Halen

I came across this one about 10 years ago, not long after it was released. Basically, it's a covers comp done by various Boston-area musicians, taking Van Halen tunes and taking them in very disparate directions. It begins and ends with Eruption. The first version is performed on a pipe organ by a priest. The second version is wanked out on a banjo by some dude appropriately named Crick Diefendorf. Of the 17 tracks, only one is Van Hagar, and it's far, far, far better than the original, thankfully. It's the Gigolo Aunts covering "Why can't this be love?" and it's actually not bad. The rest fall all over the spectrum of being whacked out. The standouts for me are "Everybody wants some", as lounged out by Talking to Animals, "Jump" by Mary Lou Lord (anybody remember her?), Fuzzy's 60s girl-pop version of "Feel your love" complete with sleigh-bells a-jingle, and "Panama" as recorded by Captain Rock. For one thing, his name is Captain Rock, and I wish it were mine. For another thing, it's all played on tubas and trumpets and trombones and stuff, and the vocals sound like they were performed by Animal from the Muppets. It's really awesome and makes you wish your high school's band wasn't completely lame, because if they had played this, booze and drugs and naked women would have fallen from the sky and the basketball games would have been way better. Also really good are Tom Leach's excellent country take on "Dance the night away" and Sam Black Church rocking the fuck out of "Romeo Delight". But for all the good, there's plenty of bad. This mostly plays out with failed experiments. The sort of stuff that might be really fun to fuck around on yourself, but that you'd never want to put on a record. There's also Jajuya's cover of "Jamie's crying", which is well done to be fair, but anything that sounds remotely latin gets shuffled in my brain to the "shit" category, so sorry guys. Mean streets got wrecked, Somebody get me a doctor got wrecked, Little guitars didn't work out so well, Atomic Punk was ruined and Beautiful Girls tried too damn hard to be jaunty and funky and came across like G-love and special sauce all taking their dicks out and waving them in your face.

So it's a really mixed bag, but one well worth listening to.