The Life Of A Song, Vol. 2: Multiple Artists - "Train Kept A-Rollin'"

[Apologies for the long delay in returning to an acceptable reviewing schedule; I shall soon return to the established US/UK historical revue, but I just wanted to put the ‘Life Of A Song’ project more firmly on its feet first, as well as complete my evaluation of Mass Effect, and both these projects end up swallowing a lot of the small amount of free time I have on my hands. Not to mention all the physical and emotional exhaustion going on, though I guess it’s just regular routine by now as you learn to normalize the un-normalize-able. Anyway, back to fun times...]

Gather ’round me, children, a story I will tell, of Donald MacRae Wilhoite Jr., the Andrews Sisters knew him well (his ‘Beat Me Daddy, Eight To The Bar’ is still one of the coolest song titles to come out of the 1940s). Little did Donald, or Don Raye for short, suspect how much history he’d be making when he wrote this song way, way back in 1942:

The song was supposed to go into the soundtrack of the latest Abbott and Costello movie, Ride ’Em Cowboy, where it would have been sung by none other than Ella Fitzgerald herself; for some reason, though, it was ultimately cut from the movie (Ella still gets to sing in the movie, and it is a rare treat to see her in her youthful prime — I suppose that ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket (I Lost My Yellow Basket)’ was still her most commonly recognizable song at the moment, so, of course, this is precisely what they had her perform... but we’re really getting off course here).

Eventually, Ella still got to issue a commercial recording of the song, on which she was backed by The Ink Spots, but the earliest release was still by Ella Mae Morse as a vocalist for the Freddie Slack Orchestra — and it is also notable for having been recorded on May 21, 1942, during the very first recording session held for the newly formed Capitol Records, and earning the young label its very first gold record. That’s right, children: without ‘Cow Cow Boogie’ there would have been no American distribution of Beatles albums and no Beach Boys, and all you damn Yankees would have to associate the idea of «pop music reaches maturity» with Elvis making the transition from ‘Blue Hawaii’ to ‘Suspicious Minds’.

Joking aside, ‘Cow Cow Boogie’ is still a lot of fun, and a bit of attentive listening probably lets us see that the glorious role it would come to play in the development of rock’n’roll music was hardly a total coincidence. Ella Mae herself, coming out of Mansfield, Texas, was one of the 1940s’ hippest singers, a rock’n’roll lady in all but name — ‘House Of Blue Lights’ from 1946 is such a perfect Chuck Berry song that it would actually be covered by Chuck Berry, and I’m not sure he does a better job on it than Ella did.

‘Cow Cow Boogie’ by itself is not nearly quite as rock’n’roll, but musically it is even more interesting: a mid-tempo country-western tune as far as its main melodic lines are concerned, but arranged as a trendy urban jazz number — perfectly in line with its lyrical content, telling us a story about a somewhat extravagant ranch hand who seems to have been infected with the big city bug: "He’s just too much / He’s got a knocked out western accent with a Harlem touch / He was raised on local weed / He’s what you call a swing half breed". The cowboy’s "most peculiar cowboy song" which he "learned in the city" goes "get along, get hip little doggies get along" — certainly a play on the traditional folk narrative of the cowboy directing his livestock (this old Cartwright Brothers’ performance of ‘Get Along Little Doggies’ may or may not have been the direct inspiration), but the mutation to "get hip little doggies" is definitely something he could only pick up "in the city" in the 1940s.

Additionally, Ella Mae’s performance somehow manages to be sexy and seductive even if there is no explicit sexual content in the song itself — but I guess seduction can be symbolic as well, in this case reminding us of the irresistible attractive force of the big city, bound to make its mark even on the conservative rustic scene... right? Something like that, I’d imagine. (There’s an even more seductive document of Ella Mae performing the song more than ten years since the original recording — provided you can stand the sight of Liberace, the Supreme God of Cornball, her appearance on his TV show in 1954 features a tightened up and modernized run through the song).

Interestingly, ‘Cow Cow Boogie’ went on to have a life of its own on the jazz circuit — while failing to become a true «songbook classic», it has still been covered by dozens of various artists in both vocal and instrumental versions, though arguably not even Ella Fitzgerald’s version manages to improve on the tasty flavor of Morse’s original (for a recent cover version, check out this 2019 live performance from Yellow Magic Orchestra’s own Haruomi Hosono — nothing too special, but the oddness factor got to count for something). Fate, however, decreed that it would be not the song itself, but one of its offsprings that would eventually become a household names for everybody to whom the term «rock’n’roll» mattered even remotely.

When Myron Carlton Bradshaw, commonly known as "Tiny", decided to rewrite ‘Cow Cow Boogie’ as ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’, he was already 44 years old (and would, in fact, only have seven years left to live). His musical career was somewhat reminiscent of the much more famous Big Joe Turner: having first made his name on the swingin’ scene in the 1930s, he was able to make the post-war transition to rhythm’n’blues and score a bunch of hits in the boogie / jump-blues style, getting in the groove and staying hip along with all the cool cats out there despite his age (although, frankly, «being hip» and «being young» were by no means as synonymous in the late Forties / early Fifties as they would become with the onset of the rock’n’roll era). We do not remember a whole lot of what he recorded back then, because most of the second-rate jump blues heroes became so very irrelevant with the coming of Little Richard and Elvis, but his King Records sound was fairly solid anyway, just not too outstanding (‘Well Oh Well’ from 1950 was his biggest hit and it’s pretty typical of his sound).

There was nothing too special about ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’, either, back in 1951, but if you knew the pop scene well enough to catch its origins, you’d certainly be amused at the results of Tiny’s implanting the boogie virus into the languid country-western trot of ‘Cow Cow Boogie’. The lyrics preserve traces of the old rhythmic and syllabic patterns: "out on the plains" becomes "I caught a train", "he trucked them on down the old fairway" becomes "she trucked on down the ol’ fair lane", and "get along, get hip little doggies get along" becomes "get along, sweet little woman get along". So if you ever wondered about the language describing this fortuitous meeting between the protagonist and his "real gone dame" on the train from New York City to El Paso, keep in mind that much of it goes back to the song’s origins when no trains whatsoever were involved. (I mean, what would old fair lane, as opposed to the easily understandable old fairway, mean anyway? and why would the real gone dame be trucking on down it, right?).

Well, regardless of the strange (some would even say lazy) approach to rewriting the lyrics, Bradshaw’s recording did hit the spot. I cannot get too excited about its musical side: seems like pretty standard fare jump-blues, good groove, lively sax solo and all, but hardly anything to distinguish it from hundreds of similar recordings from the same era. Structurally, there’s this little unusual bit about a song essentially having two different choruses — "get along, sweet little woman..." and "train kept a-rollin’ all night long..." coming after each other as if to add an extra layer of build-up, but this hardly counts for a revolutionary achievement. Probably much more interesting for the «casual pervy listener» was the story, basically depicting a random sexual encounter with a hot stranger on a train ride — every libidinous male’s favorite fantasy, right? and certainly not something you’d be commonly hearing on the airwaves in 1951, not even with most of the message (rather poorly) hiding behind all the train innuendos.

Amusingly, the lyrics still retain a little bit of the "western" flavor by making the train journey from New York City to El Paso (through Albuquerque, which does actually make sense from a geographic perspective and is not there just to introduce the world to the rhyme between Albuquerque and real gone jerk). The singer is probably related to that same old cowboy from Santa Fe in ‘Cow Cow Boogie’, and the real gone dame is the hipster chick from New York City who’s so free-spirited and all, she wouldn’t mind taking a roll in the sleeping couch with a fine young ranch hand returning to the prairie from a trip to the big city. We thus take the deeply hidden sexuality of ‘Cow Cow Boogie’ (which Ella Mae Morse did her best to endorse, after Ella Fitzgerald could not properly herald — uh, sorry, that just came out of nowhere) and push it up one notch further. Wanna get laid? Hottail it to Grand Central, presto.

But obviously, I am writing all this not because these thoughts jump out at me (of me?) instinctively whenever I put on Tiny Bradshaw’s original; in fact, I wouldn’t even think of listening to Tiny Bradshaw’s original if it weren’t for its transformation in the rock’n’roll age. Admittedly, I suppose that if not for Aerosmith, most people wouldn’t listen to the Yardbirds either; and if not for the Yardbirds, most of them wouldn’t listen to The Rock’n’Roll Trio — history follows its own backward laws. But one thing is for certain: it is with The Rock’n’Roll Trio’s recording of the song (July 2, 1956) that it truly became the song, probably belonging on any serious «Top 10 Songs That Shaped Rock’n’Roll» list. And I don’t need to scrutinize the lyrics or conduct meticulous contextual analysis when listening to Johnny Burnette, Dorsey Burnette, and Paul Burlison tearing it up. Because it sounded like nothing else back in 1956, and it still sounds like nothing else even today.

I don’t really know if the Burnettes themselves felt any extraordinary potential within the song when they opted to cover it for their next Coral single down in Nashville, or if they simply chose it by accident out of the miriads of R&B records they listened to. Changing the accent from jump blues to rock’n’roll, they gave the tune a much more frenetic, almost paranoid pace; and if Tiny sang the song as if he were amicably bragging about his sexual conquest to assembled friends over a barbecue, Johnny Burnette delivered his vocals with all the exuberance of a smooth-faced whippersnapper who just ran five miles to tell his buddies that he finally scored, and that this one particular train trip will be forever burned in his memory.

But the beat here is not unique, and Johnny’s rockabilly vocals are strong but formulaic for the genre. What is totally unbeatable, though, is the distorted guitar tone — that little wonder from the early days of distortion when people were discovering it in various ways, not entirely sure of how to tame it and regulate it, and unable to reproduce it at later dates in the exact same way. There are, in fact, exactly two Rock’n’Roll Trio songs to use that guitar tone — ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ and ‘Honey Hush’ — and both were issued as the A- and B-side of the same single (which did not sell because "guess you guys weren’t ready for that yet"). Discussion is still open on whether the guitar was actually played by Paul Burlison or by the Nashville great Grady Martin, who was definitely present at the sessions — but regardless of the correct answer (most people these days tend to lean toward the Grady Martin choice), it would be hopeless to go search for more of that playing style on any other Grady Martin records, either. It was just a once-in-a-lifetime event.

What makes the distortion here so special is that it is played with a bit of delay, almost like an echo of the regular ringing note, and has something like a 75% chance of cropping up, in a state of quantum-like uncertainty, coming and going in a mystical haze — confirming the suspicion that it might have had something to do with malfunctioning equipment, but they liked it well enough to keep it, and then, of course, the equipment was fixed and the sound was gone forever, because perfection is predictable but mistakes are unique. And this mistake resulted in arguably the most badass sound of the entire 1950s; in fact, it’s so badass that it totally sounds imposing and sinister even today, and probably always will. The guitar does not just bark, roar, and grumble like it typically does in distorted rock tracks; it snarls back at you with isolated notes as if you were directly pinching its nerves and it shook and shuddered in response like a wild animal would. It’s not exactly the kind of attitude you’d expect from a song about a "real gone dame", but it’s very much the kind of attitude you’d expect from, say, a classic Stooges track... yes, that’s right, fifteen years later.

Because "these guys were so much ahead of their time" is a cliché always thrown around out of straightahead exuberance, but in this particular case it’s true. Nobody got this, played this, or bought this back in 1956 — and, in fact, even if the Burnette Brothers on the whole got their share of respect and recognition (The Beatles were pretty big fans and all), I notice that ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ remained pretty much uncovered, either by their American rockabilly peers or the early British Invasion bands, until 1965, which is fairly symbolic. All the young British rhythm’n’blues pioneers had their Fats Domino and Little Richard and Chuck Berry covers from around 1962 to 1964, but it took the semi-independent emergence of early hard rock, spear­headed by ‘You Really Got Me’ and Jeff Beck’s first recordings with the Yardbirds, to finally get the song recognized as the long-lost biological father of that entire strain.

In fact, before looking at the Yardbirds’ version, let us first look at one other interesting direction the song had taken just a few months before Jeff Beck and his friends turned it into a template. This is a version that is probably known to very few people, but in May 1965, it — along with the very same ‘Honey Hush’ as a B-side — was released as a single by none other than Mr. David Edward Sutch, commonly known to his friends as «Screaming Lord Sutch», the UK’s self-proclaimed inheritor of the macabre spirit of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and arguably its first glam-rock / shock-rock hero, not tremendously talented on any other account than flamboyance but definitely way ahead of his time for the meek standards of 1963–1965.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Sutch picked this particular couple of songs precisely due to their subtle «demonic» appeal — their subject matters were not particularly shocking by 1965, but they sure stood out even from all the other recordings by the Rock’n’Roll trio for their naughty, aggressive flavor. That said, Sutch was not so much about aggression himself as he was about goofiness and extravagance, and this version, slower and denser and more multi-layered than the original(s), is far more carnivalesque. Sutch himself, who was not much of a singer, delivers the lyrics with the pompousness of a cabaret MC, not particularly caring about their content — not only does he totally mess up the verses, but he even ends up replacing Albuquerque with ol’ Kentucky, probably because they learned all those words by ear and the geography of New Mexico was a little too much for a native of Hampstead (he could have taken a few lessons from Mick Jagger’s meticulous study of the American landscape in ‘Route ’66’, though). It’s still funny, though, so it hits the spot.

More musically interesting than Lord Sutch’s buffoonery is the production on the record, courtesy of the extravagantly-futuristically-minded legendary Joe Meek, the biggest weirdo on the UK production scene at the time who felt equally attracted to other weirdos: he was the only person at the time who could make your guitar sound like a saxophone and your saxophone sound like a guitar, which is more or less what he does on the song’s instrumental section. Oh, and that, by the way, is Ritchie Blackmore himself on guitar out there — starting out his solo as if he’d just finished studying all of Clapton’s lead work on the first Yardbirds singles, but then throwing in his own trademark trills (catch them at around 1:20 into the song) that will certainly be familiar to any Deep Purple fan in the audience.

On the whole, this is pretty heavy stuff for 1965, not to mention that it really sounds more like a glam number from the early 1970s — with more of a T. Rex or New York Dolls vibe to it than almost any other number from the same year. Even if the song went nowhere further in that musical direction, it’s still fascinating to see how many different types of fire it could light inside different people. But once again, the world wasn’t really any more ready for Screaming Lord Sutch back in 1965 than it would be in 1982 when he founded The Official Monster Raving Loony Party, because, you know, people typically prefer voting for monster raving loonies when they don’t call themselves by their true name and all.

Anyway, as fun and groovy as this particular dead end can be, it’s time to turn our backs on it and rejoin the song on the more productive part of its journey. I do not know if it was a total coincidence that Lord Sutch and The Yardbirds recorded the song at about the same time, or if one of them influenced the other, but I do know that Jeff Beck always was a big fan of the rockabilly scene and that it was his idea to include a Burnette Brothers’ number in the band’s repertoire; the song was recorded on September 12, 1965, but, strangely enough, was not released as a single, ending up on the US-only LP release Having A Rave Up in November of the same year (so, technically, the Brits were stuck with Lord Sutch’s version for the time being).

The first thing we notice about Beck’s reinvetion of the song is the expressiveness — the opening guitar overdrive sounds almost exactly like a train whistle. It’s a nice touch, but not particularly original, as people had imitated train whistles before on a variety of instruments; moreover, even if the Burnette brothers did not use the same trick to open their version, it was still fairly sound-symbolic — the distorted guitar propelled the song forward like a bonafide grumbly train engine, creaky, rusty, but steady. Certainly Jeff Beck was not the kind of guy to miss the train metaphor, and he pretty much put it before the horse here, so to speak.

What is far more important, though, is the riff. It’s difficult to assert that the original even had a riff; technically, the rhythm guitar part could count as one, but it was not a perfectly chiseled, loud, hummable, repetitive melody that comes to mind whenever the word "riff" is mentioned. It was more of a "chug" than a "riff", if you get my meaning. In Beck’s hands, though, the song grew itself one of the most classic riffs of all time — a monster of a riff, sonically inheriting the hard-rock hits of the early Kinks but taking them a few steps further in terms of complexity without losing the emotional edge. The Kinks’ hardest riffs were constructed in such a way as to give the impression of swirling in circles; Beck’s ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ makes you feel like you are constantly driven forward, in a veritable Ferrari of a train whose purpose is not just to get you where you want to be, but to get there way before everybody else does. In fact, it pursues the very same purpose that thrash metal did in the Eighties — give you the feeling of punching through walls without the expense of actually breaking your knuckles.

On the other hand, it’s relatively complex, too. The last bar, with its unexpected 5-5-5-7 "hiccup", is all about establishing Jeff Beck’s personality — combining the primal brutality of rock’n’roll with technical prowess and musical inventiveness; in 1965, he was unquestionably better at this than just about everybody else (one might even argue that he would be best at this than just about everybody else until the day he died, but then he would never be quite as radio-friendly as he was in his Yardbirds years). You could say that last bar makes the song a trifle jazzier, or you could use more metaphors and say it’s like the wild beast pausing for a couple seconds to pant and growl before returning back to the prowl, but it’s definitely not the kind of riff you would expect from Keith Richards or Dave Davies at the time. Jimmy Page (who would soon be doing the honors himself) and Tony Iommi sure gave it a good listen, though.

The single weirdest thing about this version, though, is probably not the Jeff Beck guitar parts, great as they are, but the decision to overdub two different lead vocals from Keith Relf, sounding  slightly out of tune with each other and even singing somewhat different lyrics. This was obviously just a gimmick, of the let’s-do-it-because-we-can variety, but it adds a healthy dose of rambling chaos to the recording and it agrees well with Jeff’s own style: Beck himself belongs to that class of guitarists who usually prefer to constantly play around with their melodic structures, introducing little changes based on the spur of the moment rather than strictly sticking to the repetitive basic pattern like a rock, and the riff of ‘Train’ provides ample opportunity to fool around with endless variations (not so amply demonstrated on the studio original, but certainly evident in later live performances of the song).

In between Beck’s guitar and Relf’s disorienting voice overdubs, ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ completes its transformation from a sleazy sex song into an aggressive power trip. The Rock’n’Roll Trio initiated the process, but Johnny Burnette’s singing was still the singing of an exuberant, over-sexed teen, and Paul-Burlison-or-Grady-Martin’s guitar could still be interpreted on many different levels, including sexual. On the other hand, few lead singers in 1965 could sound less sexy than Keith Relf, and few guitar players were less concerned about using their prowess to score chicks than Jeff Beck. This is why there’s nothing wrong with the lyrics being almost completely undecipherable this time around — all you need to know is that the train kept a-rollin’ all night long, train kept a-rollin’ all night long, as the train is now more of a symbol of relentlessly pushing forward rather than, you know, pushing inside.

This is why, when circumstances forced Keith Relf to swap the lyrics at the last moment, he did just that without blinking. This alternate version of the song, retitled ‘Stroll On’, is a bit of a secret, though not a particularly well guarded one, familiar to both fans of Michelangelo Antonioni and owners of the expanded CD editions of Having A Rave-Up. I won’t dwell on how The Yardbirds ended up playing in an Antonioni movie and on the thematic importance of ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’, specifically, for the impact of Blowup — as you probably already know, The Yardbirds weren’t originally supposed to be there at all, as the director was going for The Who, but circumstances played into the hands of the competition and it would be Jeff Beck who had to do the guitar-smashing thing (I don’t think that Jeff was ever a big fan of the ritual, but he was known to be rather harsh-tempered when life deals him lemons, so I think he manages quite a convincing feat in the movie).

Anyway, the reason I am specifically addressing this version is not because it opens up another strange road from ‘Cow Cow Boogie’ to the pretense of mid-Sixties’ arthouse cinema, but because it belongs to the tiny time window in which both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page played twin lead guitar for The Yardbirds, and this is one of the tiny handful of cases (along with ‘Beck’s Bolero’ and ‘Happenings Ten Years Ago’) where you can hear it in all its glory. Dueling lead guitars in 1966 were still a major novelty, let alone dueling lead guitars by two acknowledged virtuosos of the instrument, and thus our song makes its historical mark in that department, too.

My admiration for ‘Stroll On’, however, is not so much due to the fantastic dueling guitars as it is to the fact that the Big Riff, introduced in 1965, has continued to evolve — now played even lower than before, it becomes a thick, iron-clad (or should we rather say lead-clad?) monster of a guitar line, arguably heavier than anything Led Zeppelin would ever record, comparable rather to the Tony Iommi and early Metallica levels of chthonic bass-heaviness. Admirably, the effect is achieved purely by downtuning and taking away all the treble, not by throwing on a lot of distortion — the sound is monumentally powerful, but clean, like the echoes of some giant demon burrowing deep underground. I simply do not have anything to compare it to if we’re talking 1966... or 1967, 1968, and 1969, for that matter. (I also have no idea of who is actually driving that riff home — Beck or Page; I would guess that it was the addition of Jimmy that made the difference, but I could be very wrong).

Relf’s new lyrics for the song, which completely ditch the original story and replace it with a generic "you’re a bad bitch and I’m so totally /not/ over you" narrative, are, in comparison, no big poetic masterpiece, but in a way, they fit better into the new musical arrangement. After all, ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ used to be a piece of naughty, sleazy humor; with the Yardbirds trans­forming it into a mean and lean rockin’ machine, it made total sense for the lyrics to match the new mood, and "I’m strollin’ on, be your turn to cry, I’m strollin’ on, you’ll wish you never lied" is a decent touch, albeit perhaps a trifle too whiny (Keith Relf was a polite young lad, though, so this is as far as he could go with insulting ladies). But it’s an important step on the way to ‘Dazed And Confused’ (which began life as a Yardbirds number before being inherited by Led Zeppelin) and its association of deeply chthonic musical heaviness with feelings of romantic betrayal.

Speaking of Led Zeppelin, everybody probably knows that ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ was the very first song that the newly assembled band played for their rehearsals in August ’68; they kept on regularly playing it throughout 1968–1969 and later on even resuscitated it for their last tour in 1980, but never attempted a new studio recording. I have heard some bootlegs both from 1969 and 1980 and I cannot say I’m a big fan; like so much else of what they did, the song was contaminated with too much of Page’s and Plant’s narciccism (or call it «adventurous experimental spirit», if you wish), both in the form of unnecessary musical effects and flourishes and generic wailings. Still, I guess the fact of Led Zeppelin playing the song does more to support the statement of how ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ deeply influenced the heavy metal sphere than, well, merely stating it with words and all.

That said, as I already indicated, there was one little problem with the direction that the song took when appropriated by the Yardbirds. In all its previous incarnations, it was dirty, more concerned about attracting the undesirables and spooking away adepts of clean family entertainment. The Yardbirds extolled its musical potential and put it at the forefront of a whole new genre, but, one might argue, at the expense of somewhat gentrifying the song, even "intellectualizing" it (I mean, it was eligible for the soundtrack to a frickin’ Antonioni movie, right? where the rest of the music was provided by Herbie frickin’ Hancock, right?). Come to think of it, this was totally in line with the arisal of art-rock and prog-rock in the mid-to-late Sixties. But as the Seventies came along and values were shifting once again, it almost became a necessity to «de-artsify» the old warhorse. Make America dirty again! And you know who was the best candidate for the job.

Let’s face it, the young and feisty Aerosmith had a tough challenge to beat: after both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page took their turns with the song, it might not be exactly clear whatever could remain for the likes of Joe Perry. (In fact, so much nothing remained for the likes of Joe Perry that the lead guitar playing you hear in the studio recording on Get Your Wings is the trendy glam-rock duo of Alice Cooper’s Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner; naturally, Joe did play all the leads in Aerosmith’s live performances.)

The one obvious change introduced by Aerosmith is that the song was basically performed twice; the first half is a slowed-down, syncopated, somewhat funky groove variant that might seem more inspired by Grand Funk Railroad or Bad Company than the forefathers — and, frankly, feels a little sluggish, but I would guess intentionally so because, just as you’re ready to drop from exhaustion, the song shifts gears and picks up the pace, becoming quite close to the Yardbirds’ version. (However, the overdubbed live noises, which producer Jack Douglas allegedly nicked off the tapes of Concert For Bangla Desh, make no sense whatsoever and are in somewhat bad taste).

But the two-section structure, other than psychological baiting, also serves a more theoretical purpose — the first part is literally «this is how we’re rollin’ today in the 1970s!», while the second part is kind of like an acknowledgment of «yeah, but all the first-rate rollin’ was still going on in the 1960s, dude». And yet... of course, the fast part of the song still sounds updated for the Seventies, primarily in that it adds more arena-style bombast while still managing to be tight, crunchy, and well-disciplined. Aerosmith took that sound and made it big — loud bass, loud drums, a guitar sound that threatens to occupy all frequencies, and on top of that, the dirtiest, screechiest singer to have picked up the relay so far. This is just the kind of material for Steven Tyler to sing, and he never lets Tiny Bradshaw and Ella Mae Morse down when it comes to reminding us of how deliciously naughty it was all supposed to be in the first place.

Interestingly, Tyler once again changed the lyrics up a little bit. "She was a hepster and a real gone dame", a bit of slang that was probably thought as antiquated in 1974, became "she rather handsome, we kinda looked the same" — I don’t know if I’m supposed to envy or pity a lady who kinda looks like Steven Tyler (then again, they do say that Liv looks quite a bit like her father in some facial features), but perhaps the main idea here was rather to stress the consensual nature of whatever might have taken place in the vicinity of Albuquerque. And then "with a heave and a ho" on some of the choruses becomes "I’m in heat, I’m in love" which is, well, just a way of letting audiences know that we’re allowing ourselves to be more direct and less metaphoric in the middle of The "Me" Decade. It ain’t genius, but it sure is marking time.

Do I love Aerosmith’s version? Not necessarily — I do love a lot of the hard rock classics they wrote themselves in their peak period, but with ‘Train’, they didn’t exactly manage to propel the song to some substantially different plane of existence, like the Rock’n’Roll Trio and the Yardbirds did. They could have concentrated on the significantly reworked slower, funkier version, but they were relatively clever lads and they probably realized that it would simply be judged an inferior re-interpretation by everybody with an opinion. So they just took what was already there and gave it a «Seventies’ hard rock» sheen, which was perfectly legit and still remains an enjoyable experience, but, you know, wasn’t nearly as creative as writing ‘Walk This Way’ or even ‘Rats In The Cellar’.

But if the effort is to be rated about a B for creativity, it certainly deserves an A+ for symbolism: here is the quintessential hard rock song of the Fifties, transformed into the quintessential hard rock song of the Sixties, and now... well, maybe not transformed into the quintessential hard rock song of the Seventies, but nurtured and homaged by one of the quintessential hard rock bands of the Seventies, with old values transitioning into the new vessels of the new decade with pride and glory. Unfortunately, it did not chart when released as a single — but then, neither did the Rock’n’Roll Trio’s version, and the Yardbirds, as I already mentioned, did not put it out as a single at all. Guess the world was not really ready for that kind of heavenly heaviness in either of the three decades.

If we want to get snobby about it, we can. The Yardbirds in their prime were all about opening their minds to new ideas, with Beck and the rest borrowing heavily from the thriving jazz scene and combining melodic and harmonic innovations with advances in studio technology... and still not forgetting to kick serious rock’n’roll ass when the music demanded it (and nothing demands kicking ass on a mightier level than ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’). Aerosmith certainly weren’t closed to new ideas, but their top priority at all times was to have a lot of (preferably dirty) fun, and while they were reinventing the song for the Seventies, they weren’t really reinventing the Seventies with the song, know what I mean? Or here’s another metaphor: to the Yardbirds, this music was the kind of jet fuel supposed to launch their musical rocket into uncharted space territory — to Aerosmith, it was the kind of jet fuel you’re provided with at the wildest parties. Strictly for internal consumption. Rumored to seriously increase potency.

With all of that in place, you’d think, perhaps, that ‘Train’ would have made an equally easy transfer to the Eighties — after all, the carnal hedonism of Seventies’ hard rock was quite notoriously inherited (some might say, squandered away) by the glammy pop-metal scene of the following decade, and I was almost sure that, if I tried hard enough, I’d find at least a couple covers by the likes of Def Leppard or Mötley Crüe. But no dice! Apart from an early Mötorhead cover, recorded for their delayed self-titled album in 1977 (which sounds exactly like you’d expect a Mötorhead cover to sound), the only versions of ‘Train’ released in the Eighties belong to neo-rockabilly acts like The Bopcats or Shockabilly. Dread Zeppelin put out a funny cover in 1991 in their usual reggae-rock style, too, but it was all on the level of «alleyway novelty» rather than a serious — conscious or subconscious — attempt to make the song symbolic of the next decade. Somehow it did not survive either the hair metal or the grunge «revolutions».

Still, you got to give credit to a song that served as a fresh vehicle for contemporary ideas over four decades — from Ella Mae Morse to Aerosmith, it somehow ended up as a genuine linker between the hepster swag of the Forties, the R&B and rockabilly explosions of the Fifties, the progressive hard rock tendencies of the Sixties, and the musical hedonism of the Seventies. If there’s a more blatantly transparent musical Dr. Who for all that time period than ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’, I still gotta hear it. But I doubt it.

Actually, the reason why the song finished the major part of its journey with Aerosmith is not too difficult: like most of its contemporaries, it did not survive the big rift transition that took us into the truly modern era with punk, New Wave, and everything that came after. Few things did — most of the abundant cover versions of pre-1975 songs by post-1975 artists work more like tributes and acknowledgements (tipping our hats to our past influences and all that) than true artistic innovations. From that perspective, ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ is also quite telling, setting a big fat delimiter here not between «pre-rock’n’roll» and «post-rock’n’roll» music as we are usually used to (pre-Elvis / post-Elvis, pre-Beatles / post-Beatles, whatever), but rather between «pre-modern» and «(post)-modern» times, you know, when the Beatles find themselves on the same side of the fence with Duke Ellington, Sinatra, and Ella Mae Morse rather than with Talking Heads and Radiohead.

Before acknowledging that, want it or not, all things must pass away once we reach El Paso, I’ll just leave you with this performance from the 2009 Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame concert, where the goddamn symbolism just goes through the roof:

While I am, in general, very much not a fan of the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, and most of the live playing from its puffed-up ceremonies ranges from uninspired to cringeworthy, this particular version is an exception. The fact that they assembled an entire army of guitarists to play here ("this is rhythm guitar playing heaven, all right?" — Hetfield’s introduction isn’t too far off the mark), in a rare kind of situation, is not merely for the sake of pretentious bombast: Beck, Page, and Joe Perry all have a direct connection to the song, and although Metallica does not, ‘Train’s undeniable contribution to the ultimate development of the thrash metal style could not gain a better acknowledgement. (Not really sure what Ronnie Wood is doing there, other than through his own connection with Jeff in the classic incarnation of the Jeff Beck Group; but since both Paul Burlison and Grady Martin were already dead by 2009, let’s just imagine that they got him as a symbolic replacement for the old-time rockabilly heroes).

There’s a funny moment here near the end, too, when Hammett and Perry finish their solos and Joe gives a signal to either Beck or Page to take on the challenge, but both either decline or pretend not to notice and the whole pack just ends up paying tribute to The Riff for the last verse, without showing off or anything. Because as good as those Beck, Page, or Perry solos were over the years, you can find plenty more examples of kick-ass lead guitar playing from those guys, but it is the main melody of the song that remains one of the purest symbols of rock’n’roll energy teetering on the brink between cathartic and destructive, or, for that matter, between violently ferocious and humorously good-natured. The kind of song they simply stopped writing after 1975, because somewhere along the way this combination of values somehow became outdated and irrelevant — but as long as we keep all these versions in rotation, train shall keep a-rollin’ all night long. With a heave and a ho.