waiting for a train and another train and another train
Anyway, there’s this Flash and the Pan track called “Waiting for a Train” and it’s new wave but in a sort of shallow way and they do this “choo-choo-CHA” thing at the beginning that’s kind of fun and that’s very Mick Jagger doing the “shufflin’ through the street” bit in The Rolling Stones’ 1978 track “Miss You,” which is not to be confused with the Alabama Shakes song of the same name, which is part of that great pantheon of songs about being a total shithead and loving someone who is also a total shithead and leaning destructively into it (I'm gonna miss you / And your mickey mouse tattoo / And you were living in your Honda Accord), a pantheon that includes such varied songs as Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears’ “Bitch, I Love You” and Frightened Rabbit’s “Modern Leper.” (The Stones’ “Miss You” belongs more in the creepy suitor pantheon, if you could call it that.)
Anyway, “Waiting for a Train”—the Flash and the Pan song—is a synth groove with some meandering lyrics about commuter tedium (Ain't it stupid how some people stare? / Not even, “How do you do?”) and aside from the title it has little to do with the song “Waiting for a Train” from Hans Zimmer’s score of Inception (2010), which doesn’t really have anything to do with any of this but which does have snippets of Édith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien,” which has recently been in Allstate commercials about leaving stuff on the top of your car, and which is in Inception because Zimmer did this whole thing where the song is slowed down and looped and distorted as the protagonist Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) descends deeper into dreams. In some ways it’s cool to think that all the blaring horns of ten ponderous years of action movies actually owe their existence to an Édith Piaf sample but in other ways it’s a disheartening reminder that what originally worked in Inception has since been ruined by its constant application elsewhere. “Waiting for a Train” in Inception gets its name from the scene in which Cobb and his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard, who played Édith Piaf in a 2007 biopic) commit suicide by lying down on a railroad track, a coincidental nod to the blues standard “Trouble in Mind,” which goes: “I'm gonna lay my head / On some lonesome railroad line / Let the 2:19 train / Ease my troubled mind” and which has been covered countless times, for instance by Nina Simone in 1961 and Johnny Cash in 2003.
Anyway, there’s this song by Flash and the Pan called “Waiting for a Train” and in 1983 it was covered by a band called Moonbase, which I can’t find anything about online and which I came across in one of Spotify’s many mysterious compilation albums, 80’s Dance Story Original Italo Hits. I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out why I like the Moonbase version better than the Flash and the Pan version, even though both are kind of silly and the Moonbase version is in many ways messier and less concerned with creating a unified mood than the original. Most notable covers either polish a song (like Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” or Father John Misty’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”) or make more significant structural renovations (like Jimi Hendrix’s cover of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” or Nina Simone’s cover of pretty much anything) or make it something entirely different (like Pet Shop Boys’ rendition of Wayne Carson’s “Always On My Mind”) or are made as a larger conceptual project, like Phish covering whole records live on Halloween as a “costume” or Angelique Kidjo covering Remain In Light, the Talking Heads record that owes its existence to Fela Kuti in the first place. (Then there are covers that cash in on nostalgia in a way that seems designed to make you think it’s not even a cover, like Ariel Pink’s “Baby,” which is actually a cover of Donnie & Joe Emerson, and besides, I only recently learned that Pink, despite that 2010 record that everyone, including me, liked a great deal, has apparently been saying bigoted stuff for years and on January 6 he went to the MAGA rally with fellow musician Jon Maus and his record label dropped him and he cried on Tucker Carlson’s show in what has to be the weirdest man-to-man victimization aesthetic of 2021 so far.)
Anyway, the Moonbase cover of “Waiting for a Train,” which I prefer to the original for reasons that are still unclear, doesn’t really fit any of these. It’s like Moonbase took a track that was already basically a stupid Italo disco song and made it stupider and more Italo disco-y and three minutes longer. Maybe I prefer it because it has that aura of intrigue, that feeling of digging through crates of records and finding something that’s confusing but also kind of groovy. Or maybe I like it because it represents how enjoying music can be as much about the song itself as the whole web of other songs and chance encounters and influences that led you to it, like someone dusting something random off and putting it on and saying, Hey, haven’t we heard this before?
ben tapeworm