The best covers don’t polish up a song we already love. They stomp all over it and drag out whatever was lurking underneath. Johnny Cash did it. The White Stripes did it. The Dickies did it. And one of my all-time favorites came from Los Angeles glam-punk legends Celebrity Skin.
Gary Jacoby and Tim Ferris started the band after Vagina Dentata, their project with Pat Smear, ended. They brought in fellow Germs alum Don Bolles, along with the feral guitars of Bob Haas and Jason Shapiro, and somehow built something that was equal parts punk rock, Hollywood spectacle, trashy glamour, and musical mayhem. They lived together in a dance studio overlooking Hollywood Boulevard they called the “Celebrity Suites,” and got banned from every club in L.A. for their hijinks and seemingly endless thrift-store costume changes.
These guys weren’t interested in behaving themselves.
So naturally, they decided to stomp all over ABBA.
They took “S.O.S.,” ABBA’s pop masterpiece, and added screaming guitars, distortion, speed, and attitude. The melody is still in there, buried under the wreckage, but Celebrity Skin never treats “S.O.S.” like a sacred object. They treat it like something they found in the street and dragged through Hollywood.
They didn’t just make “S.O.S.” louder or faster. They turned it into a monster that refused to behave. ABBA’s version is perfectly aching. Celebrity Skin’s is desperate, dirty, theatrical, dangerous. It sounds like the song stayed up all night, smoked too many cigarettes, put on eyeliner, and wandered into a club at 2 a.m. looking for trouble.