Last “Last Friday Night” is a rotten egg
Tuesday, June 28th, 2011The Heavy Boxes have largely built our meager fan base, if you can call it that, via YouTube. Our filmed performance of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,” in particular, has circulated around friends, friends of friends, and among a small crowd of primarily British Kate-loving strangers. However, despite even being featured in the Internet’s most popular blog about the Brontë sisters, our videos remain more of a contained rash than a globally viral phenomenon. So back in November, we hatched a plan to see if we could get slightly closer to being web celebs.
Melanie and I were listening to “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)”, second only to the sublime “Teenage Dream” as the best song on Katy Perry's most recent album. It’s once again produced by the unstoppable Dr. Luke, along with his mentor, Max Martin, the man behind all of the boy band and teen princess hits of the late ‘90s. We knew it was just too good to not be released as a single, so looking ahead at the calendar, we predicted it would drop in late May or early June in an attempt to make it the summer jam of 2011. When it did show up on the radio, we were going to be prepared. The Heavy Boxes spent some time in the studio arranging a cover of the song, out-popping Katy Perry by reharmonizing the chords slightly and playing it like a ‘70s-AM-radio-soft-rock hit, along the lines of the Bay City Rollers or Pilot. While the original song's sax solo provided by Tower of Power/SNL's Lenny Pickett is good, we were going to blow it out of the water with the skronkiest free jazz freakout courtesy of one of Stuart's horn player friends. Then, after perfecting it over the next 5 months perfecting it, we’d bring in our film crew to shoot a nice high quality video of us recording it. It was going to be all edited and ready to be uploaded as soon as summer hit so we could piggyback on the inevitable success of Katy Perry’s original.
Then…we got busy. And it never materialized. Just as we expected, Katy’s single came out in early June, and now sits at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 (her previous single, “E.T.”, is directly below it at #5). So here I remain, still wallowing in obscurity, with only you, Dear Reader, to keep me company. Perhaps someday I will upload the demo recording we made of the arrangement, so you can get all misty-eyed the way you do when you see the footage of Josef von Sternberg’s unfinished I, Claudius or Orson Welles’ Don Quixote and ponder what might have been.
In other news, Melanie and I are going to the Katy Perry concert at the Allstate Arena next week! AND IT'S ON A FRIDAY NIGHT!!!! You know what that means...
