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“Love Buzz” – Shocking Blue
(Words/music: Robbie van Leeuwen, available on At Home, Pink Elephant 1969) 

If I may go out on a limb to begin, most people would know Shocking Blue for their song “Venus,” a number one single in 1969 and a staple of TV commercials in recent years.  Admittedly, I knew the song but not the band for the longest time.  I say this because I knew song “Love Buzz” for years before I ever heard of the band.  “Love Buzz” was the A-side to the first Nirvana single in 1988, the first in the Sub Pop Singles’ Club series that helped fund the label during lean years.  A decade later, “Love Buzz” was among the Nirvana songs I extracted from CDs for use in mix tapes.  I loved the agile bass line underneath the wall of distortion.  In particular, I loved “Love Buzz” because it was one of the popier songs on Bleach (an album I never fully loved the way I loved the band’s later output).  Of course, this was still “pop” run through a distortion pedal, sung with a slightly deranged vocal tone.  In short, this was pop that I could co-sign at fifteen.

So at some point (one of the unsung tragedies of the digital era is that acquiring albums don’t leave imprints as much), I heard the original “Love Buzz.”  I knew it was a cover, but some of the more high profile Nirvana covers (The Man Who Sold the World was the first Bowie album I owned).  I knew that Kurt Cobain (born today) loved some offbeat pop songs, but “Love Buzz” still took me by surprise.  Despite adding a far more aggressive guitar tone, Nirvana streamlined the song somewhat.  The original version moves at a slower, deliberate pace with Mariska Veres’ deep vocals flanked by a sitar.  If the Nirvana song churned along at the same pace as much of their early material, Shocking Blue’s version sounds eerier at its slower tempo.  Then, there’s a double-time section where the drums, measured and restrained to this point, pound away.  The whole thing, whether it’s Veres’ tone or the sitar or just all the open space, sounds slightly creepy yet still entrancing.  I understand why Cobain was fascinated with a song like this.

More on Shocking Blue: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm