If you listen to Captain Beefheart’s mid-70s albums such as Unconditionally Guaranteed or Bluejeans & Moonbeams it can be pretty depressing just how limp they sound. “Party of Special Things to Do,” the opener on Bluejeans, is better than everything else on the album but still manages to just be OK. And while most put blame on the lack of any real Magic Band members, the sense of musical castration is made even worse by how phoned-in Beefheart sounds. His lyrics are still just as wonderfully bizarre and he does all of his hiccup-y vocal tricks and there’s a sort of cool spoken word intro and so on, but it just doesn’t feel right. Everything is where it should be, but the passion you’d normally be hearing seems completely drained.
This disappointment might have been why Jack White decided to cover “Party of Special Things to Do” as the A-side to their only single on Sub Pop and transform it into one of the most hard-hitting songs the White Stripes ever recorded. In their standard fashion the song is stripped down to its bluntest parts, something that White surely learned from Beefheart’s own arrangements on albums like Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby. The weak riff to Beefheart’s version gets re-born with White’s monstrously heavy guitar and turned into a brilliant hook that carries the song while White shouts over Meg’s pounding drums. The White Stripes made possibly the best tribute to one of their big influences, not by covering Beefheart’s best or most famous material, but by taking one of his few, forgotten duds and turning it into stunner.
