Heaneyland!

Yoko Nono

It's MP3 week here at Heaneyland. Yesterday was "Enthusiastic", today is a little lesson in B-52's arcana.

If you own a copy of the B-52's "Whammy Kiss" (as I do), you'll be familiar with the song "Moon 83", which is a remake of their own "There's a Moon in the Sky (Called the Moon)". That might seem like an odd choice of song to revisit as an album track, but you probably just shrugged and thought, well, those guys are kooks, whatever.

It turns out that "Moon 83" did not appear on the original LP release of "Whammy Kiss". It used to feature a cover version of Yoko Ono's "Don't Worry" in its place. Yes, Yoko Ono. Seriously.

So why didn't "Don't Worry" appear on future releases? From all the articles about it I can find, it's because they couldn't get copyright clearance from Yoko, so they had to pull the song. Now, this seems odd to me, as it's my understanding that you don't actually need to get the permission of a songwriter to cover their song as long as you credit them properly and send them their royalties (and don't change the lyrics or anything). But whatever the reason -- it's not on the album anymore.

Mind you, this song is not an especially great loss to the B-52's canon. But fans are bound to be curious enough to want to hear it once. So here it is. (Or there it was. It's offline now.) I'm not going to leave this up very long, so get it while it's hot. (Now it is cold. So very cold.)

Posted by Francis at 01:55 AM