“Pictures of Matchstick Men”
by Camper Van Beethoven (originally by Status Quo)
from the album Key Lime Pie
1989
Buy the album on Amazon
I was totally scratching my bean this week trying to think of a cover song I wanted to blather about for a couple of graphs. I keep a little notepad of cover songs going so I can write down ideas as they pop into my head or come up on shuffle, but nothing on there was really speaking to me. So I started looking through recent posts to see if anything would spark a thought. I saw the post about Cracker’s “Teen Angst” and started wondering if they had done some cover songs as B-Sides or something and then I suddenly remembered this CVB song. I had always known it was a cover, but I thought it was by Strawberry Alarm Clock, however I was nowhere near being correct. But before we get to the original, let’s take a few minutes to watch the amazing, obviously late-80s music video for CVB’s version. It’s about 120 Minutes-worthy as you can get.