Move On Up:The Flying Lizards

Artist: The Flying Lizards

Genre: Avant Garde

Appears On: Fourth Wall

Appears On (Mixes): Thirteen Ugly Children Roll Gutterballs

Song Notes: Two different versions of the same song this week! The first is the original, of course, by Curtis Mayfield from his first album Curtis!, and the second is The Flying Lizards' version from Fourth Wall, sung by Patti Palladin (of Snatch), David Cunningham's collaborator for that album. Both versions have much shorter single versions (the Mayfield one takes out a lot of the cool instrumental work; the Flying Lizards one mainly strips out the static at the beginning, and a few other tweaks to the mix). Both versions are pretty cool; this is one of the few cases where I actually prefer the original to The Flying Lizards' version of a song, though theirs is good -- it's just that the original is awesome. It's fun to compare the two, though, and I really like Patti Palladin's vocals on the Flying Lizards one, but there's so much... awesome packed into the original. It's just shy of 9 minutes of pure cool. I don't know if Curtis Mayfield ever heard The Flying Lizards' version, or what he thought of it. I'd be interested to find out, though! I know that for some artists the more re-arranged a cover is, the more satisfying it is for them -- apparently Mick Jagger said DEVO's cover of "Satisfaction" was the best version he'd ever heard. And the Army of Me Björk compilation is made up pretty much solely of quite different arrangements, some of which are pretty drastic. - Rev. Syung Myung Me

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