The Songs of Tony Sly: A Tribute

No Use for a Name frontman Tony Sly died in July 2012. A little over a year later, his former record label, Fat Wreck Chords, put together this compilation of friends and label mates paying homage to one of punkrock’s great songwriters. The album is both sad and exciting – and it brings back good memories.

In the fall of 1994 (a year that figures prominently in discussions of  punkrock in the Nineties), three friends and I got together and started a band called Trick or Treat. We practiced every Saturday, played a handful of shows, and mainly just enjoyed hanging out. One of the two or three cover songs we played was No Use for a Name’s “Straight from the Jacket.” We recruited my brother to do the “Tell me how it feels” part when we played it live. He held his nose when he sang it, so that it would sound like on the CD. After all, covering a No Use for a Name song and trying to sound like them was a way to participate in the magic that punkrock held for all of us.

When Tony Sly died in July 2012, I immediately thought back to our band back then. Incidentally, “Straight from the Jacket” was also the first song I heard from The Songs of Tony Sly: A Tribute. It’s probably my emotional connection to that song, but Alkaline Trio’s version is one of the highlights of the album. They make it entirely their own – and its drawn-out rhythm, instrumentation, and melancholic feel not only underline the intensity of that song but also emphasize the great songwriting behind it. When we covered “Straight from the Jacket,” somehow it never occurred to us that we could play the song anything other than exactly like the original – something we apparently have in common with Bad Religion, whose rendition of “Let it slide” on this album is so unimaginative it feels like a semi-talented high school band trying (and failing) to emulate their favorite band. Strung Out also follow the original song  (“Soulmate”) pretty closely, but they do in a way that shows that they know exactly what they’re doing – and they do it really well.

A lot of the other bands on here take a slow song and make it fast (NOFX, Lagwagon, Pennywise, The Flatliners, Anti-Flag, etc.), with a few doing the opposite (Rise Against, Jon Snodgrass, Joey Cape, Brain Wahlstrom). Of course, these two approaches more or less represent Tony Sly’s own way of doing cover songs – just think of the punkrock versions of “Redemption Song” or “Fairytale of NewYork” or the acoustic renditions of his own songs on the split album with Joey Cape. So whether or not these approaches are original is kind of beside the point. And in most cases, they work pretty well. NOFX’s version of “The Shortest Pier” is done masterfully and one of my favorites on the album. And Rise Against’s stripped down “For Fiona” is definitely one of the emotional highlights.

It gets perhaps most interesting when the songs don’t really sound like the original anymore. Karina Denike’s version of “Biggest Lie” – like  Alkaline Trio’s “Straight from the Jacket” – is  just awesome. Old Man Markley’s honky tonkification of “Feel Good Song on the Year” turns the song into something entirely new. On the other hand, I think that Snuff’s calypso version of “On the Outside” takes away from the emotional intensity of what is one of my favorite No Use songs and Simple Plan’s turning of “Justified Black Eye” (a song about domestic violence), into a radio-ready reggae song is kind of strange – although it shows what a great song the original is.

As on most tribute albums, you could argue about the song selection (I would have loved to hear “The Daily Grind,” “The Saddest Song,” and “Room 19”) or the artists participating. It would have been nice to move a little bit outside the Fat Wreck box. I wonder what bands from different backgrounds would have done with Tony Sly’s songs (Neurosis or Rihanna, for example). Ultimately, though, this is a nice collection that reconnected me with a lot of the bands I liked in the Nineties. A collection that takes me back to that time twenty years ago when I swore to myself never to miss a concert again (after missing the last Nirvana show ever in Munich). A time when we went to shows, traded new CDs, and proudly sported shirts of our favorite bands. When music defined who we were. That the album doesn’t entirely turn into a trip down nostalgia lane is not simply due to the fact that almost half of the songs on it are from Tony Sly’s 2008 and 2010 solo releases – it’s perhaps mainly because this album shows how strong Tony Sly’s songwriting was and how timeless his songs are.