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Voices carry
Petra Haden sings The Who Sell Out
BY MAC RANDALL

Like lots of people, Petra Haden enjoys making funny noises with her voice. Unlike lots of people, she’s really good at it. True, the 34-year-old singer and multi-instrumentalist comes from a musical family led by her father Charlie, one of jazz’s greatest bassists. Even so, her gift for vocal mimicry is extraordinary, as her 1996 solo debut, the mostly a cappella Imaginaryland (Win), made clear. But in much of her other work, whether as a collaborator with Beck and Victoria Williams or as a member of the quirky ’90s rock outfit That Dog, she hasn’t been able to stretch out her voice. That’s changing. In January, she set foot in a realm closer to her father’s world on Petra Haden and Bill Frisell (Sovereign Artists), which pairs her with the jazz-guitar great. And her latest album is one of the most wonderfully bizarre releases of this or any year: Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out (Bar/None).

That’s right. Haden covers, in its entirety, the Who’s classic 1967 tribute to English pirate radio (and by extension all commercial pop radio), complete with station IDs, advertising jingles, and special announcements. And from start to finish, from "Heinz Baked Beans" to "I Can See for Miles," from the ad for Charles Atlas’s bodybuilding courses to the proto-Tommy epic "Rael," every instrument — guitars, keyboards, drums, horns — is "played" by Petra’s multi-tracked voice. It’s a twisted venture into the realm of extreme doo-wop that turns out to be tremendous fun.

Over the phone from Los Angeles, her modified Valley Girl accent punctuated by sweet, goofy giggles, Haden acknowledges that "I would never have thought of this in a million years." The idea came from her friend Mike Watt, the fabled Minutemen bassist. After hearing Haden’s vocalizing on Imaginaryland, Watt challenged her to remake one of his all-time favorite albums. To that end, in 2000, he gave her an eight-track cassette recorder and two tapes, each with a side of the original LP on track eight. All the other tracks were blank, so Haden could first sing along to the existing music and then replace it with her own version in the same exact tempos and sequences.

Haden wasn’t familiar with the album — in fact, she hardly knew anything by the Who. But she quickly became an admirer. "When I heard the song ‘Sunrise,’ " she recalls, "I just thought, ‘Where was I? Why didn’t I already have this record?’ It was a real eye opener."

For more than three years, she worked in fits and starts on this tribute to a tribute. "It was like an art project to me, sitting in my room, figuring out the parts and how to use the eight-track. The drums were the toughest thing to do, for sure. Mike Watt loves Keith Moon, so I was really nervous about trying to sing those parts." Every so often, she’d play her latest work over the phone to Watt, who encouraged her to keep going. When she was finished, in 2003, he said, "Well, now you can put it out."

This hadn’t been part of Haden’s plan. "I was recording with an old microphone from Radio Shack and headphones that didn’t work," she remembers with a guffaw. "I thought, if someone wants to release this, I’ll have to redo the whole thing." But thanks to oddball aficionado Irwin Chusid, who brought the project to Bar/None’s attention, that wasn’t deemed necessary. Petra even posed for photos replicating those on the Who album cover, including the famous shot of Roger Daltrey in a bathtub full of Heinz baked beans.

There is a potential sore point here for Who fans: some of the song lyrics are flat-out wrong. The third line of the opening "Armenia City in the Sky" should be "If the rumors floating in your head are turned to facts," but Haden sings, "If the room exploding in your head are turned to facts," which isn’t even grammatical. And that’s just one instance. Haden pleads guilty as charged. "I didn’t think to get the lyrics from the Internet. I thought I could listen and write them down, but some of them I just didn’t understand, so I made them up." The charm of the arrangements at least makes it easier to overlook this surprising carelessness.

A more pleasant surprise is the prospect of live performance. Given that Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out depends on the miracle of overdubbing, you’d think it couldn’t be done before an audience, right? Not exactly. "I’m putting a choir together to do the songs," Haden says, "because I want to play some shows in the spring. My sister Tanya’s in it, and she sounds a lot like me. We’ve got six girls now. I want at least eight, but it’s already pretty mind-blowing."


Issue Date: April 1 - 7, 2005
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