Hotel California – The Moog Cookbook

A tour-de-force of almost every kitsch seventies synth cover trope in the book – from pan-pipe serenade to baroque pop and space disco – the Moog Cookbook’s cover of The Eagles’ Hotel California featured on their second album Ye Olde Space Band in 1997.

The Moog Cookbook were formed by American musicians Roger Manning (ex Jellyfish) and Brian Kehew as a parody of and tribute to the novelty Moog records of the late sixties and early seventies. Hotel California by The Eagles first appeared on their 1976 album of the same name.

I remember getting my ex-girlfriend’s brother-in-law to buy the Moog Cookbook’s two studio albums for me in Canada because I couldn’t get them over here back in the late nineties. He was very kind. He didn’t even ask for the money for them. He was a doctor. One time we went with him on a call to a local Mennonite community. An old man was dying. He tended to the old man while two generations of his family sat on their couch and sang bluegrass gospel to us, in perfect harmony.

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I Feel Love – Blue Man Group with Venus Hum

Blue Man Group’s cover of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love appeared on their 2003 concept album The Complex as a collaboration with Nashville electronic group Venus Hum.

Blue Man Group formed in 1987 with three close friends in blue face masks who performed creative disturbances on the streets of New York. The group now has several companies of multiple members performing in shows around the world, though they retain the original formula of only three members appearing on stage at any one time.

Venus Hum member Tony Miracle has a rare heart condition which results in perpetually hearing his own heartbeat in his ears. This condition is known as Venous Hum, from which the group’s name is derived.

I Feel Love, produced and co-written by Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, was recorded by Donna Summer for her fifth studio album I Remember Yesterday in 1977. The album concept was to have each track evoke a different musical decade; I Feel Love aimed to evoke a futuristic mood by employing a Moog Modular 3P synthesiser. Donna Summer recorded her vocal in one take. In 2011, The Guardian ranked the release of I Feel Love as one of 50 key events in the history of dance music, proclaiming it “one of the first to fully utilise the potential of electronics, replacing lush disco orchestration with the hypnotic precision of machines”.