Tojo Yamamoto Creates a Brutal and Brilliant Cover of “Man on the Moon”
Some cover songs sometimes brings the best out of the original, some stay true to it, some also bring their own skin and some sometimes just twist things and add extra depth. So lemme ask you, do you prefer your cover songs to stay pretty close to the original, or do you love it when a band completely destroys a classic and builds something crazy out of the pieces? Either way, you’re in for a treat, so if you think you have heard every possible version of R.E.M.’s classic song “Man on the Moon,” I am here to tell you that you are completely wrong. You definitely haven’t heard it run through a literal paper shredder.
That is exactly what a band called Tojo Yamamoto did with their new cover single. They are a noise-punk band from Lexington, Kentucky, and they are named after a famous bad-guy pro wrestler from back in the day. The lineup is pretty wild too. It features Elwood Francis, who is the current bassist for the legendary rock band ZZ Top, but here he is playing guitar. Joining him are Darren Howard on drums, Will Pieratt on bass, and Larry Joe Treadway on vocals.
These guys aren’t trying to make polite radio hits. They sound like they want to drag punk music behind a moving truck down a gravel road. Their cover of “Man on the Moon” is a massive nod to Andy Kaufman, the legendary comedian who famously had a wild stint as a wrestler in Memphis. Since the band named themselves after a Memphis wrestling villain, covering this specific song was pretty much inevitable.
But do not expect a sweet, acoustic sing-along here. The band took the beautiful melody we all know and absolutely wrecked it in the best way possible. They loaded the track with screeching feedback, used old CB truck-driver microphones, screamed through megaphones, and played through broken amplifiers that are probably older than you are.
When you listen to the track, it starts with a heavy, mechanical groove that feels like it could totally collapse at any second. Larry Joe’s vocals come through sounding completely unhinged and hostile, but strangely danceable. It turns a gentle pop song into an aggressive, noisy piece of dark humor. It is heavy, loud, and feels like listening to late-night talk radio from a pirate station during a thunderstorm.
The single is released on their own label, the Jarrett-Welch Wrestling Co., as a special 7-inch vinyl record. And if the main track isn’t weird enough for you, the B-side is a completely deconstructed remix of the song. That side brings even more bizarre vocal harmonies, extra feedback, and absolute chaos. Tojo Yamamoto manages to capture the raw tension of old-school post-punk bands without sounding like a boring history lesson.
It is deeply Southern, but not in a country music way. It’s more like a pawn shop full of cheap guitars exploding in slow motion. If you need something more organic and noisy, give this one a listen,just maybe warn your neighbors first so they don’t think your speakers are actually on fire.
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