I was out at a bar this weekend, and whoever was DJing had made the wise decision to give everyone a break from now.

We got some Motorhead, some Hendrix, some Dylan – a look at everything that rocks the hell out of a bar, but isn’t really happening anymore.

The thing I noticed even more than the backwards-thinking DJ was the success of some old covers; how brilliantly someone could reinvent an original with the force of their individual musical personality. Classic examples, like what may be one of the greatest covers of all time, Jimi Hendrix doing Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” show what happens when a pliable but firm song structure, originally intended as a vehicle for Dylan’s folk poetry, gets a dose of guitar abuse.

Dylan wrote the song in 1967, and Hendrix had a cover out by 1968. Something’s changed, because I don’t really see many examples of people covering recent music. And when they do, the ways in which they flop show why.

First off, rock wasn’t 50 or so years old when these guys were writing, so some of the standard forms weren’t so worn out. It’s tough to sound conventional when you’re inventing the conventions, but within genres now, they’re pretty much established. The things that artists have to do to their sounds to distinguish themselves result in songs that are hard to cover, at least meaningfully. While Hendrix could easily abstract the framework from “All Along the Watchtower,” sometimes the interest of current work comes from the specific personalities involved.

A good example is The Decemberists’ recent cover of Joanna Newsom’s “Bridges and Balloons” of the 2004 album, “The Milk-Eyed Mender.” A lot of what makes Newsom’s work interesting is the way her bizarre voice dances around her ethereal harp-plucking, and without these elements, some of the songs don’t support themselves. When The Decemberists took a smoothed-out acoustic approach to the song, it robbed it of some of the things that really made it work. Sometimes the cover gets glimpses of the original, but it’s only when Colin Meloy’s voice strangely evokes the sound of Newsom’s.

Another example of this kind of recent flavorless cover is Jose Gonzalez’s take on the 2006 song “Heartbeats,” by The Knife.

Jose Gonzalez is a minimalist-influenced acoustic guitar-playing singer/songwriter type, and The Knife is an electronic band. The original depends so much on the sounds used – the personality of The Knife – for its value, and when Gonzalez breezes through it as a quiet finger-plucking meditation, it loses something. Granted, this is interesting out of sheer curiosity for fans of The Knife, but it does sort of miss the point.

When recent artists have done covers that do work out, like some of the tracks on Cat Power’s “Jukebox,” it’s because the selections aren’t current songs. Covering James Brown or the Rolling Stones, and translating them through a completely different aesthetic, is never going to get old, because they left us with so many songs that stand alone. But when music becomes about the idiosyncrasies of flaunting form, it gets more difficult to make someone else’s statement.

– Alex LaRue