OCD Chronicles: Straightjacket Fits "So Long, Marianne"

I never quite understood all the fuss about Leonard Cohen. I’m sure he’s a perfectly capable songwriter and, to a substantial audience, he’s considered a genius. I’m not about to argue that distinction, primarily because I haven’t heard enough of Cohen’s oeuvre to make a decent argument against him. My entire opinion of the man is based on one album, I’m Your Man. From what I’ve been told, that’s not the best example of Cohen’s work; it’s fraught with cheesy synthesizers and curious arrangements that distracted me from what I was supposed to focus on: the lyrics.
Yes, Cohen’s a songwriter. I got that. But the only line I can remember distinctly from The Future was the “give me crack and anal sex” verse which only made me giggle instead of allude to a darker imagery as was probably intended.
It seems that I prefer my Leonard Cohen when it’s performed by another individual. Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” stands out, and there’s a badass version of “Bird On A Wire” on Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen album. But lately, my obsessive/compulsive ear has been fixated on an obscure band from New Zealand who picked “So Long, Marianne” as one of the songs for their debut. The band, Straightjacket Fits, was part of the infamous Flying Nun collective and, while the rest of the world was discovering Leonard Cohen for the first time in 1988, I was deeply entrenched with discovering some of the great power pop bands from New Zealand that were starting to get recognized in the states.
Not only did Cohen have a new album to promote, he had many supporters covering his songs via the compilation I’m Your Fan that brought some interest towards him. Straightjacket Fits weren’t part of I’m Your Fan. Instead, they brought their chimey and wonderfully harmonized version of “So Long, Marianne” directly to the first album Hail which had the unfortunately luck to be released via Rough Trade records here in the states. Rough Trade, if you didn’t know, ran into a huge mess of financial issues around 1990 and took a lot of great bands down the shitter with them as they tumbled into legal limbo and out-of-print catalogs.
Straightjacket Fits were able to rebound briefly and sign to Arista records for one album before being dropped and, for the most part, forgotten. But I haven’t forgotten about them. As a matter of fact, I’m thinking about them fairly regularly and how they managed to take a wonderful little Leonard Cohen song and lodge it firmly in between my ears.
The video below isn’t “So Long, Marianne,” but it gives a pretty good glimpse into the band’s sound and how shitty the video production budget was for up-and-coming bands in the late 80’s.