Best Covers
Dave Edmunds is not a songwriter, so most of his music is recordings of songs written by others. Here’s his version of John Fogerty’s "Almost Saturday Night", which I prefer to John’s original.
Here’s a live version of a Nick Lowe (Dave’s partner in their band Rockpile) song. You know you’re doing well when Steve Cropper is playing rhythm guitar for you. 😊
|
Getting back to the topic of this thread, here are a couple of my favorite covers of Slim Harpo’s classic "Shake Your Hips", both of which make The Stone’s version sound tepid. Joan Osborne’s version is smokin’ hot, live in a radio station with her great band. The Legendary Shack Shakers is kind of a Garage Band version, and I love it too. I wish Willy DeVille had recorded the song.
|
Emmylou and Lucinda have always had the best bands. Rodney Crowell, Ricky Skaggs, Buddy Miller, Albert Lee, James Burton, Glen D. Hardin, Emory Gordy, Herb Pedersen, Bernie Leadon, Ron Tutt, John Ware, Ben Keith, Byron Berline, Amos Garrett, Bill Payne, Richard Greene, Hank DeVito, Mike Auldridge, Tony Brown, and Tony Rice are amongst the great musicians who have provided Emmylou with musical accompaniment! Just yesterday I found a copy of Emmylou’s Gliding Bird LP, on Emus Records. It was released in 1979, and contains early pre-Reprise Records recordings. Eight bucks. Right next to it in the bin at Music Millennium was the MoFi pressing of her Quarter Moon In A Ten Cent Town album. NM condition, $15. I of course have an original, but for fifteen bucks I’ll gamble that this is one of the "good" MoFi’s. 😉
I started seeing Lucinda live in small joints throughout L.A. around the time she was recording what became her s/t album on Rough Trade Records (I assume that’s the one stuartk referred to as her "white album"), once in a pizza parlour! Just Gurf on Telecaster, Dr. John on upright bass, and drummer Donald Lindley playing a washboard (the stage was too small to accomodate a drumset). In the mid-80’s I went to see The Long Ryders at Club Lingerie on Sunset Blvd., and saw a guy I knew standing with a lanky blonde chick. I went over to say "Hey", and he replied "This is Lucinda, she writes songs too." I didn’t yet know it, but Lucinda’s then-husband was The Ryders’ drummer (for you drummers in the audience, he was playing a set of vintage white marine pearl Slingerland Radio Kings. Very cool!). I was also unaware of her two albums, Ramblin’ On My Mind and Happy Woman Blues. But hearing the Rough Trade album and then seeing her in those intimate performances around L.A. was a life-changing experience, and I of course became an instant fan. I separate musical performers into two groups: entertainers, and artists. Nothing wrong with entertainers, but artists are just a different breed. Lucinda, like Emmylou, is an artist.
|
@stuartk: I too love Gurf’s playing. I sometimes saw him in the Guitar Center on Ventura Blvd. in Sherman Oaks, buying guitar strings. He has done some great producing other than Lucinda, including Mary Gauthier. He has also made a few nice albums of his own, available on CD only. There’s a guy in SoCal who is similar to Gurf, a fine singer and Telecaster/steel guitar player: Rick Shea. I saw him live dozens of times when I lived there, and subbed for his regular drummer for one show in 2008. One of those fifty dollar gigs. 😉
|
@stuartk: When you watch the video on Lauderdale I posted you will get the answer to your question, and much more. 😉 You may get an inkling as to why Elvis Costello, Buddy Miller, Lucinda Williams, Rodney Crowell, and many other artists (and I, of course) think as highly of Jim as they do. When Gurf Morlix resigned as Lucinda’s guitarist, harmony singer, and bandleader, she hired Lauderdale to take his place. I already had all his albums when he joined her for the Car Wheels tour, but hadn’t yet seen him live. Joining them on lead guitar was Kenny Vaughan, now a member of Marty Stuart’s band The Fabulous Superlatives. That they are! IMO, the best band in the land.
|
Before giving this song a listen, think about where Rock music was in 1968, the year this song appeared on the debut album of The Band. In ’68 everyone I knew was listening to Cream, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, etc. Sure, there was also Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, and a few other Rock Groups incorporating Country elements into their music, but nothing like the Hard Country of a Lefty Frizzell song. Hard fans of The Grateful Dead always claim that band wasn’t playing "catch-up" when they recorded and released their Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty albums in 1970, but in ’68 and ’69 they were still deep in Psychedelic territory, with their Anthem Of The Sun and Aoxomoxoa albums. After The Band’s 1969 second s/t album---routinely cited as the first "Americana" album---sent shock waves through the Rock music world, suddenly The Dead---and a lot of other bands---followed suit, but none with the depth The Band possessed and exhibited. "Long Black Veil" had been a Country & Western hit by Lefty---cited by Merle Haggard as a major influence---in 1959, but it was new to me when in 1968 I heard Music From Big Pink. What an odd choice for a cover song, ay? Brave, daring, and evidence of a deep-rooted sense of identity. The Band---then still known as The Hawks---spent all of 1967 in the basement of the Big Pink house with Bob Dylan, recording all manner of songs. I’ll bet this was one the fellas worked on. Absent was drummer/singer Levon Helm, who had quit The Hawks part way through the Dylan world tour of 1965-6 (two guys I was later in a band with saw Dylan & The Hawks in the San Jose Civic Auditorium, the rat bastards 😉), no longer wanting to be in anyone’s back-up band, nor playing for booing audiences. He went down to the Gulf Of Mexico and worked on an oil rig, that job ending when bassist Rick Danko called Levon to tell him Capitol Records had offered them a million bucks to record an album. Levon was on the next plane to Upstate New York. 😊
|
