Last April The Biletones went into the studio to drop down five tracks for an EP, and while we were at it, a friend of the band, Andre Welsh, who does camera work in Hollywood, agreed to video the band in action. It was kind of fun and intense, but also ugh city.
As in for the Route 66 video, we played the song 11 times so the film crew could focus on different aspects and players during the song.
The four remaining tunes we played were It Takes a Lot to Laugh (check out Steve Gibson’s killer solos), It’s All Over Now (I sing lead), Don’t Cry no Tears, and lead singer Tom Nelson’s Rich Girlfriend. Do click to the third cut and check out Girlfriend. It is one of our strongest tunes (it is third on the playlist in the upper right corner of the Route 66 vid).
One of the most sacred elpees in rock history is Neil Young’s Harvest. And I love a lot of it, can sing along to a lot it, though I’ve never owned it.
But even when I was a teen in my friend Judy’s bedroom with a whole gang of kids, listening to this elpee for the first time, it was hard to stomach A Man Needs a Maid.
The sentiment fails, and the grandiose arrangement overcompensates for what? This is Neil Young at his absolute worst.
I’m not sure why Neil decided to tart up the song on the elpee, with all those strings. For me it takes a simple confessional statement, a good melody, and makes it a bit ugly and grandiose.
Here’s a live clip where the basic sexist shit comes across as a man looking closely at his life. He could be wrong, but who can fault him for that. I like that a lot better.
Just added Love It To Death, Killer and School’s Out to the album troika list, then decided I had to hear me some Alice. Went to youtube and stumbled upon this.
Appears to be a genuine attempt at a music video, way before music videos were a thing.
Not an A+ Alice song, nothing extraordinary about the video either, and guessing you guys have seen this before, but it’s very cool to see footage of Alice and the band in their prime.
But when I think of Keef these days I think of Wingless Angels, the recordings he made with his Jamaican neighbors. According to his book, these live recordings in his yard were pretty much done on the fly. A record of neighbors getting together for nightly jams, maybe around the fire pit. On the actual releases, you can hear the crickets. It’s beautiful.
The former music biz guy turned newsletter ranter, Bob Lefsetz, has a piece today about something called Skyville Live. Skyville Live is a video show that appears to be a small club in which mostly old musicians play with a crackin’ house band, reeling off classic tunes quite wonderfully. Lefsetz hinges his piece on this cover of the Allman Brothers Whipping Post by country star Chris Stapleton.
https://vimeo.com/188680983
Stapleton is a rising star, maybe a rised star. He’s written more than a handful of No. 1 hits, and since becoming a recording performer (in 2015) has been nominated for just about every major award and won some of them, too. So, he’s living the dream.
Skyville Live, it turns out, is a video show out of Nashville that is shown on some weird Verizon channel, and has clips on Vimeo.
Here’s my gripe. Whipping Post is a great song. It’s also a great song because the Allman Brothers recorded it twice brilliantly. And those performances are a part of what makes Whipping Post one of the great classic rock songs of all time.
In contrast, this cover, which seems to be conferring cannon status on the song, is kind of small. I was going to get into a whole argument about organic versus copies, about virtuosity versus chops, about the magic of the moment versus the nod toward nostalgia, about the weak slide guitar, but then I found this clip of the Allman Brothers playing the song in 1970.
I can’t help but think that Stapleton and band, no matter how well intentioned, aren’t paying tribute to the song. It feels like they’re speaking to their own glory by covering a transcendent performance—in a professional manner.
Whipping Post is a great song, but part of the thing that made it as great as it is is the arrangement and musicianship of the Allman Brothers. Stapleton and his session guys are excellent, but they chose the wrong song. They act like they’re playing a song from the cannon, a tune that a proficient rendering will justify. But it doesn’t. The great classic rock songs are usually tied not only to the excellence of the song, but also the moment (and excellence) of the performance. If you don’t live up to that, why bother?
This isn’t to say that great songs and performances can’t be covered, they can, but the artist has to bring something else to the table besides the cover. Think about the Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, one of the great tunes of all time:
Devo, of course, raised their profile by their brilliant cover, which totally resets the song. Way to go, Devo.
I remember an indie band called Gomez, but not one called Chavez. But Chavez is back! And the NY Times put this on their weekly list of new tracks to pay attention to.
