Okay, so in our journey through rock tunes with soulish horn parts, this tribute to Fats Domino from Van Morrison landed in 1970.
Wikipedia says
Enjoy!
Graham Parker and the Rumor are mining the same vein as Southside Johnny, but Wikipedia has a different take.
| Rock, new wave, pub rock, soul, rhythm and blues |
I’m mystified by what genre this tune, and almost all of Johnny Lyon’s sides are. It’s some strand of soul, but different.
Wikipedia says:
I don’t know. In this one I hear more Mink Deville, but while Springsteen always manages to sound like the early 60s, this comes out of that idea, but is different. I really like this song
The Germs are not universally loved, but they are indisputably worth talking about. And they covered Chuck Berry, well.
I love this.
I gather this is an early recording of Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker doing some covers in a club. The first is Chuck Berry’s Too Much Monkey Business, which is fantastic. That’s why I’m here, though I loved Cream back in the day. But we didn’t have this then.
Then there is the rest, which is pretty damn sweet.
Many of the great Chuck Berry covers were by the Rolling Stones, and a few were by the Beatles and John Lennon. But there were other covers of note. Here is a website that lists them all.
Here are a few I recommend.
This embellished list by Alan Light is well worth going through. They’re the greatest hits, for the most part, but many of the notes were new to me.
As was this song, which Light notes he wrote while in jail, without a map.
Dick Clark introduces an appearance by Berry promoting this album and stumbles over the title, with the audience tittering at the double entendre. Really?
It is 1959, and, as Clark mentions, this is an album that has on it Carol, Maybelline, Johnny B. Goode, Roll Over Beethoven, Little Queenie and many more.
Those were the days of album oriented rock. Not.
It’s an incredible trove, not a greatest hits album, that the Rolling Stones particularly mined for their early (and later) setlists.
Berry, of course, looks right at home playing along to this other cut, Back in the USA, that is also on Chuck Berry is on Top, with the totally white and polite audience clapping along.
One of my favorite, lesser known, Chuck Berry songs.
RIP, Chuck.
He took the jazz/R&B stylings of T-Bone Walker and invented a new guitar style that IS rocknroll. He turned the whole concept of “authenticity” on its ear fifteen years before it reared its misguided head, by writing perfect vignettes of white middle class teenagers as a 30-year old black man. He was sometimes bitter and sometimes difficult and had good reasons for both, but he always got his due and always will. And check out this smoking drummer, who I’d give his due if I only knew who he was. Bye bye.