The B List: Searching for Deep Cover

1. I wouldn’t have pegged country star Kenny Chesney as a Van Halen fan, but then again, I don’t know much about the guy that I only knew because he used to be married to perpetually bee-stung Renee Zellweger. But at a recent show in California, Eddie and Alex Van Halen made a rare appearance to play Jump and You Really Got Me with Chesney and his band. Somewhere David Lee Roth is crying.

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2. I bet if I jumped on stage and kicked Victor Wooten in the nuts, blinded him with mace, and broke his left arm the man would still be able to play Beethoven’s Fifth on his bass with no problem. He’s scary good. And in this video here, Wooten fingers an effortless solo version of The Beatles’s Norwegian Wood.

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3. For years artists have been covering other artists’ music from the same subgenre as a show of respect. In the ’60s, Hendrix played Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower. In The ’70s, the Grateful Dead played Warren Zevon’s Warewolves Of London. This past December, Perpetual Groove’s Brock Butler continued the trend by paying tribute to the Disco Biscuits, playing a kickass solo acoustic version of Home Again.

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4. Alanis Morrisette, aka Alanis from You Can’t Do That On Televison, burst on the scene in the mid ’90s with the incredible album Jagged Little Pill. Her unique voice and unorthodox songwriting differentiated her from the pack, and she achieved her success organically. Lately, though, Morrisette has shown some incredible chops as an arranger. In 2005, she completely re-arranged all the songs on Jagged Little Pill using acoustic instruments, both on record and for a lengthy tour. And while on that tour she used her backing band perfectly for a take of The Police’s King of Pain. Well done, Alanis.

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5. Faith No More’s Mike Patton ripped Wolfmother earlier this year as completely unoriginal, accusing them of copying Black Sabbath’s sound. Patton and his Faith No More bandmates know a lot about Sabbath’s sound, as they included a cover of War Pigs on their 1989 debut album, The Real Thing. Faith No More often played War Pigs in concert, including this show from April 28th, 1990.

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6. In a 1983 Guitar Player interview, Frank Zappa tells the story behind his cover of the Allman Brothers’s Whipping Post:

It started about ten or twelve years ago when some guy in the audience at a concert in Helsinki, Finland, requested it. He just yelled out “Whipping Post” in broken English. I have it on tape. And I said, “Excuse me?” I could just barely make it out. We didn’t know it, and I felt kind of bad that we couldn’t just play it and blow the guy’s socks off. So when Bobby Martin joined the band, and I found out that he knew how to sing that song, I said, “We are definitely going to be prepared for the next time somebody wants ‘Whipping Post’–in fact we’re going to play it before somebody even asks for it.” I’ve got probably 30 different versions of it on tape from concerts all around the world, and one of them is going to be the “Whipping Post”–the apex “Whipping Post” of the century.

Zappa featured Whipping Post on his 1984 long-form video Does Humor Belong In Music? Check it out.

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7. Ween bass player Diamond Dave Dreiwitz doesn’t often handle lead-vocal duties, so when he does, it’s a special event. Here’s the band’s cover of Motorhead’s Ace of Spades, which features Dreiwitz channelling Lemmy.

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8. A friend’s eight-year-old daughter recently saw a Bob Dylan concert and remarked to her mom, “Is he singing words?” Dylan’s vocal eccentricities became more pronounced when he moved from folkie to rock star. At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival Dylan shocked the folk community by debuting Like A Rolling Stone with an electric backing band. Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones, in their typical egotistical Stones style, always took the song as a tribute to them. In 1998 at a Rio De Janerio stop on the Bridges To Babylon tour, the Stones and Dylan finally played Like A Rolling Stone together.

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9. The extremely underrated concert film, The Earth Will Swallow You, features footage of Jorma Kaukonen and John Bell practing Kaukonen’s Genesis on their acoustics. I love how the acoustic video footage is intersped with clips from Widespread Panic’s full-band performance of the tune (w/ Jorma) later that same evening.

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10. At a Halloween concert in Toronto, Death Cab For Cutie came out for their encore dressed as Devo and performed Devo’s Whip It, Girl U Want, Mongoloid, and Uncontrollable Urge. The video quality on this clip of Whip It and Girl U Want is a little lacking, but you get the point. I think.

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Leave a comment below if you’ve found any interesting cover versions on YouTube, and I’ll include it in the second part next week.

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0 Responses

  1. Dave gets points deducted for not jacking that mic stand up further and pointing the mic down more ala lemmy.

    Further points will either be added or deducted if Dave put some fake warts on his face.

  2. Awesome, Scotty–very impressed by that Alanis “King of Pain” cover. And how sick is Vic Wooten?

    Since I’m a huge Faith No More fan, I have to mention that “The Real Thing” is actually their 3rd album, after their ’85 debut “We Care A Lot” and ’87s “Introduce Yourself.”

  3. Facts are for losers Andrew 😉 But seriously I wasn’t aware the band was around for a few years before Mike Patton joined up. I should have said his debut album with the band.

    How are those first two albums?

  4. Great list Scott. Any idea where the Brock solo is from? That’s some quality shit right there.

  5. Nice.

    Seeing Jorma play Genesis w/ Jb 7 Co. at the Warfield was a dream come true, but the movie footage makes it all the more special.

  6. PFT, I tried my best with filming the Death Cab show. The lighting wasn’t very good, and I was fairly far back. Then security yelled at me, which is when the clip ended. Still glad you enjoyed it!

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