Posts by DaveO

Umphrey’s McGee has once again topped the voting of Cover Wars by capturing a majority of the votes in last week’s Nirvana edition. Of note is that every artist earned at least one vote – which doesn’t happen frequently. This week we’re moving back to the glory days of Classic Rock, more specifically 1967 and Jimi Hendrix’s second studio album Axis: Bold as Love.

Spanish Castle Magic’s lyrics are inspired by a dance club that Jimi would frequent in his high school days called, wait for it…The Spanish Castle. Whether you’ve been a long-time Hendrix fan or just like the song because it was on Guitar Hero, hopefully you’ll enjoy at least one of the versions included this week as we’ve got a smattering of artists including: Other all-time guitar greats, alternative rockers and more…

(You must login/register with IMEEM to hear these tracks in their entirety.)

READ ON for more information and versions we could only supply via YouTube…

Following up on last week, the Dave Matthews Band walks away with the trophy after receiving the most votes from the Sledgehammer edition of Cover Wars.

It has now been 21 years since Nirvana formed and 14 years since Kurt Cobain has left us. Nirvana holds a special place in my heart as I was in my early teenage years as grunge music peaked during the early ’90s. We’ve got an interesting collection of various Nirvana covers from a pop artist, a few jazz guys and some jambands.

As always, you gotta register/login to Imeem to hear the playlist below in it’s entirety. If you are not logged in, you’ll be hearing 30-second clips.

READ ON after the jump to cast your vote for the best Nirvana cover…

Phish writing songs about the enormity of what they created, and the requisite baggage that comes with it, can perhaps be traced to some sentiments in Down with Disease. But there is no questioning that Vultures was widely interpreted to illustrate what my editor ScottyB eloquently referred to as “The inmates running the asylum.” A […]

Last week’s She Said She Said voting reassures something I’ve always known to be true – Gov’t Mule destroys covers. So Mule takes home their first CW trophy and one note about last week: Audio has since surfaced of Mike Gordon’s band performing the song (previously we only had a YouTube) and has been added to the playlist.

Moving on to the new stuff…known for its sexual innuendos and bangin’ horn lines, Sledgehammer is Peter Gabriel’s only #1 hit to date here in the USA. This song comes to us off the 1986 release So.

As always, you gotta register/login with Imeem to hear these clips in their entirety.

READ ON after the jump to see some video of our seven contenders this week and to place your vote for the most deserving band of this Cover Wars title…

The Taste-inspired headlines are just going to keep on coming from us here at Hidden Track regarding this release. The official Phish YouTube channel just tripled it’s toal number of videos when they added four 3-minute preview clips of the upcoming Walnut Creek DVD. Taste: [youtube]https://youtube.com/watch?v=C0MxDHlv_3Y[/youtube] Mike’s Song: [youtube]https://youtube.com/watch?v=AM2dqCEDW1o[/youtube] Also check out: Weekapaug Groove Bouncing […]

Black Cab Sessions has quickly become one of my favorite music sites out there. If you are not familiar with the concept: Bands or portions of bands pile into the back seat of a cab with their instruments to perform one song in one take and the video is then released on the website. There […]

I know I’ve been a little Beatles heavy as of recently, but who could blame me? Members of Phish getting together to play Beatles cover is a pretty big deal. Speaking of which, two weeks ago’s Day Tripper edition is way too close to call, so if you haven’t done so – navigate over there and place a vote if you are so inclined.

I was thinking about doing She Said as a Cover Wars just as soon as Mike Gordon’s new band played it in Northampton last week. Then I heard that Trey and Fish played it with him at Rothbury and THEN I heard that Gov’t Mule played their own rendition of it directly after that – so this could not be more topical.

If you don’t know the inspiration of the song – long story short: During an off week of The Beatles USA tour in 1965…they rent out a house, most of the band is on LSD as is Peter Fonda who is freaking out George Harrison and John Lennon by telling him that he “knows what it’s like to be dead”. Fonda accidentally shot himself at age 10 and apparently his heart stopped 3 times on the operating table. Fonda thought this was a good story to tell people that are tripping face and was even showing people his wounds from it.

You can read some hilarious quotes from the band members regarding that crazy night in a few places around the Internet. Check out: Wikipedia, The Songs of John Lennon: The Beatles Years, and The Beatles Anthology. All links open in new windows.

As always, you must register/login to imeem if you wish to listen to the songs in the playlist in their entirety.

READ ON after the jump for the voting and lots of live She Said video footage…

Two weeks ago we took a look at a few versions of Solsbury Hill and we’ve got a Gold and a Silver medal to give out. The winner, by a landslide, is the a cappella group The Hyannis Sound – congrats guys. Coming in second was my good friends Rane. Sorry about the week off, how you all got by for 14 days without a playlist of covers to sit and judge, I’ll never know.

This week I’m returning to the original band featured in the first ever edition of Cover Wars, one of the most covered bands of all time: The Beatles. We’ve got six versions of Day Tripper here and don’t worry, there isn’t an American Idol clip anywhere near us this time. We’ve got a nice mix of some other artists of the ’60s covering the song while it was still ripe — and of course a few jambands rocking their way through the tune.

To quote Lennon himself from the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon & Yoko Ono,

That’s mine. Including the lick, the guitar break and the whole bit. It’s just a rock ‘n roll song. Day trippers are people who go on a day trip, right? Usually on a ferryboat or something. But it was kind of-you know, you’re just aw weekend hippie. Get it?

Yep, we get it John. It’s also one of the songs that Lennon & McCartney disagree on the songwriting credits – but hey, all that matters is that it’s a great tune. You’re going to need to register/login to Imeem to hear the tracks in their entirety.

READ ON after the jump for voting, videos and descriptions…

What? No, Cover Wars doesn’t come out on Tuesdays, you guys are all crazy. Yeah, what can I say, I’m a day late. I enjoyed the return to using just one song so much last week that I’m going to do it again. Let’s take a look at nine renditions of the 1977 single by Peter Gabriel: Solsbury Hill.

In what I consider true slacker-blogger format, why write when you can just copy and paste? Here’s what the folks over at solsburyhill.org have to say…

The first and last Peter Gabriel hit for quite a while, many critics have considered Solsbury Hill to be Peter’s finest moment. While this view clearly fails to take into account many subsequent successes in the catalogue, it does indicate the unusual and extraordinary appeal of this track. Built around a 7/4 time signature in a sprightly B major, the song’s sunny disposition is largely thanks to the acoustic guitar riff, an instrument which has rarely been used in Gabriel’s arrangements since the 1970s. Lyrically the song takes the stress and uncertainty of a future without his former bandmates and twists it into a positively electric excitement (eg. his heart’s “boom boom boom”). The track’s pace quickens as new instruments are added with each additional verse, the final cathartic moment occuring at the last “home” as the crash cymbal darts across the stereo spectrum (a technique applied to many of the songs insturments, so much so that listening to Solsbury Hill in audiophile headphones can create a sense of motion sickness) and the electric guitars groan down to the tonic chord over bristling shouts and odd-ball squeals. Solsbury Hill is one of the few songs in popular music to guarantee goosebumps with every listen and well deserves its place in the Peter Gabriel catalogue.

That about sums it up…I’ll add that Solsbury Hill is an actual place.

We’ve got nine versions this week, and eight of them appear on the playlist below. To hear the covers in their entirety be sure to register/login to Imeem:

READ ON after the jump for the voting, videos, commentary and the announcement of the winner of last week’s Can’t Find My Way Home CW…

If you’re paying really careful attention to what I write in Cover Wars you might recall that I said I was going to ten straight weeks of Cover Album Wars instead of the older format where we had multiple versions of the same song. Well, I lied. This week I’m taking a request I have received and we’re taking a look at nine covers of Can’t Find My Way Home. CFMWH comes to us from the greatest super-group of all time: Blind Faith.

Blind Faith was a short lived band, releasing just the one self-titled album. Founding members Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood (who wrote the song we are discussing) recently performed three sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden in February of 2008. However, the show was billed as Eric Clapton & Steve Winwood and not as Blind Faith.

Read on after the jump for some versions that you can only find on YouTube, the winner from last week’s column (it’s a first time winner), killer videos of Blind Faith Live and more.

You must register/login to Imeem to hear the audio clips in their entirety.

To place your vote, and for full descriptions READ ON after the jump…

iClips is at it again! Last weekend they webcasted three full days of Summer Camp performances (with minimal technical difficulties) and starting now, they move about 900 miles to the east to broadcast Mountain Jam live from Hunter Mountain.

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If you’re anything like me, you’ll be creating a personal multimedia presentation combining the likes of live music and playoff sports starting tonight.

READ ON after the jump to see the schedule. It’s starting right – meow.

Good Afternoon. I hope all of our readers had a fantastic long weekend and as we ease back into a shortened work week, I thought I’d supply some good ‘ol American Rock & Roll this week for the Cover Wars. So let’s take a look at the works of The Allman Brothers Band.

As you may have read last week, I’m diving into greatest hits and compilation discs to make life a little easier and I am continuing that this week with a few alterations. The release A Decade Of Hits (1969 – 1979) features 16 tracks off of five ABB releases. Well, this Cover Wars is going to feature 14 of those tracks off four of those albums. Don’t blame me for being a slacker, blame the thousands of bands out there who have yet to cover either Wasted Words or Crazy Love. It’s possible that I missed them, if I did PLEASE point me in the direction of some covers of these tunes.

As always, you must register/login to Imeem to listen to these tracks in their entirety (If you’re only getting 30 seconds, you’re not logged in).

That’s the audio for 12 of the tracks, we’ve got YouTube’s for two others, so READ ON after the jump for: The voting, the videos, my short write-ups on the tracks and the results from last week’s entry featuring the singles of The Police (Spoiler Alert: We’ve got another addition to the CW Hall of Fame)

iClips, one of the newest players in the video streaming of live music events, will be bringing us full sets from Summer Camp in Chillicothe IL all weekend long. 5 sets of moe., 3 sets of Umphrey’s McGee, 2 sets from Lotus and 18 other bands and DJs.

The action starts right now over at iclips.net

READ ON after the jump for the full broadcast schedule…

Well, as I’ve bitched and moaned about the last couple of weeks, finding an album where different artists have covered all the tracks is getting harder and harder. So I’ve been forced to delve into Greatest Hits albums, which is fine…

So now that I’ve opened the doors to it, I’ve selected the 1986 release by The Police, Every Breath You Take: The Singles. This is an interesting one because The Police are certainly a unique sounding trio of musicians and the vocals can be particularly challenging.

As always, please register/login with Imeem to ensure that you’re getting full length tracks and not just 30 second snippets. This week there are a few artist that are embedded only with YouTube and will not appear in the playlist below.

READ ON after the jump to vote and for more entries from this week, as well as the results from last week’s Highway 61 Revisited Cover Album Wars.

DaveO brings us today’s GraphJam parody: George Harrison and Eric Clapton: Taxman (Live In Japan) GraphJam: And In The End Previously on HT: Inspiration!, The Coal Ran Out, Big Red’s Issues

Well it’s official, Mr. Blotto is the first member of the Cover Wars Hall of Fame. They have won back-to-back weeks including both last week’s Houses of The Holy edition and the week before with Pinball Wizard.

Sure, maybe it’s the same guy that keeps voting over and over again with different IP addresses, but I don’t care! Umphrey’s McGee is likely headed to the CW HOF, as well, as they were the only other entry to give Mr. Blotto a run for their money last week. While it’s clear that voting is just a popularity contest, it’s my opinion that these two artists did have the best covers last week. Many of our readers pointed out that I omitted Gov’t Mule from the running, as they have covered the entire album. Surely, we’ll make it up to Mule fans with a review of the official release when it comes out.

As always, I want you listening to the whole track and not just 30 seconds of it, so you need to register/login to Imeem first.

On to this week, and the second edition of Cover [Album] Wars, we’ve got Neil Young’s second solo disc Everybody Knows this is Nowhere. This is Neil’s first solo album and his first with Crazy Horse as his backing band. Fun fact about Neil’s songwriting lifted from the Decade liner notes, I’ll transcribe this chicken scratch the best I can:

READ ON to check out the specs on this week’s contestants…

I’m not sure how the Mr. Blotto fans get the word around, but they sure know how to dominate some Cover Wars and they are the winner of last week’s Pinball Wizard edition.

After ten weeks of writing Cover Wars, I think it is time for a change in format. Previously, we’ve been putting up multiple versions of the same song for comparison. What I’m going to do for the next ten weeks is pick an album and select different artists for each track. This week’s selection will be Led Zeppelin’s 5th album, Houses of The Holy.

You will need to register/login to Imeem to hear these tracks in their entirety:

The Song Remains The Same (Umphrey’s McGee): Since UM first performed this in 2002, it has been a staple in their extensive cover repertoire. Check out the whole show on The Archive.

READ ON for more on this week’s contestants…

Well, I need to make a major correction in regards to the You Enjoy Myself Cover Wars. It appeared that The Benevento/Russo duo (w/ Mike Gordon) had it in the bag, and I declared them the winner in a move reminiscent of Dewey Defeats Truman. I’ve sent ScottyB down to The Duo headquarters to forcibly remove the CW trophy from their mantle and have it delivered to Tim Palmieri, the real (err, current?) winner of the YEM Cover Wars.

What I really like about writing this once a week is how fast some of these blogs can show up in Google Search, very often you’ll find this column on the first page of some Google Search terms. People are discovering it everyday and for that reason, voting never closes.

So that was two weeks ago, last week we had the Making Flippy Floppy Edition, and Umphrey’s McGee currently has over 75% of the voting, so we’ll call that one for UM…but as we’ve seen, voting is never final.

Moving on, I’ve selected The Who as the artist for this week’s cover wars and we are taking a look at perhaps the most well-known song off the Rock Opera Tommy, Pinball Wizard. The playlist below has got five renditions of the tune about our beloved deaf, dumb and blind pinball champion. If you are only getting 30-second clips of the songs, you must first register or login to Imeem.

Read on for the tale of the tape on this week’s competitors…

Well, I never said it was going to be fair! With a little help from Mike Gordon, the Benevento/Russo Duo ran away with last week’s Cover Wars, which featured seven versions of You Enjoy Myself.

Today marks the ninth installment of Cover Wars, and I figured it was about time that I picked a Talking Heads’ song. I’m operating with a few less brain cells than normal having seen four shows in four days, traversing well over 900 miles in my car while of course working Thursday, Friday and Monday. With that in mind I chose a Talking Heads’ tune that only a few bands on the Archive have covered: Making Flippy Floppy.

If you’re only getting 30-second clips of these songs, you must first register/log into Imeem.

Read on for the scoop on this week’s competitors…

Here’s a cool freebie: Umphrey’s McGee just made it’s show from April 8th, 2008 available for download on the Live Music Archive. The band had this to say: The city of DeKalb and students of NIU have welcomed Umphrey’s McGee for many years, and after hearing the news of the tragedy on February 14th, we […]