Posts by DaveO

I am always at the mercy of what happened the previous week when I write this piece – and I like it when the bands make it so easy on me. We’ve got Club D’Elf welcoming last minute, world-renowned special guests as they attempt to raise money to spring a fellow collaborator out of an INS prison. Then, there is moe., who 20 years into their career manages to debut five new songs at their rescheduled Halloween gig. Perpetual Groove paid an early tribute to John Lennon – I think. And finally, we get to feature The Radiators from New Orleans, a band that has logged over 4,000 shows and is currently on an extended farewell tour.

A reminder, you can download all of this week’s audio in one easy to listen to MP3 that we call the Last Week’s Sauce Podcast, click here to download.

[Thanks to Gordon for this week’s photo]

Club D’Elf – Zeed al Maal
Date & Venue: 2010-12-03 The Lizard Lounge – Cambridge, MA
Taper & Show Download: Z-Man

Club D’elf, a rotating cast of musicians fronted by bassist Mike Rivard, welcomed a very special guest last week – Hassan Hakmoun. Both the audio and video feature Hassan’s contributions. Merchandise sales from the show also went to benefit Kousmat Mohammed, another D’Elf collaborator that had been detained in an INS facility, an all too common tale for international musicians. The good news? He’s out thanks to an outpouring of contributions. Club D’Elf [tour dates] has a few upcoming shows in Japan with John Medeski on keyboards. The next US gig is scheduled for January 7th at The Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, MA.

READ ON for tracks from moe., Perpetual Groove and The Radiators…

For your weekly hour’s worth of music, you’ll first be listening to The Frames, the Irish band celebrating their 20th year of existence. From there, we cruise over to the soulful sounds of J.J. Grey & Mofro for a track from their 2010 record. Mike Gordon, who was recently singing the praises of J.J. Grey, contributes four tracks from his show in Maine where he was joined by Phish drummer Jon Fishman. And we close it out with a recent Robert Hunter penned tune from New Riders Of The Purple Sage. Hope you enjoy it.

A reminder, you can download all of this week’s audio in one easy to listen to MP3 that we call the Last Week’s Sauce Podcast, click here to download.

[Thanks to scb for this week’s photo]

The Frames – People Get Ready
Date & Venue: 2010-11-23 The Vic Theatre – Chicago, IL
Taper & Show Download: Brian Emerick

As you may have read in Monday’s Pullin’ Tubes, Irish folk-rock act The Frames are turning 20. Unfortunately, for our American readers, you have missed the live dates at this point. The Frames [tour dates] continue their anniversary run overseas tomorrow night at Paradiso in Amsterdam.

Video from The Avalon Theater:

READ ON for tracks from JJ Grey & Mofro, Mike Gordon w/Jon Fishman, and New Riders Of The Purple Sage…

Written by guitarist Robbie Robertson and sung by bassist Rick Danko, It Makes No Difference was first released in 1975 on Northern Lights-Southern Cross, the first real studio record from The Band in four years. An incredible tale of heartbreak, the track clocks in over six and a half minutes, one of the longest in The Band’s catalog (Acadian Driftwood, also on Northern Lights-Southern Cross is almost seven minutes long).

The Contestants:

Dave Katz & Ed McGee of Ekoostik Hookah lead us off this week with a tight duo version featuring acoustic guitar and piano. Source: 5-8-2002

READ ON for the scoop on the rest of this week’s contestants…

Appearing on the 1967 Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Within You Without You was written by George Harrison. While of course technically a song by “The Beatles”, Harrison is the only member of the band that appears on the recording. For an in-depth musical analysis of the musical structure and more, I recommend reading the notes from Alan W. Pollack.

The Contestants:

In 1998, Bela Fleck & The Flecktones were pairing Within You Without You with their own tune Shanti from their ’98 release Left Of Cool. This Flecktones show features sit-ins from Carter Beauford and Dave Matthews, who sang on the track Communication, also on Left Of Cool.
Audio Source: 10-22-1998

READ ON for the scoop on the rest of this week’s contestants…

I apologize that you have not seen a new addition of Last Week’s Sauce in nearly a month, but I have recently switched coasts and am now a resident of San Francisco. I’m settled in and excited to get back to my regular HT columns. This week, we’ll take a listen to a new song from the moe. side project Disgrace, Keller Williams, Jimmy Herring Band and a great acoustic segment to close from Little Feat members Paul Barrere and Fred Tackett.

A reminder, you can download all of this week’s audio in one easy to listen to MP3 that we call the Last Week’s Sauce Podcast, click here to download.

[Thanks to RobC for this week’s photo]

Disgrace – Little Miss Cup Half Empty
Date & Venue: 2010-11-09 Southgate House – Newport, KY
Taper & Show Download: K.C. Cadwallader

moe. has got a new side-project titled Disgrace that features Al, Chuck and Rob on acoustic instruments. In addition to a lot of moe. songs and covers, the project debuted an original at this Kentucky show titled Little Miss Cup Half Empty. Disgrace [tour dates] plays tonight at 8×10 in Baltimore, MD.

READ ON for tracks from Keller Williams, Jimmy Herring Band, and the Paul Barrere and Fred Tackett Acoustic Duo…

[Originally Published: June 24, 2009]

Following up on last week’s Willin’ Cover Wars, which the Black Crowes won by a small margin over Uncle Tupelo, we’re re-running an old Cover Wars on another Little Feat classic – Skin It Back…

Skin It Back is a track off the 1974 Little Feat album Feats Don’t Fail Me Now. It also has the distinction of being the first Little Feat song where the songwriting credits are solely that of guitarist Paul Barrère.

This is the second Little Feat song selected for CW. Longtime readers might remember that Mule was the winner of the Spanish Moon Cover Wars. [Ed. note – We’ve tackled Willin’ since this was originally posted]

Let’s get down to business and look at this week competitors…

The Bridge: Leading off this week is the only band that also appeared in the Spanish Moon Cover Wars and there is some excellent guitar work in this one. Source: 8-17-2005
[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/skinbridge.mp3]

READ ON for the lowdown on the rest of this week’s contestants…

[Originally Published: 9/14/2010] It’s been a while since I selected a Led Zeppelin song for Cover Wars, over a year actually. Though always a popular song on the radio, Ramble On was not played in full live by Led Zeppelin until 2007, 38 years after the release of Led Zeppelin II.

The Contestants:

Bustle In Your Hedgerow, which features Marco Benevento and Joe Russo of The Duo with Scott Metzger of RANA and Dave Dreiwitz of Ween delivers an instrumental rendition to lead us off for this weeks edition.
Source: 7-31-2005

Bustle Video from Brooklyn Bowl last year:

READ ON for the scoop on the rest of this week’s contestants…

We’ve got a good mix this week. There is an absolutely fantastic matrix recording of The Bridge, acoustic rock courtesy of Guster, a brand new tune from The New Deal and a section of a Phish first set that displays both the best and the worst of the performance of their tricky compositions.

A reminder, you can download all of this week’s audio in one easy to listen to MP3 that we call the Last Week’s Sauce Podcast, click here to download.

[Thanks to Big Perm for this week’s photo]

The Bridge – Easy Jane > Midnight Special
Date & Venue: 2010-10-15 River Street Jazz Cafe – Plains, PA
Taper & Show Download: Keith Litzenberger

I have heard that the River Street Jazz Cafe is one of the best venues to tape due to the helpful staff and the acoustics of the room. We’ve got a perfect example as this is a fantastic matrix recording. The Bridge [tour dates] plays tonight at Johnny D’s in Somerville, MA.

READ ON for tracks from Guster, the New Deal and Phish…

You may have read a recent Washington Post article examining how some of the Indie rockers are growing more comfortable coming out of the jamband-fan-closet. One area which I’d like to see more crossover in is to have more bands implement open taping policies. That’s why I was ecstatic to pull up recordings on my weekly Live Music Archive search from bands like Blitzen Trapper and The National. Good for them, now whatever happened to the policy that MGMT promised months back only to have the idiots at Sony make them retract it? Note: Hidden Track previously contacted Sony for a comment, was promised one, and then received nothing. Oh but Hidden Track readers and LWS Podcast faithfuls, don’t worry – we still remember that Phish tour started last week too.

A reminder – you can download all of this week’s audio in one easy to listen to MP3 that we call the Last Week’s Sauce Podcast, click here to download.

[Thanks to acidjack for this week’s photo]

Biltzen Trapper – Destroyer Of The Void
Date & Venue: 2010-10-06 WorkPlay Theater – Birmingham, AL
Taper & Show Download: Jeff Hatcher

The P4K album review of Destroyer Of The Void describes the title track as such – “ambitiously steamrolls over decades of canonical popular music, squishing it into an epic suite that gathers Beatles harmonies, sci-fi synths, classic rock guitars, country-rock twang, and AOR sentimentality into one big, ballsy package.” Pretty serious stuff, and they are right – it’s an amazing piece. It’s nice to hear the band has a good live arrangement of it as well. Blitzen Trapper [tour dates] plays tonight at the Dallas House of Blues.

Video from a Blitzen Trapper show from two nights ago:

READ ON for tracks from The National, Phish and String Cheese Incident with Trey Anastasio from the Fourmile Canyon Revival concert…

Yeah, Cover Wars is a bit different this week. They can’t all be jamband-friendly accessible tunes, sometimes we need to freak out some squares. So that’s why you probably won’t know many – or possibly any – of this week’s contestants as they tackle this Genesis tune from the epic 1974 album The Lamb Lies Down Broadway.

The Contestants:

Leading off this week is this rendition from Fragile using female vocals, a piano and some cheesy electric bass sounds, it works though. Source: smile

READ ON for the scoop on the rest of this week’s contestants…

We’ve got a good one this week complete with dueling sit-ins from the same show, a song that took seven years to make it to the live stage, some great covers from a folk/bluegrass legend and two of the hottest women on the live music circuit sharing the stage for a few minutes. Let’s get right into it.

A reminder, you can download all of this week’s audio in one easy to listen to MP3 that we call the Last Week’s Sauce Podcast, click here to download.

[Thanks to taperj for this week’s photo]

Gov’t Mule – Wild Horses, I’ll Be The One
Date & Venue: 2010-10-01 U of Iowa Pentacrest – Iowa City, IA
Taper & Show Download: Brad Shears

Pretty cool double-bill for a “homecoming” show when it features Gov’t Mule and Yonder Mountain String Band. YMSB opened the show and Warren Haynes welcomes mandolin player and lead vocalist Jeff Austin out for a cover of Wild Horses. Gov’t Mule [tour dates] next plays Saturday October 23rd opening for Widespread Panic at The Joint @ Hard Rock in Las Vegas, NV – sounds fun.

Banks of The Deep End from the same show:

READ ON for tracks from Grace Potter, Jazz Mandolin Project, Tim O’Brien and Yonder Mountain String Band…

Under African Skies is the seventh track off Paul Simon’s classic 1986 album Graceland. We have previously done The Boy In The Bubble Cover Wars here at Hidden Track, but because of stupid IMEEM shutting down, a lot of those old editions no longer have audio embedded in them, rendering them a bit useless. At some point in the future we will go back and fix these old posts with direct audio embeds. But enough about that, on to the covers…

The Contestants:

Brock Butler, who also appeared in The Boy In The Bubble Edition, kicks us off with a killer solo rendition. Source: 12-30-2005

Video from Amberland 2008 with a little help from Ayinde:

READ ON for the scoop on the rest of this week’s contestants…

It’s a mostly Rock and Roll edition of Last Week’s Sauce today. Luckily we have the funky Stanton Moore Trio to break things up for us and we lead off with an absolutely amazing cover recently added to Built To Spill’s repertoire. Umphrey’s McGee and Wilco both do what they do best to round us out and that is what you get for your hour’s worth of music.

Of course, you can download all of this week’s audio in one easy to listen to MP3 that we call the Last Week’s Sauce Podcast, click here to download.

[Thanks to Kush for this week’s photo]

Built To Spill – The Plan, Ripple
Date & Venue: 2010-09-19 The Beaumont – Kansas City, MO
Taper & Show Download: TEAM KANSASOURI

“The New Grateful Dead” has been tossed about in the past describing Built To Spill, it’s a comparison that a lot of Deadheads completely don’t understand – but I think it has some merit once you get past the obvious differences in overall sound. Well this tour, which is massive by the way with very few days off, they have been playing Ripple. The cover starts off slow and somewhat true to the original, but by the end it is a full-on rocker. I hope you don’t mind, but since Built To Spill tends to take a lot of time between songs, I have removed a big chunk of dead space between these two tunes. BTS [tour dates] plays the first of two shows at The Paradise in Boston tonight. I’ll see ‘ya there tomorrow.

Video of Ripple from the same show as the audio embedded above:

READ ON for tracks from The Stanton Moore Trio, UM and Wilco…

The last time I was due up for Friday Mix Tape I put together a list of rock tunes written in 5. Well, let’s add two more beats to the measure as we take a look at songs with at least large portions of the tune written in 7. Now count with me: One. Two. […]

Two of the five bands featured in today’s edition of Last Week’s Sauce offer acoustic performances from acts that normally rely heavily on electric guitars. Furthur contributes a track that has been 40 years in the making, we’ve got a very jazzy Beatles cover and close it out with a fantastic live recording of Pavement.

You can download all of this week’s audio in one easy to listen to MP3 that we call the Last Week’s Sauce Podcast, click here to download.

[Thanks to DATBRAD for this week’s photo]

The Black Crowes – My Morning Song, Miracle To Me
Date & Venue: 2010-09-19 Thomas Wolfe Auditorium – Asheville, NC
Taper & Show Download: Gordon Wilson

The Black Crowes played an acoustic first set in Asheville this past Sunday and it is incredible. The two songs embedded below close the set. If you are a fan of this band I recommend downloading the entire acoustic set and adding it to your collection. The Crowes play tomorrow at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in Houston, TX.

Morning Song from the electric 2nd set:

READ ON for tracks from Furthur, JFJO, and The Machine…

We first visited the catalog of Tom Waits a couple of months ago when we made the Cold Water edition of Cover Wars. Goin’ Out West was released on the 1992 Waits album Bone Machine. Fun bonus this week, we’ve got both very old and recent video to compare from two of our four contestants. You don’t see a whole lot of Mid ’90s live concert footage on YouTube, so that was a pleasant surprise to find. Ten points to anyone who can identify what scene in Fight Club features this song.

The Contestants:

British band Gomez leads us off this week with a strong performance from 2005. A fantastic recording of a show that also features covers of The Beatles and Buddy Holly. Audio Source: 1-24-2005

READ ON for the scoop on the rest of this week’s contestants…

A couple of weeks ago when I just featured longer segments from less bands, I saw the download count for the “Pocast” go up a little bit, so I’m going to start doing that more often. I’ll still have editions where I feature five different bands, but for today – just three bands, and leading off we’ve got a 30-minute segment spanning just two tunes.

You can download all of this week’s audio in one easy to listen to MP3 that we call the Last Week’s Sauce Podcast, click here to download.

[This week’s photo is actually courtesy of me]

the Disco Biscuits – Reactor > Shem-Ra Boo
Date & Venue: 2010-09-10 Mountain Park – Holyoke, MA
Taper & Show Download: Jesse Hurlburt

the Disco Biscuits have just wrapped up their big summer tour and from I can tell from fans of the band, it went very well. I personally went and checked out both shows in Massachusetts this past weekend and thought the band sounded great and they looked even better with the addition of the lasers. tDB are off until their Halloween run starts on October 27th in Baltimore, but Conspirator (featuring Marc Brownstein and Aaron Magner) plays tonight at Cervante’s in Denver, CO.

Feeling Twisted, the encore from the following night’s tour closer in Boston:

READ ON for tracks from Dr. Dog and STS9…

There were a couple of festivals this Labor Day weekend. One of them was moe.down in Mohawk, NY and you’ll be hearing plenty of recordings from that below. The other one was the North Coast Music Festival in Chicago and while we’ve seen plenty of video pop-up, it’s been pretty light to non-existent on the audio recordings.

You can download all of this week’s audio in one easy to listen to MP3 that we call the Last Week’s Sauce Podcast, click here to download.

[Thanks to tonedeaf this week’s photo]

The Black Keys – Next Girl, Chop and Change, Howlin’ For You, Tighten Up
Date & Venue: 2010-09-05 moe.down – Mohawk, NY
Taper & Show Download: Rob Clarke

moe.down always does a great job of bringing in a few non-jambands to round out their talent. This segment of songs features a little extra help from the baking musicians whereas the video embedded below is during the portion of their set that was stricly duo-style. The Black Keys play tomorrow at the Virginia Beach Amphitheater.

READ ON for killer tracks from EITS, the Mike Gordon Band and moe…

Judging by The Raw Totals over at ZZYZX’s website, Phish has played 736 different songs in the 1298 shows that we know about and have setlists for. 310 of those were one-timers, that number may seem high but remember that includes things like: Che Hun Ta Mo, Dickie Scotland, Merry Pranksters Jam, Metal Bagel Death – you get the idea. As Phish continues to dig deeper into their massive catalog of songs, I thought I’d take a look at a few songs that have been played exactly once that I think might be worthy of at least a second performance, if not a third and fourth.

Amoreena:
Suggested placement: Encore: The Squirming Coil > Amoreena
[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/amoreena.mp3]
There’s something about Star Lake in Burgettstown, they always seem to get at least one major bust out and often many more than that. In ’98 it was Trenchtown Rock and Time Loves A Hero, ’99 you’re going to see later in this list, 2000 saw the first performance of Shafty in almost 150 shows, 2003 was basically one bust out after another, and even 2009 which appears a bit standard on paper featured the first Walk Away in almost nine years. Amoreena has been the only Phish foray into the repertoire of Elton John, which is surprising because it seems right in Page’s wheelhouse.

No digital cameras in 1997 to show you video of Amoreena, but here is the Chairman Of The Boards performing Tiny Dancer solo at the High Sierra Music Festival in 2006.

READ ON for more one-timers Phish should bust out again…

The timeline for Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn) is a bit more complicated than most Cover Wars because while the song was written by Bob Dylan, Manfred Mann officially released their cover of it two years before it would appear on Bob Dylan’s album Self Portrait. The song was written and first played with The Band during the recording sessions for The Basement Tapes, but the version penned during that session would not be released until 1985 as part of the Biograph release. Further complicating things, when Manfred Mann recorded the song they simply titled it Mighty Quinn. The song gets named a LOT of different ways.

The Contestants:

The Britpop band Cornershop released this cover on their 2009 release Judy Sucks A Lemon For Breakfast. The entire album is recommended listening, and if you like what you hear, be sure to give their 1997 album When I Was Born For The 7th Time a listen as well.

Video from the Godiva Festival this year:

READ ON for the scoop on the rest of this week’s contestants…