Posts by DaveO

If I had to choose a theme to this edition of Last Week’s Sauce, I suppose it would “legends”. Booker T. and Leo Kottke are undoubtedly legends in my mind. And Wilco, well Wilco is one of the premiere bands on the scene right now and they are legends in the making. Galactic? OK probably not, but they do have one of The Neville Brothers playing with them and that helps.

[Thanks to Patrick for this week’s photo]

And we continue to take all the selected tracks, normalize them, create some simple fades and put it into one easy to download MP3 for you. Click here to download Last Week’s Sauce Podcast #5

Artist & Title: Booker T. – Green Onions, Born Under A Bad Sign, Potato Hole
Date & Venue: 2010-04-02 Varsity Theater, Minneapolis MN
Taper & Show Download: perks

Leading off this week we’ve got legend Booker T. Jones. There are three songs here and he wrote all of ’em. Well, he co-wrote Born Under A Bad Sign, but Green Onions is all his. The third track is the title-track from his newest album. Booker T. next plays at the San Francisco Jazz Festival on April 23rd.

Video of Green Onions from the same show:

READ ON for tracks from Galactic, Leo Kottke, and Wilco…

Once in a while a band comes along that so captures the attention of their contemporaries, that the covers just start flowing in. It used to be much more common to cover your peers, these days it’s a rarity. Somewhere along the way it got less cool to cover songs that were released in the past couple of years, but MGMT is one of the bands that seems to have avoided this.

For this week’s B List we assembled our favorite MGMT covers…

10) The Kooks – Kids:

English band The Kooks acoustically cover Kids live at Triple J Studios:

9) ALO – Time To Pretend

This ALO side project played under the name “Bag Of Tricks” for this gig on 10-29-2009 and featured three members: Zack Gill (Keyboards), Steve Adams (Bass), and Dave Brogan (Drums).

READ ON for eight more artists covering MGMT well..

While you might not think of the middle of March as “Festival Season”, we’ve got audio from two separate festivals this week in our audio & video recap of what’s been going on recently. Jam In The Dam returned to The Melkweg in Amsterdam after taking a year off in 2009, while moe. had their first festival of the year up in Rutland, VT for the appropriately titled snoe.down.

[Thanks to OtherOneK for this week’s photo]

We also check in with Widespread Panic as they played their first live shows of the year and we listen in on some of the acoustic mini-sets that Wilco has been throwing into the three-hour shows they’ve been playing. We lead off with a gorgeous Neil Young cover and also have some audio and video from Orchestra Morphine’s most recent gig.

And we continue to take all the selected tracks, normalize them, create some simple fades and put it into one easy to download MP3 for you. Click here to download Last Week’s Sauce Podcast #4

Artist & Title: Cowboy Junkies – Don’t Let It Bring You Down
Date & Venue: 2010-03-23 Space, Evanston IL
Taper & Show Download: darktrain

As Neil Young says on 4 Way Street, this next song is guaranteed to bring you right down. It’s called Don’t Let It Bring You Down. The Cowboy Junkies perform a fantastic rendition of it. Cowboy Junkies next play April 15th in Buffalo NY.

Video from a very intimate gig in Davenport. Read more about it here:

READ ON for tracks from Les Claypool, moe., Orchestra Morphine, Widespread Panic and Wilco…

We started our Cover Wars March Madness tournament with 32 different winners of Cover Wars over the past year. We broke those down into two separate portions as to not overwhelm our voters. Then, we had our Sweet Sixteen, our Elite Eight, the Final Four, and now there are two. It all comes down to this, and it’s a battle of jamband quartets.

PGroove – This Must Be The Place vs. Phish – Curtis Loew

Hailing from Savannah, GA; Perpetual Groove offers up their cover of The Talking Heads’ This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody). The first known performance of this cover took place at The Georgia Theater in Athens on September 5th, 2002. PGroove has gone on to play it over 100 times since. The vocal duties are handled by guitarist and lead singer Brock Butler.

Perpetual Groove – This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)
Audio: 2-10-2007
[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/pgroovenaive.mp3]
Video: 12-13-2009

Hailing from Vermont, Phish offers up their cover of Lynryd Skynryd’s The Ballad Of Curtis Loew. The first known performance of the cover took place on a Wednesday Night in the Spring of 1987 at Burlington’s famed Nectar’s. It was pretty regular in the rotation for the next few years. The first notable gap was from 10/30/1990 to 3/14/1993, a 290 show gap. It was played three times in 1993 and disappeared for the next six years. Though not an official performance, The Ballad Of Curtis Loew was soundchecked at Big Cypress in 1999. And then Phish brought it back at Fenway Park in Boston on May 31st of last year for a glorious bust out, and we haven’t seen Curtis Loew since. The lead vocals are handled by keyboardist Page McConnell and it’s part of a rare group of songs in Phish’s repertoire where guitarist Trey Anastasio doesn’t sing a single note.

READ ON to listen and watch Phish’s Curtis Loew and to vote…

The Disco Biscuits have had quite a week, but they made it through and Jon “The Barber” Gutwillig is at home resting up after successful surgery on his wrist. In addition to some music from Barber’s fill-ins, we’ve also got audio from Fareed Haque’s great world music ensemble, a John Mayer/Michael Franti collaboration, some recent goods from Perpetual Groove and a fantastic classic rock cover from the Ryan Montbleau Band.

Another week and another edition of the Last Week’s Sauce Podcast. If you want to take this week’s five selections with you, you now can.
Click here to download Last Week’s Sauce Podcast #3

[Thanks to J5Brock for this week’s photo]

Artist & Title: the Disco Biscuits – Park Avenue
Date & Venue: 2010-03-19 House of Blues, Boston MA
Taper & Show Download: Matt Quinn

Before things went horribly wrong at the House of Blues last Friday, there was some fantastic music being made despite difficult circumstances. From the moment Chris Michetti took the stage for Park Avenue, I knew the Disco Biscuits had a good game-plan on how to attack that night’s show. tDB’s set at the Ultra Music Festival and their late night Tractorbeam set will go on as scheduled tomorrow with the help of Michetti and Tom Hamilton.

Some great video of Helicopters from the Boston show:

READ ON for tracks from Fareed Haque, PGroove, The Ryan Montbleau Band

Last week, we launched the first-ever Podcast to accompany this weekly feature and I was happy to see that a bunch of you downloaded it. We’re going to continue doing this every week. For those who missed it last week, it’s just one MP3 that you can download and take with you, it’s got all the selections that are embedded in the piece with a few extra fades to give it that real Podcast feel. This week, we’ve got relatively short compositions as our bookends with the jams sandwiched in the middle. Hope you enjoy it.

Click here to download Last Week’s Sauce Podcast #2

[Thanks to OtheroneK for this week’s photo]

Artist & Title: The Duke & The King – Union Street
Date & Venue: 2010-03-12 Wellmont Theater, Montclair NJ
Taper & Show Download: edtyre

HT favorites The Duke & The King had the honor of opening for Levon Helm last week. This is a very nice recording and a nice lead-in for the jams to follow in this week’s edition. The Duke & The King next play April 2nd in Brooklyn.

Thought not from last week, here’s some video from a gig in Paris:

READ ON for tracks from Furthur, Mike Gordon, Tropical Jam 5 and UM…

Sure we’re a bit ahead of the NCAA because we’re already down to sixteen contenders. Voting turnout was great in the first round, thanks to everyone who made their voices heard throughout the last week. Some races were very close, Primus (The Devil Went Down To Georgia) inched out Widespread Panic (Skin It Back) 51% to 49%. Some were blowouts, Bruce Hornsby & Trey Anastasio took down 90% of the vote when matched up against The Waybacks. Clare & The Reasons did their best to fire up their Facebook fans, but they could not overcome the built-in Phish advantage here on Hidden Track as they lost 57% to 43%.

In the first round we did our best to match up the artists that had won multiple Cover Wars ver the past year. We’ve still got two left as we’ll see Bruce Hornsby & Trey Anastasio take on Trey Anastasio’s solo band. And there are still two Phish covers in the mix. Once we’re down to the round of eight on Friday, we’ll have this all cleaned up.

1) Bruce Hornsby & Trey Anastasio – Standing On The Moon vs. Trey Anastasio – Sultans of Swing
2) Jeff Tweedy – I’m Only Sleeping vs. YARN – Oh! Sweet Nuthin’
3) Built To Spill – Cortez The Killer vs. Foo Fighters – Band on The Run
4) Umphrey’s McGee – Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’ vs. Max Creek – Eminence Front
5) Phish – Sweet Virginia vs. Phish – Ballad of Curtis Loew
6) Pearl Jam – Baba O’Riley vs. Grateful Dead – Ballad Of A Thin Man
7) Give Us The Money Lebowski – Godzilla vs. of Montreal – Moonage Daydream
8) Perpetual Groove – This Must Be The Place vs. Primus – The Devil Went Down To Georgia

For our first Round of 16 matchup, we’ve got Trey Anastasio teaming up with Bruce Hornsby to cover the Dead’s Standing On The Moon taking on Big Red’s cover of Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits…

Bruce Hornsby & Trey Anastasio – Standing On The Moon

Trey Anastasio – Sultans of Swing
[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/treyswing.mp3]

READ ON to vote and for the other seven Sweet 16 bouts…

Back on Tuesday, we kicked off our annual Cover Wars – March Madness tournament by asking you to vote on the first eight matchups in our Round of 32. Today, we’ve got the other eight first round bouts for you to check out and vote on. As we mentioned on Tuesday, we took 32 Cover Wars winners from the last 12 months and pitted them against each other as we start a competition to crown the best cover from this year’s column.

All of the winners’ audio/video has been embedded for you and we have linked back to the corresponding Cover Wars that led to each artist’s victory. We have enjoyed running this piece for you every week (or maybe, three times per month?) and hope you enjoy Cover Wars March Madness.

First, we’ll list each of the matchups followed by audio (or video) of each cover, so check out the bottom half of the bracket…
1)Life On Mars? (Phish) vs. The Ballad Of Curtis Loew (Phish)
2)Tomorrow Never Knows (801) vs. I’m Only Sleeping (Jeff Tweedy)
3)Going To California (Great White) vs. Band On The Run (Foo Fighters)
4)Baba O’Riley (Pearl Jam) vs. Harvest Moon (Pearl Jam w/Sleater-Kinney)
5)Moonage Daydream (of Montreal) vs. Bohemian Rhapsody (Pink)
6)The Devil Went Down To Georgia (Primus) vs. Skin It Back (Widespread Panic)
7)Standing On The Moon (Bruce Hornsby & Trey) vs. Dupree’s Diamond Blues The Waybacks)
8)Helpless (YARN) vs. Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ (YARN)

For bout number one, we’ve got Phish taking on themselves as the legendary jammers’ cover of David Bowie’s Life On Mars? goes up against their version of The Ballad of Curtis Loew by Lynyrd Skynyrd…

Phish – Life On Mars?
[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/phishmars.mp3]
Phish – The Ballad Of Curtis Loew
[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/ph.mp3]

READ ON to place your vote for all eight of today’s bouts…

This past weekend I was explaining the concept of Last Week’s Sauce to a friend of mine and they said, “Oh, so it’s like a Podcast of music that happened the previous week.” I explained yes that it was, but that I don’t compile all the tracks into one file, I just download them…do some edits and normalizing and we embed them individually on our site. Then it occurred to me that it would be just a little more work to essentially make this a Podcast as well. So for the first time this week, you can download all of this week’s selections in one easy to transport MP3. Click here to download this week’s selections. The rest of the piece will continue as it always has, with the audio embedded directly into the piece individually.

[Thanks to kcmoejoe for this week’s photo]

Artist & Title: Jackie Greene – I Don’t Live In A Dream
Date & Venue: 2010-03-07 SPACE, Evanston IL
Taper & Show Download: arzjr

Jackie Greene is on the road in a slightly more stripped down setup than you are used to seeing from him live. The shows are being billed as the Jackie Greene Acoustic trio, and he has regularly been performing a few songs solo acoustic as well. He certainly has the song catalog to effectively pull this off. Greene plays tonight at Old Rock House in St. Louis.

READ ON for tracks from Lettuce, RRE, Stockholm Syndrome and Wilco…

Welcome to the 2010 edition of Cover Wars – March Madness. We are taking our efforts from last year and doubling them: this year we’ve got 32 covers in the running for the Championship. Over the past year, we’ve had six different artists win Cover Wars more than once. For these winners, we have paired them up against each other in the first round. For example, if you were going to vote for Trey Anastasio because of your loyalty to him – now you have to decide if he plays a better O-o-h Child or Sultans Of Swing. We have also paired up original artists whenever possible – Did Joan Baez or The Grateful Dead do better justice to their Bob Dylan cover?

All of the winners’ audio/video has been embedded for you and we have linked back to the corresponding Cover Wars that led to each artist’s victory. We have enjoyed running this piece for you every week (or maybe, three times per month?) and hope you enjoy Cover Wars March Madness. My personal highlight would have to be us running The Ballad Of Curtis Loew edition in early May and seeing Phish pull the cover from deep off the shelf three weeks later at Fenway Park. Let’s look at the first eight matchups…

1) Cortez The Killer (Built To Spill) vs. The Maker (DMB)
2) Sultans of Swing (Trey) vs. O-o-h Child (Trey)
3) Will It Go Round In Circles (The Bridge) vs. Godzilla (GUTML)
4) Ballad Of A Thin Man (GD) vs. A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall (Joan Baez)
5) Sweet Virginia (Phish) vs. Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Clare & The Reasons)
6) You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Max Creek) vs. Eminence Front (MC)
7) Naive Melody (Perpetual Groove) vs. Time (Flaming Lips)
8) Lenny (Umphrey’s McGee) vs. Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’ (UM)

For bout number one, we’ve got Built To Spill covering Neil Young’s Cortez The Killer vs. DMB’s cover of Daniel Lanois’ The Maker…

Built To Spill – Cortez The Killer
[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/builtcortez.mp3]
Dave Matthews Band – The Maker
[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/dmbmaker.mp3]

READ ON to place your vote in this matchup and to check out and vote on the other seven March Madness bouts in this part one of our Round of 32…

There was enough Grateful Dead material to make this Last Week’s Sauce entirely focused on GD-related-bands. But we’ve been using a lot of Furthur in this feature lately, so I chose just two of the Dead bands for inclusion.

From the Phish world we’ve got a few more tracks from Trey Anastasio & Classic TAB as their 16-date-tour came to a close. There will soon be Mike Gordon tracks showing up in the coming weeks in this column, I’m sure. And representing the present, Thom Yorke debuted a few new songs overseas, we’ll take a look and a listen to those. And Umphrey’s McGee tackled another contemporary cover when they stopped by New York City during blizzard conditions last week. As always, enjoy…

Artist & Title: Bill Kreutzmann Trio aka BK3 – Estimated Prophet
Date & Venue: 2010-02-26 Moe’s Alley, Santa Cruz CA
Taper & Show Download: shark420

I love this band, saw one of their first performances in Northampton a couple of years ago and really dug what they were laying down. It’s just a winning combination of musicians and you should catch this band the next time you can. While there are no BK3 tour dates on the books, Billy plays with Steve Kimock, Bobby Vega, Michael Kang & Chris Berry in Hawaii at Tropical Jam 5 next week.

Help On The Way from the same show:

READ ON for tracks from JGB, UM, TAB and Thom Yorke…

Last Year’s March Madness tournament was a huge success. Fans of the bands involved got way into it, we had huge voting turnout, and overall it was a lot of fun for us here at HT as we looked back over the previous year’s editions of Cover Wars. To review, last year we started with […]

While this weekly feature is normally a good way to recap what touring bands were up to by way of choosing audio and video to embed for our readers, this week we’re also going to give you a recap of last week’s shenanigans involving the Disco Biscuits and this publication, Hidden Track.

At around 2PM last Thursday afternoon, Disco Biscuits bassist Marc Brownstein simply tweeted the URL www.planetanthem.com. With no real fanfare, tDB had launched a fun, and somewhat hilarious, pre-order site for their first studio release in eight years, Planet Anthem. While some of the items available for purchase were pretty standard (i.e. signed CD’s, a copy of the CD plus entry to the record release shows at the TLA in Philly), some were much more interesting (i.e. for $500 you and four friends get to sing the “Oooooooo” part of tDB epic Basis For A Day at Camp Bisco or $250 to get the Disco Biscuits to remix a song for you).

At 2:40pm EST, I sent ScottyB an email to ask a) if he had seen the Pre-Order page and b) if this situation was ripe for satire. With a little help from tDB guru Matt Quinn we went live with a B List at 5pm titled 10 Rejected Planet Anthem Pre-Order Items.

The post was well received with a few of our readers joining in on the comment section to offer up their own entries of funny would-be pre-order items. I also got a couple of emails from friends saying they enjoyed the piece and we were all happy with the way it went. Fast forward to 8:06am the following morning when I got a text message informing me that a number of the jokes listed in our B List had magically appeared on the actual pre-order page! While some of the Hidden-Track inspired items have been purchased, fans still haven’t been able to pool together the $1 million to get tDB to make their triumphant return to the Pacific Northwest.

READ ON for more on this highlight in Hidden Track history and for LWS selections from tDB, Trey, Wilco, George Clinton & P-Funk and MMW…

Though Daniel Lanois is known more for his work as a producer (U2’s The Joshua Tree, Peter Gabriel’s So, Bob Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind to name a few), he has a few albums of his own, and The Maker is arguably his most well-known composition.

The Contestants:

Dave Matthews Band: Dave Matthews has been playing The Maker as far back as 1991. Its frequency has fluctuated throughout the years, it’s even disappeared for periods of over three years, but it keeps coming back in the rotation at both DMB shows and Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds duo shows. Source: Live In Chicago 12.19.98 at The United Center

Video from the Chicago ’98 Webcast:

Also of note to the Hidden Track readers is that on 10-15-1994 at the Oak Mountain Amphitheater, there was a full-band sit-in where all the members of DMB joined Phish for their encore and after a Drum Duel and a brief Free-form jam, The Maker was performed. Listen to it below. Thanks to hoydog for all he does with the Phish Downloads Spreadsheet.

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

PlanetAnthem.com has gone live allowing Disco Biscuits fans to take a peak at a number of pre-order options for the jamtronica act”s long-delayed studio album. The pre-order opens on Monday at noon (EST) and include an assortment of awesome options for purchase including a signed CD and dinner with Magner in any city ($100), a […]

This week’s edition of Last Week’s Sauce is being brought to you by the lovely city of Chicago. Three of the area’s best bands are represented in the categories of: Alt-Country, Post-Rock, and Jamband. And one of the groups covered the other on Valentine’s Day, you can probably guess which one.

[Thanks to Jesse Hurlburt for this week’s photo]

Artist & Title: Furthur – Unbroken Chain
Date & Venue: 2010-02-14 Barton Hall – Cornell U., Ithaca NY
Taper & Show Download: Tim Burke

Furthur dropped this 15+ minute rendition of Unbroken Chain at Cornell’s Barton Hall, a room steeped in Grateful Dead history. The Grateful Dead scene continues to have the most tapers of any band, look through the Live Music Archive and you’ll see multiple sources for basically every show. Furthur plays tonight at Shea’s Performing Arts Center in Buffalo NY.

Video of a great Morning Dew, also from Barton Hall:

READ ON to stream the rest of this week’s selections…

[Originally Published: October 6, 2009]

Baba O’Riley is the first track on the 1971 album Who’s Next by legendary British rockers The Who. Did you know that the song’s title is a reference to both Meher Baba and Terry Riley? I did not until today.

I don’t know about you, but when writing this I kept having memories of a scene in Freaks and Geeks when Seth Rogen’s character scolds Lindsay Weir for referring to this song as Teenage Wasteland. I would wager a number of our readers have had a similar experience.

The Contestants:

Acoustic Syndicate: Leading off this week is this great band formed in 1992 from North Carolina. They disappeared for a little while, but Acoustic Syndicate is back and have two shows scheduled in NC the weekend of Thanksgiving. Source: 5-29-2005

Video from Asheville 2007:

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

We have a lot of good audio and video to throw at you from last week, Furthur is back on the road for a major tour and Trey Anastasio is out on the road solo for the first time in over a year. Also Umphrey’s McGee seems to have worked their way into three different bands entries this week. Check out what’s below to see which band had a member sit-in with UM and which one took a veiled jab at either the band or the fans, or possibly neither.

[Thanks to j5brock for this week’s photo]

Artist & Title: Furthur – It Must Have Been The Roses
Date & Venue: 2010-02-06 Hard Rock Live, Orlando FL
Taper & Show Download: marcus

Somewhat quietly, Zoe Ellis and Sunshine Garcia have been added to Furthur to help out in the vocals department. This rendition of this great slow Jerry tune sounds fantastic and most certainly benefits from their addition. Furthur plays tonight at Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte.

Dear Mr. Fantasy Video from the night before:

READ ON to stream the rest of this week’s selections…

Last night was the tour opener for Trey Anastasio and Classic TAB. It was a busy night as the band played until Midnight, performed a five-song double encore and debuted four tunes. Two of the songs were brand new and two were tracks originally found on Phish’s Party Time album that accompanied their 2009 release […]

2010 has some great albums on the way, and some are already here. Charlie Hunter released his most recent effort on January 12th, the Disco Biscuits supposedly have their first studio effort in eight years coming in March and Drive-By Truckers also release a new disc that month. Check this piece to see what these bands and others were up to on the road last week.

[Thanks to sonicsound for this week’s photo]

Artist & Title: The Brew – Chance Reaching
Date & Venue: 2010-01-29 House Of Blues, Boston MA
Taper & Show Download: Ted Gakidis

HT contributor Wade Wilby headed out to the House Of Blues last week, and as I always do, I followed his thoughts on Twitter. Since he’s not the easiest person to impress, I took note of the comment that, “At moe. HOB. The Brew is ferocious. See this band asap”. The track I have selected is from the band’s 2008 release Back to the Woods. The band also opened their set with the theme music from Back To The Future, which is just awesome. The Brew play tonight with Particle at The Jewish Mother in Virginia Beach.

READ ON to stream the rest of this week’s selections…