Lots of covers (and radical reinventions in some cases, like Oingo Boingo doing The Kinks and XTC doing Bob Dylan) plus a one-hit wonder segment including In The Year 2525 by Sager and Evans, Venus by Shocking Blue and Mason Williams’ Classical Gas. My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list.

1. Jeff Healey, Jambalaya (On the Bayou) (Hank Williams cover)
2. Cat Stevens, Indian Ocean
3. Phil Collins, Tomorrow Never Knows (Beatles cover)
4. Love, August
5. Martha and The Muffins, About Insomnia
6. The Rolling Stones, Love In Vain (Robert Johnson cover, from semi-acoustic live, part studio album Stripped, studio session with false start including laugh-filled discussion over screwup)
7. Zager and Evans, In The Year 2525
8. Mason Williams, Classical Gas
9. Shocking Blue, Venus
10. 999, Homicide
11. XTC, All Along The Watchtower (Bob Dylan cover)
12. Oingo Boingo, You Really Got Me (Kinks cover)
13. Slash featuring Demi Lovato, Papa Was A Rolling Stone (Temptations cover)
14. The Doors, The Spy
15. Robert Plant, Embrace Another Fall
16. Mudcrutch, Lover Of The Bayou (Byrds cover)
17. Van Morrison, T.B. Sheets
18. Booker T. & The M.G.’s, Melting Pot
19. Kris Kristofferson, Me and Bobby McGee
20. Robert Palmer, Remember To Remember

My track-by-track tales:

1. Jeff Healey, Jambalaya (On the Bayou) (Hank Williams cover) . . . Rocking version of the Hank Williams classic, released on Healey’s 2008 album Mess Of Blues, a covers album which came out just two weeks after his passing, of cancer, at age 41. Healey had previously released another covers album, Cover To Cover, in 1995.

2. Cat Stevens, Indian Ocean . . . One of my favorite Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam songs, a touching ‘world music’ track first released as a digital download to benefit 2004 Asian/Indian Ocean earthquake/tsunami relief efforts. It saw physical release on the 2005 compilation Cat Stevens Gold.

3. Phil Collins, Tomorrow Never Knows (Beatles cover) . . . From his debut solo release, Face Value, issue in 1981 which featured the big hit In The Air Tonight and another top 10 track in Canada and the USA, I Missed Again. I first heard the album, playing over the store’s sound system, while browsing a record store in the San Francisco Bay Area with one of my younger brothers during some time I spent in California the spring and summer of 1981.

4. Love, August . . . Well, it is August, so I figure I had to get this in before the end of the month. From the fourth Love album, 1969’s Four Sail, a somewhat harder rocking album, of which this song is an example, than the previous psychedelic fare serve up by Arthur Lee and friends, although any Love is good Love, to me. Great band, never sold all that many records but hugely influential particularly via albums like the seminal 1967 release Forever Changes.

5. Martha and The Muffins, About Insomnia . . . A track, actually a single that didn’t chart, from 1980’s Trance and Dance album. It’s about (not really but it fits) my last couple nights of not getting much sleep, just an hour or two here and there but I’m in remarkably fine fettle all things considered. Martha and The Muffins is of course best-known for the 1979 hit single Echo Beach although they had other hits, at least in home country Canada, like Paint By Number Heart, Women Around The World At Work, Danseparc (Every Day It’s Tomorrow) and Black Stations/White Stations (during the 1983-86 period when the band was also known as M + M).

6. The Rolling Stones, Love In Vain (Robert Johnson cover, from semi-acoustic live, part studio 1995 album Stripped) . . . From a studio session in Tokyo with false start including brief laugh-filled discussion between Ron Wood and Keith Richards about guitar arpeggios after Wood messes up (sounded fine to me but I don’t play guitar) and wants to start over. Love In Vain has a long history with the Stones, dating to its first studio release on 1969’s Let It Bleed album, the 1970 live album Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out! and many concert renditions since.

7. Zager and Evans, In The Year 2525 . . . First in my one-hit wonder mini-set. I’ve been planning to play this and the several songs that follow, for a few weeks, finally getting to it for tonight’s show. Not much more to say about these songs except they’re great and, so what if the artists never approached the same commercial heights, they did what they did and their legacy is assured.

8. Mason Williams, Classical Gas . . . From the 1968 album The Mason Williams Phonograph Record. Williams may have been a one-hit wonder but still with us at age 85 he is/was an accomplished writer and comedian, among other artistic pursuits. Among his comedy writing credits are The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour and Saturday Night Live.

9. Shocking Blue, Venus . . . They were a one-hit wonder (but actually maybe not, more on that in a bit) featuring the striking singer Mariska Veres who sadly died young, of cancer, age 59 in 2006. But in putting together the show I explored the Dutch band’s ouevre and in addition to their own stuff, like Venus and Send Me A Postcard (with Veres sounding like Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, or vice-versa) they did fine covers of Hank Williams’ Jambalaya, just a terrific up-tempo reinvention of the tune I played earlier in the show as covered by Canadian Jeff Healey, and the classic John D. Loudermilk tune Tobacco Road.

10. 999, Homicide . . . Not sure why but I scared the shit out of a friend years ago and she told me as much the next day, she was listening to the show, when I played this track from the English punk/new wave band. It’s just a song, as I told her, it’s arguably aggressive for sure but it’s not advocating anything the way I read the lyrics and there’s any number of songs about disturbing subject matter. Like for example Polly, by Nirvana, about the abduction, rape, and torture of a 14-year-old girl returning home from a punk rock concert in Tacoma, Washington in 1987 that I played fairly recently. I like Polly a lot musically but it’s quite disturbing to the point I’m often reluctant to play it and almost feel bad for liking it, musically, but, fortunately, the perpetrator was caught and is behind bars, serving two concurrent 75-year terms. In any event, Homicide by 999 is a propulsive track, hit No. 40 on the charts in 1978, my first year of college which coincided with punk/new wave breaking big and contributing to opening my musical horizons.

11. XTC, All Along The Watchtower (Bob Dylan cover) . . . I like lots of XTC, including of course the hit that got me and many people into them, 1979’s Making Plans For Nigel, but I’d never heard their cover of the Dylan tune until I went down the YouTube rabbit hole some time back. XTC reinterpreted the Dylan tune, as Jimi Hendrix also of course did, in a different fashion, on the band’s 1978 debut album White Music.

12. Oingo Boingo, You Really Got Me (Kinks cover) . . . I discovered this major reinterpretation by the California ska/new wave band of The Kinks’ classic while listening to some of the earlier songs in the set, on YouTube, as I prepared tonight’s show. Playing it reminds me and brings a smile to my face, of my equally music-loving younger brother, into classic rock along with me, Stones, etc. with his ‘what’s happened to you?’ when he at some point saw my late 70s early 80s punk/new wave albums, Haircut One Hundred, Fabulous Poodles and the like. He said something like, what next, Oingo Boingo? Not at the time, although I’d heard of them and thought the name was cool, but here I go playing them. Cool version, akin to, say, how Devo reinvented the Stones’ Satisfaction.

13. Slash featuring Demi Lovato, Papa Was A Rolling Stone (Temptations cover) . . . From Orgy of the Damned, a covers album by the Guns N’ Roses, Velvet Revolver, Slash’s Snakepit etc. guitarist, released just a couple months ago, May 2024.

14. The Doors, The Spy . . . Spooky sort of track, musically and lyrically, from 1970’s Morrison Hotel album.

15. Robert Plant, Embrace Another Fall . . . Intoxicating experimental world beat folk rock from Plant’s 2014 album Lullaby . . . and the Ceaseless Roar as Plant continues on his late career amazing musical explorations.

16. Mudcrutch, Lover Of The Bayou (The Byrds cover) . . . Tom Petty’s original, pre-Heartbreakers band which reformed and released two studio albums, in 2008 and 2016 before Petty’s 2017 passing. Here, from the first Mudcrutch album, the band covers one of my favorite Byrds tunes and of course Petty was hugely influenced musically by The Byrds, to whom he and friends pay great tribute on this track.

17. Van Morrison, T.B. Sheets . . . Near 10-minute piece, his voice as always an instrument in itself, from Van the Man’s 1967 debut solo album Blowin’ Your Mind after he left Them.

18. Booker T. & The M.G.’s, Melting Pot . . . Title cut, typical funky R & B fuelled instrumental rock, from the band’s 1971 album.

19. Kris Kristofferson, Me and Bobby McGee . . . Sometimes a song covered by someone else overshadows the original, which is what Janis Joplin’s No. 1 cover of the KK tune did. As did, maybe, Roger Miller’s cover. Or the one by Jerry Lee Lewis. Yet . . . crazy as it maybe sounds, as with Jimi Hendrix’s reinterpretation of Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower which even Dylan himself said became ‘a Jimi Hendrix song’, I still prefer the originals while loving the covers. Honestly. I mean, I absolutely love the Joplin version, particularly the way she sings the “windshield wipers slappin’ ‘taaaam” (time)’ but well, Kristofferson if one checks out his stuff Bobby McGee and beyond is/was just an amazing songwriter. And emotive singer. In any case, his song includes one of the best, and perhaps most true or accurate lines ever, depending obviously upon how one looks at life: But I’d trade all of my tomorrows for a single yesterday. And I don’t live in the past, but sometimes would be interesting to go back.

20. Robert Palmer, Remember To Remember . . . He topped the charts later on with stuff like Addicted To Love and so on but for me, it’s the back-to-back albums, Secrets in 1979 and Clues in 1980. Track-for-track excellent, this one from Secrets whose hit was the cover of the Moon Martin-penned Bad Case Of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor).