Wednesday, April 06, 2005
no, no no no, he's really dead
Various Artists: "Legend of a Mind" (from Moody Bluegrass: A Nashville Tribute to the Moody Blues"
Various Artists: "Your Wildest Dreams"
Here are a couple of songs sent in by LD, from a record called Moody Bluegrass: A Nashville Tribute to the Moody Blues. Basically a ton of Nash Vegas’s top pickers done played the Moody Blues all hoe-down style, and did it pretty damn well. When LD first mentioned it to me I immediately thought of those horrible tribute records where anonymous musicians do bluegrass or string quartet covers of popular bands, like these Radiohead and Dave Matthews cash-in trash-heaps. Moody Bluegrass is different from those, though; instead of cheap, disposable rip-offs blatantly calculated for nothing more than some quick bucks, this record seems to have been made with some degree of care and attention. Instead of nameless hacks and obscure nobodies, real-life, honest-to-God, notable bluegrass musicians play on this one, like Allison Krauss, and… um… tons of people I’ve never heard of. So hell, maybe they’re not so notable after all. In this one instance, though, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that NPR knows what it’s talking about when they call these folks “top musicians.”
Anyway, the bluegrass backing of “Legend of a Mind” highlights the ridiculous absurdity of the psychedelic lyrics. I think I would have enjoyed flying the astral plane with Dr. Leary, were I thirty years older, and not mortally ascared of drugs. But this is a nice adaptation of a mediocre song about a guy who was generally just a giant dipshit. “Your Wildest Dreams” really starts up about thirty seconds in, and when it does, the melody sounds a lot like the first line to “Legend of a Mind”. It’s a pleasant song, though, and, unlike “Legend of Mind”, if I didn’t know any better, I wouldn’t be able to tell that it wasn’t originally a country song.
Various Artists: "Legend of a Mind" (from Moody Bluegrass: A Nashville Tribute to the Moody Blues"
Various Artists: "Your Wildest Dreams"
Here are a couple of songs sent in by LD, from a record called Moody Bluegrass: A Nashville Tribute to the Moody Blues. Basically a ton of Nash Vegas’s top pickers done played the Moody Blues all hoe-down style, and did it pretty damn well. When LD first mentioned it to me I immediately thought of those horrible tribute records where anonymous musicians do bluegrass or string quartet covers of popular bands, like these Radiohead and Dave Matthews cash-in trash-heaps. Moody Bluegrass is different from those, though; instead of cheap, disposable rip-offs blatantly calculated for nothing more than some quick bucks, this record seems to have been made with some degree of care and attention. Instead of nameless hacks and obscure nobodies, real-life, honest-to-God, notable bluegrass musicians play on this one, like Allison Krauss, and… um… tons of people I’ve never heard of. So hell, maybe they’re not so notable after all. In this one instance, though, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that NPR knows what it’s talking about when they call these folks “top musicians.”
Anyway, the bluegrass backing of “Legend of a Mind” highlights the ridiculous absurdity of the psychedelic lyrics. I think I would have enjoyed flying the astral plane with Dr. Leary, were I thirty years older, and not mortally ascared of drugs. But this is a nice adaptation of a mediocre song about a guy who was generally just a giant dipshit. “Your Wildest Dreams” really starts up about thirty seconds in, and when it does, the melody sounds a lot like the first line to “Legend of a Mind”. It’s a pleasant song, though, and, unlike “Legend of Mind”, if I didn’t know any better, I wouldn’t be able to tell that it wasn’t originally a country song.
