"Masters of War" Eddie Vedder · Mike McCready · G.E. Smith Live at Madison Square Garden, New York, NY - October 1992
Eddie Vedder crushes this cover of the Bob Dylan classic.
Eddie is joined by bandmate Mike McCready (guitar) of Pearl Jam and G.E. Smith (mandolin), who cut his chops first with Hall and Oates, and then later at Saturday Night Live.
The sound may be a tiny bit cleaner on the official release, but that one has no video.
Eddie Vedder with Johnny Depp – "Society" (live, 2010)
Take the chords I, IV, V, and vi, put them in any order, and—voilà!—you've got a good pop song. In this case, the chords are C, F, G, and Am, but the real fun is the appearance of Johnny Depp.
This performance is not that great, in large part because the cell-phone video is shaky, but the Johnny sighting makes it interesting.
This week, I've been digging a ballad from Houses of the Holy. John Paul Jones composed a splendid orchestration to accompany the fine guitar work by Jimmy Page.
Ran into it on a reaction video by classical composer Doug Helvering.
Thanks for this! Elizabeth Cotten is yet another blues great that I had never heard before.
About halfway through the first song, the camera zoomed in, and I noticed that her guitar is strung upside down, with the bass strings on the bottom. I guess there’s more than a few southpaws who learned that way. Made me want to check her entry on Wikipedia:
Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten (née Nevills; January 5, 1893 – June 29, 1987)[1][2][3] was an American folk and blues musician. She was a self-taught left-handed guitarist who played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down.[4] This position meant that she would play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. Her signature alternating bass style has become known as “Cotten picking”.[5]
I’m not surprised you’d appreciate her talent and her performance. While Led Zeppelin was undoubtedly one of the most talented and influential rock groups of all time, they obviously borrowed much of their catalog from the work of earlier, less well-known artists, many of whom received little recognition for their talent and even less financial reward. The female musicians, in particular, from whom Led Zeppelin borrowed (e.g., Anne Bredon, Memphis Minnie, etc.), never received the credit they deserve for pioneering the blues, folk, and rock styles, and often received no royalties for their music when performed by more famous rock musicians.
Yeah, Led Zep was definitely a blues band. I know how you feel about hearing too much of a particular band. One of my freshman roommates (in a horribly-mismatched room full of them) played Fleetwood Mac 24/7, very loudly. To this day, I can’t enjoy listening to them.
Anne Bredon is another one I did not know about, and I have been playing my rather poor version of Babe I'm Gonna Leave You since I was in high school! Glad to hear that Zep eventually paid royalties on the composition.
Joan Baez – "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" (1962)
I did not even know about the Joan Baez version that inspired Led Zeppelin, and I own the album Joan Baez in Concert where it appears. In all fairness to me, however, her version is quite different from the one Led Zeppelin came up with. It does have it's charms, though.