It seems that each day we’re learning of another musician who has passed away after battling cancer. Guitarist Chris Cartelli survived a bout with the dreaded disease and started a foundation called Rocking Out Cancer to raise funds which support clinical trials in cancer research through live music events [read our feature on the organization here]. Rocking Out Cancer’s first concert will take place on August 2nd at The Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett, New York featuring HT faves Tim Palmieri, performing a set of Beatles tunes on acoustic guitar, and Leroy Justice.

Tickets will run $10, with proceeds going towards ROC. For more information on this incredibly worthwhile concert, be sure to follow the event’s page on Facebook.

Here’s six other stories of note as we start the week…

• The lineup for the second annual Holy Ship! EDM cruise was announced
• Mumford & Sons have written a song for a new Pixar film
• Ben Harper, Los Lobos and BHT&tM will headline The Ride festival
• Check out a new Modeselektor track featuring Thom Yorke
• The Rolling Stones “Reunite” for a video Thank You to fans
• Keller Williams and the Travelin’ McCourys paid tribute to Donna Summer

Finally, HT contributor and turntablist extraordinaire Wade “Wyllys” Wilby has just launched a brand-new website. Located at OriginalWyllys.com, you can keep tabs on the latest Wyllys gigs and sample his music through the site. Wilby heads to the Summer Camp Music Festival this weekend for a performance with the New York Hustler Ensemble featuring Umphrey’s McGee guitarist Brendan Bayliss.

The premise of the song I Gotta Get Drunk by Willie Nelson has always cracked me up. The narrator laments the fact that he has to get drunk – knowing full well he is going to act like a jackass and spend a lot of money, but has to do it anyway for the amusement of others. Our protagonist also dismisses the advice of doctors telling him to cool it on his drinking citing that are more old drunks than there are old doctors. Hard to argue with that logic.

The Contestants:

Artist: Gas Huffer
Live Show: Twisted Willie: A Tribute To Willie Nelson
The Skinny: First up is this odd arrangement by Gas Huffer from a compilation of Willie Nelson covers that includes contributions from such artists as Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.

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Two of the best guitar players to come from Connecticut traded licks at Gathering of the Vibes last month, when Kung Fu/Breakfast axe-slinger Tim Palmieri sat in with six-stringer Fuzz and Deep Banana Blackout for an insane version of Tug. We came across a pro-shot clip of this ridiculous guitar duel on the New York Rangers’ official YouTube page of all places. Take a look…

Deep Banana Blackout w/ Tim Palmieri – Tug

Here’s another pro-shot Vibes ’11 clip for your pleasure, Jane’s doin’ Stop…

Jane’s Addiction – Stop

Normally, I find the month of January to be a pretty uneventful one in the world of live music. Bands play big winter tours often leading up to a big New Year’s Eve blowout, and the beginning of the calendar year seems to be a rest from the road. So I was surprised when I did my search of the Live Music Archive and found 84 recordings already uploaded at press time. We’ve got Cracker covering an album in its entirety (and that wasn’t the only album in that show), the Disco Biscuits getting drummer Allen Aucoin back onstage, Grace Potter busting out a MMJ cover, an interesting sequence of music from Tim Palmieri and a couple of classics from the Tom Tom Club.

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 vanark for this week's photo]

Cracker – Loser
Date & Venue: 2011-01-14 – Highline Ballroom – New York, NY
Taper & Show Download: Barry Shoop

Camper Van Beethoven & Cracker played three joint shows last week and at each one Cracker performed their 1993 album Kerosene Hat and CVB played Key Lime Pie, their album from 1989. You can read a review of the NYC show from Richard Gehr over at SPIN.com. For the audio from Kerosene Hat, I have selected their cover of Loser by the Grateful Dead. Camper Van Beethoven [tour dates] next plays February 18th at New Parish in Oakland, CA. No future tour dates currently on the books for Cracker. The Camper Van Beethoven set has also been uploaded to The Archive.

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Video of Low from the NYC show:

READ ON for tracks from the Disco Biscuits, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, Tim Palmieri and Tom Tom Club…

‘Tis The Season for jamband reunions. Don’t get confused, the inclusion of From Good Homes and Miracle Orchestra does not mean we set the time machine for Last Week’s Sauce 2000 like did earlier this year, these bands played shows last week. We lead off with a selection of Beatles songs from The Black Crowes’ farewell-for-now Fillmore Run. We sprinkle in some Shoegaze courtesy of God Speed You Black Emperor!, mix in the fusion sounds of Kung Fu and a slice of a San Francisco superjam featuring Will Bernard and Marco Benevento. Getting on a plane? Going for a long car ride? Take this 75 minutes of music with you by clicking below for all the audio in this week’s piece.

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 for this week's photo]

The Black Crowes – You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, Yer Blues, I Wanna Be Your Man
Date & Venue: 2010-12-14 – The Fillmore, San Francisco, CA
Taper & Show Download: Fillmore Crowe

As ScottyB recapped, the Black Crowes paid tribute to their influences in the encore slots of their six shows at The Fillmore in San Francisco. Only two of the shows have shown up on bt.etree.org, this encore is from Tuesday night’s Beatles tribute. No tape yet of the run-closing Rolling Stones segment.

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A portion of The Band tribute encore from Friday:

READ ON for tracks from From Good Homes, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Kung Fu, Marco Benevento & Will Bernard and Miracle Orchestra…

I’ve been a little busy the past few weeks, so my apologies for neglecting this column. But I’m back and while technically I’m only supposed to be using performances from August 16th – 22nd, I need to grab a little something from Sunday August 15th because the Jeff Tweedy solo set from Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival welcomed many special guests and was all around awesome. We’ll start with a few tracks from that and move on to some setlist trickery that My Morning Jacket has been employing and close out with the guitarmageddon that ensues when two jamband shredders sit-in which each other’s ensembles.

[Thanks to liveween for this week's photo]

Artist & Title: Jeff Tweedy – Various – See Below.
Date & Venue: 2010-08-15 Solid Sound Festival – North Adams, MA
Taper & Show Download: Brenndan Murphy

Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival, by everything I’ve heard, was a massive success and one of the highlights was the Jeff Tweedy solo set that featured a number of rarities, special guests and essentially turned into a Wilco set by the end of it. I’m going to embed three separate tunes from the show but I recommend downloading the whole thing now. Tweedy plays a solo set on Sunday at Loufest in St. Louis and Wilco next plays Friday September 3rd at Jazz Aspen.

Look Out For My Love (w/ all of Avi Buffalo)

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READ ON for two more tracks from the Tweedy set as well as MMJ & RAQ…

Any Major Dude Will Tell You is the third track on the 1974 Steely Dan album Pretzel Logic. Here’s a funny excerpt from Blinded by the Lyrics…

“Okay, friends, break out your Steely Dan decoder rings. Starting with the release of their debut album Can’t Buy A Thrill back in 1972, no group has trafficked in more oblique, head-scratching, and just plain weird lyrics than Steely Dan. Case in point: Have you ever seen a squonk’s tears?, an enigmatic line from “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” off the Pretzel Logic LP.’

What on earth is a squonk? As they used to say on the old Laugh-In television show, “Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls!” Actually, don’t both bother, because the word squonk is not found in any dictionary.

It turns out that squonk is a piece of jabberwocky, a completely made-up word referring to a mysterious animal, that due to its abject homeliness, spends most of its time crying. Credit for coining squonk goes to William T. Cox, who introduced the word in his oddly named book Fearsom Critters of the Lumberwoods, with a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts. To quote from Mr. Cox’s volume: “The squonk is of a very retiring disposition, generally traveling about at twilight and dusk. Because of its misfitting skin, which is covered with warts and moles, it is always unhappy; in fact, it is said, by people who are best able to judge, to be the most morbid of beasts.”

Two years after Steely Dan introduced listeners to the mythical squonk in “Any Major Dude Will Tell You”, Genesis included the song “Squonk” on their A Trick of the Tail album, wherein Phil Collins sang: Stop your tears from falling / The trail they leave is very clear for all to see at night.

The Contestants:

God Street Wine: The earliest recording on the Live Music Archive of God Street Wine performing this cover dates back to 1990. So when GSW played it last Friday, it was a good 20 years since that night at The Wetlands. Resident GSW expert ScottyB pointed me in the direction of the performance below from 1994. Man, the way they perform the intro makes it sound more like The Grateful Dead than Steely Dan. Source: 9-16-1994

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

O-o-h Child was originally recorded by Chicago’s Five Stairsteps, it was released both as a single and on the 1970 album The Stairsteps. O-o-h Child reached #8 on the Billboard charts. What did I learn this week? That the correct way to spell the song title is O-o-h Child.

The Contestants:

Beth Orton: Beth Orton leads us off this week with her down-tempo solo acoustic performance. This cover was included in an episode of the television show Alias. Source: The Other Side Of Daybreak

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

Taking our weekly audio look back, there’s a bit of a supergroup vibe going on. Tim Palmieri and Todd Stoops had the jazz/fusion thing going on in Kung Fu and Scott Metzger/Will Bernard channeled Hendrix in their ensemble Some Cat From Japan. We mix in tracks from Gov’t Mule and Umphrey’s McGee for the Rock & Roll contingent, and complete the audio with Marco Benvento’s long overdue collaboration with moe. as the band celebrates its 20th year.

[Thanks to sonicsound for this week's photo]

Artist & Title: Gov’t Mule – Broke Down On The Brazos
Date & Venue: 2010-01-20 Revolution Live, Ft. Lauderdale FL
Taper & Show Download: Steve Kwartin

This tune is the first track on Gov’t Mule 2009 album By A Thread. I’ve featured tapes from a lot of friends in this column since its creation and I was very happy to see that I could use my first track from taper legend Steve Kwartin. As Steve says in the torrent information on bt.etree.org, “If you like what you hear – buy a taper a beer”. Mule plays tonight at The Lyric Theater in Oxford MS.

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Video from the same show of Mule doing 30 Days In The Hole:

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

A friend of mine recently pointed out to me that we have never selected a Grateful Dead song for an edition of Cover Wars. I was somewhat aware of this, but he’s right – it’s time we do one. Now, I wanted to select a Dead song that hasn’t been covered by hundreds of artists, like Scarlet Begonias, St. Stephen or Franklin’s Tower. So, I poked around and found that there was a relatively small pool of artists that had played Dupree’s Diamond Blues, a track off of The Dead’s stellar 1969 release Aoxomoxoa.

If you don’t know about The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, you should. Here is a small excerpt from the entry for Dupree’s.

The text of the song is a re-working of a song, “Betty and Dupree,” with many incarnations in American folk tradition. It was based upon a true incident:

“The biography of the man and his crimes may be summarized as follows: Frank Dupree grew up in Abbeville, South Carolina. He came on the scene in December 1921 in Atlanta, Georgia, where he had a gal Betty. In trying to appropriate a diamond for her in a jewelry store he shot a policeman down. Fleeing to Memphis and later to Chicago, where he was cornered, he killed a policeman and wounded several more. He was caught while getting his mail and sent to Atlanta for trial. He was executed for murder on September 1, 1922.” (Roberts: In the Pine.)

The Contestants:

Dark Star Orchestra: Though I decided not to include the likes of Ratdog or Phil Lesh & Friends as viable contenders in this Cover Wars, I thought it was OK to include the Dark Star Orchestra. Yes, people do tape these shows. This is a great recording from last year’s Gathering Of The Vibes where DSO performed The Dead’s 11-6-1977 in its entirety. Source: 7-31-2008

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READ ON after the jump to vote and hear more of this week’s contestants…

Looking back on last week’s Cover Wars, Tea Leaf Green has emerged victorious with over 50% of the vote. In 2nd place was The Allman Brothers Band and I am also very happy to report that every entry received at least one vote – I love it when that happens. In case you missed it, last week we looked at ten covers of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

This week I have chosen an 80′s super-hit by Simple Minds. This song was written specifically for the 1985 brat-pack film The Breakfast Club. Simple Minds is still touring and plan to release an album in 2009, a title has not yet been revealed.

As always, be sure to register/login to IMEEM before starting the playlist below to stream full-length clips.

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READ ON after the jump for a look at this week’s contestants…