Cover Wars: And It Stoned Me Edition
My apologies for not getting a Cover Wars up last week. I was fighting off what I affectionately refer to as the “Tour Flu” after logging a four-day-weekend full of live music from the likes of Trey Anastasio and Umphrey’s McGee. The extra time provided an opportunity for Widespread Panic and The Punch Brothers to duke it out for the title of best cover of Ophelia. Chris Thile and the Punch Brothers ultimately walked away victorious.
This week, we look at six renditions of the first track on Van Morrison’s 1970 release Moondance: And It Stoned Me. The song, while adopted as a stoner anthem, seems to have more to do with what’s in the gallon jar mentioned in last verse than it does to smoking anything. In the artist’s own words, taken from a biography [via wikipedia]:
I suppose I was about twelve years old. We used to go to a place called Ballystockart to fish. We stopped in the village on the way up to this place and I went to this little stone house, and there was an old man there with dark weather-beaten skin, and we asked him if he had any water. He gave us some water which he said he’d got from the stream. We drank some and everything seemed to stop for me. Time stood still. For five minutes everything was really quiet and I was in this ‘other dimension’. That’s what the song is about.
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READ ON for the tale of the tape on this week’s competitors…
David Gray: Singer/songwriter Gray humorously botches this cover to lead us off this week. Gray is playing piano and is joined by his touring bass player. Source: 1-27-2003
Gov’t Mule: Warren has also performed this with Phil Lesh & Friends. If you’re looking for a recording of that check out 4-20-2001 (heady). Definitely a rarity in Mule’s repertoire as mulebase.com has it being played only eight times in the last eight years. Source: 8-8-2008
CW Cross-Polination: Warren Haynes & Dave Schools perform And It Stoned Me in the Red Rocks parking lot:
Jackie DeShannon: The songwriter that brought us What The World Needs Now and Put A Little Love In Your Heart recorded this on her 1971 release titled Songs.
Jerry Garcia Band: Oh man. This is smooth. There is some great late ’80s Garcia vocals on this one. I recommend grabbing the full show for the audio quality alone. Source: 11-26-1988
Mr. Blotto: Mr. Blotto is no stranger to Cover Wars, but it’s been a while since they’ve been included. A straight-ahead performance and solid as always. Source: 1-17-1998
Widespread Panic: If you were downloading music illegally off the Internet around the turn of the century, perhaps you grabbed WSP’s studio version off of Napster, I know I did. That track was cut for the 1995 release Hempilation: Freedom Is NORML (heady). What I’ve got on the playlist is a live acoustic version from a Sit & Ski show from 1996. A Panic live staple, still in the rotation. Source: 2-2-1996
And that’s all we’ve got this week. No live videos of Van Morrison performing the song up on YouTube, if there were we’d share them with you.
playing on a television screen, and thought I’d check out a few minutes of this underground 1979 horror hoot. Alas, this would turn into one of several Halloween Hidden Flicks to be devoured, but I did not know that at the time.
JERRY GARCIA by a landslide
agreed. not even close on this one. JGB.