Time is the fourth track on Pink Floyd’s 1973 release Dark Side Of The Moon. Well, this song called Time is anyway. Let me tell you, rounding up the renditions for this week was no easy task as: a) There are lots of other songs simply called “Time” and b) There are thousands of songs with the word “time” in them, and you can’t always make search terms do exactly what you want them, no matter how hard you try.

Cover Wars

The Contestants:

Dream Theater: According to the 3,585 comments there are on YouTube for this video at the time of publication, this cover is both the best ever and fucking awful all at once. The YouTube comments section is an interesting cross-section of humanity. Anyway, one very frequent comment is that guitarist John Petrucci really rips, and that is hard to deny. Couldn’t tell you the date of this video, I read about 50 of those 3,000+ comments and nobody mentioned it.

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

The Flaming Lips: The Flaming Lips with a lot of help from Stardeath And White Dwarfs, and others (including Henry Rollins), recorded and recently released Dark Side Of The Moon in it’s entirety. I have given it one full listen and there are some very interesting interpretations on here. Source: The Dark Side Of The Moon

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Also, they performed Dark Side Of The Moon in it’s entirety this past New Year’s Eve. Watch this video, “Hold up your cell phones now”. Genius!

Furthur: Phil Lesh & Friends used to do a whole slew of covers and some of them were the definition of kick-ass, many of them have appeared in previous versions of Cover Wars. Furthur, in their limited touring thus far, hasn’t ventured out too far into other bands catalogs, so it was nice to see this one show up on New Year’s Eve. Yes Phil gets a little lost in the verse, yes there may have been some teleprompter issues, yes he sounds a little ridiculous – but the point is that they played it, and it’s a very appropriate song for the front-men of this band at this stage in their career. Source: 12-31-2009

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Gov’t Mule: Halloween of 2008 is the only time Gov’t Mule has played this, and a number of other Pink Floyd songs, as that was the theme of the second set at Boston’s Orpheum Theater that year. Great stuff. Source: 10-31-2008

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moe.: moe. first covered Time on Halloween in 2000 when the band played Dark Side Of The Moon in it’s entirety with The Wizard Of Oz playing simultaneously. Time stuck around in the rotation and has been played a total of 20 times. Source: 4-22-2007

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Some video from moe.’s most recent performance of Time:

Phish: I’ll likely take some heat for this, but I’ve never liked Phish’s performance of Dark Side Of The Moon. To me the story that the band decided to perform it “over lunch that day” was not a sign of a quirky band that could do anything they want to, but more of a turning point for a band that developed the arrogance that they no longer needed to practice all that much. Right around the same time their guitarist is famously quoted in Bittersweet Motel saying that he doesn’t care if they, “miss a change”. At the same time, some of their absolute best music is created during this period. Anyway, this track isn’t bad by any means, but if I had my way – if the band had to cover Dark Side, I wished they had spent more than a day preparing for it. Source: 11-2-1998

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And THIS video was captured as someone recorded the screen at Festival 8 where archivist Kevin Shapiro played a whole bunch of never before seen Halloween footage.

Umphrey’s McGee: UM has a lot of covers in their repertoire. UM has a lot of Pink Floyd covers in their repertoire. But somehow in 2009 they added Time and Comfortably Numb to their rotation. Since it was already in the tracking, I have included the Great Gig In The Sky instrumental outro they tack on to the ending in this performance. Source: 8-27-2009 via Podcast #90

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Weezer: Speaking of YouTube comments, I learned from the comments on this video that it’s actually lead singer Rivers Cuomo on drums and Patrick Wilson on lead guitar and vocals for this arrangement.

Checking in on our last Cover Wars, which was for Darlene Love’s Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), Death Cab For Cutie has emerged victorious.

DaveO

David Onigman is a recent transplant from Boston to San Francisco. In addition to behind the scenes work and the occasional post, DaveO contributes the (almost) weekly Cover Wars column, though he's always looking for guest authors for it.

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