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“New Pony” (Bob Dylan / Dead Weather Cover)

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For Bob Dylan / Dead Weather chords & lyrics, CLICK HERE!

By Chris Moore:

Hello and welcome to yet another delay for the “double header” I promised last week or (technically) two weeks ago.  But I have a good reason for holding off!  Tonight, I’ve recorded “New Pony,” one of my least favorite Bob Dylan songs, because a brand new cover version was released on last week’s Dead Weather debut album.

First, I’ll give a little background on the original version of the song.  “New Pony” was first released on Bob Dylan’s 1978 album Street Legal.  To give you a little context here, Dylan had recently released Blood on the Tracks and Desire, arguably two of his best albums.  The year 1975 found him fully engaged in the Rolling Thunder Revue along with such artists as Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, poet Allen Ginsberg, and others.  Although he temporarily revived a different incarnation of the Revue in 1976, this phase of Dylan’s musical career was pretty much over by 1977.

This is not to say that life wasn’t busy for him.  This was right around the time that his marriage to Sara Dylan was breaking down and the divorce proceedings began.  A lot — perhaps too much — has been written about these personal aspects. 

Street Legal was the product of a few weeks of sessions involving a select group of musicians that Dylan had recently worked with.  Although his past two albums had met with critical success and his subsequent album, 1979’s Slow Train Coming, would earn him his first Grammy award, Street Legal has generally been lost in the valley between these two peaks.

Personally, I have always liked this album.  Sure, the female background singers come across as a bit cheesy at times (have you heard “Baby, Stop Crying”?) and the instrumentation can be a bit much at times, but there are some great songs.  “Changing of the Guards” is one of my favorite album openers and boasts a rare fade-in.  “Is Your Love in Vain?” and “True Love Tends to Forget” are fantastic Dylan deep cuts.  And “Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)” is a narrative wrapped in the best, darkest mood you’ve ever felt.  (Jerry Garcia recorded a great version of the latter.)

As for “New Pony”?  Well, it generally ranks as one of my least favorite Dylan recordings of all time, and certainly on this record.  In fact, it’s the very rare track that I may occasionally skip when listening to the album.  Why it was placed in the number 2 slot, I’ll never know.

That being said, let’s flash forward to 2009.  Last week, the Dead Weather released their debut album, Horehound.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with this group, this is a side project band composed of the White Stripes’ Jack White (drums, some vocals, acoustic guitar on one track), the Kills’ Alison Mosshart (lead vocals), Queens of the Stone Age’s Dead Fertita (guitar, etc.), and Jack Lawrence (bass, etc.).  I really liked last year’s Raconteurs album (Jack White and Jack Lawrence’s other side project band), so I figured I would give this one a shot as well.

Long review short, I was not as impressed as I had hoped to be.  (My one-sentence review is coming shortly!)  That being said, the album certainly has its moments, and for me, one of the best moments is track seven when they cover Dylan’s “New Pony.”

This is an excellent example of a band you wouldn’t necessarily think of as being heavily influenced by Bob Dylan turning around and pulling off a stand-up interpretation of one of his songs.  After hearing it, I thought that this song fit better on this album than it did on Street Legal.  In that sense, I was happy to assign “New Pony” to a better place in my estimation of Dylan’s catalog of songs.

So, without further ado, I submit to you my acoustic rendition of the song as a send-up to the 1978 Dylan version and a tip of the hat to the brand-new 2009 version by the Dead Weather.  I found that I was psyched to learn this ridiculously easy (at least chord-wise) song.  Anyone who visits the Laptop Sessions on any regular basis knows that I’m no stranger to a Bob Dylan cover song, but I never thought I’d be recording this one.

Well, at least not until I ran out of all the other ones in 2045 or so…

I hope you enjoy this, and be sure to stop back tomorrow for Jim Fusco’s Tuesday post, a couple days later for Jeff Copperthite’s Thumpin’ Thursday, and later this week for at least one more post from your truly.  (I’ve got so much to say about other music and non-music related topics, but I think this is quite enough for one post!)

See you next session!

“Peacemaker” (Green Day Cover)

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For Green Day chords, tabs, and lyrics, click HERE!

By Chris Moore:

Hello and welcome to your all-new Monday edition of the Laptop Sessions.  It’s been a while since I’ve featured a recently released song, so I’m going to put an end to that right now.

Tonight, I present to you “Peacemaker,” a track from Green Day’s 2009 album 21st Century Breakdown.  This is perhaps my quickest turnaround time from the release of a song to the recorded Laptop Session, as this album just hit the record store racks on Saturday.  I don’t know why Green Day opted for a “special Saturday release,” but it was kind of cool to have something brand new (and on sale!) on the shelves when I was browsing Newbury Comics this weekend.

What is my take on the album, you might ask?  Well, it DID knock Bob Dylan’s Together Through Life out of the number one spot in the UK, but I suppose I can overlook that…

Seriously, I don’t really know why I keep buying Green Day records.  One of my favorite lines from the movie Fracture is when a doctor asks the Ryan Gosling character, “Do you always keep asking the same question until you get a different answer?”  He responds, “I’m a lawyer.  That’s what I do.”  In this case, I’ve never been a fan of the band.  I liked early hits like “When I Come Around,” but I couldn’t get into their acclaimed album Dookie.  I’ve never really given it a fair shake, so it has ended up back in my “To Be Listened To” pile (currently housed in my Best Buy-exclusive Together Through Life crate — thank you, Mike!).

I finally picked up their 2004 album American Idiot after recommendations from several friends and critical acclaim from multiple music magazines, but I have yet to get into that album, as well.  I have consistently found it somehow too blunt.  Even the songs that I like — yes, mostly the overplayed radio hits — strike me as too formulated, too stamped out for the enjoyment of the average mainstream listener.  Who knows; perhaps someday I’ll be able to break the code of this concept album.

That is indeed why I picked up this latest installment in the Green Day catalog: it’s a concept album based loosely around the story of two characters named Christian and Gloria.  As with American Idiot, I much prefer to pay attention to the thematic threads.  Now, whereas in the 2004 album I have never been able to appreciate the lyrics, I have found several tracks on this new album that I like for several reasons — the lyrics, the overall instrumental sound, and Billie Joe Armstrong’s vocals.  Not to sound even more critical or anything, but Armstrong’s vocals on American Idiot have a tendency to get on my nerves.  That being said, he plays with his range and style in several different ways on this album.  Some songs are stripped down to basic piano or acoustic, and some songs are layered from top to bottom with spot-on vocal harmonies and distortion guitar blasts.  From start to finish, the album generally knows when to slow it down and when to kick it up a notch.

I have only heard the album three times in full, so I should reserve any final opinions for the future.  What I do know is that I like this concept album much more than American Idiot, from the sound all the way down to the album art.  Like their previous album, the cover artwork and liner notes are beautiful, carefully designed pages that feature the handwritten lyrics and various background designs.  If nothing else, this is a band that tries really hard to create an album that works as a whole.  And, after five years since their last album — more time between releases than ever before — they’ve certainly had enough time to perfect this one!

Without further ado, I’ll let you move on to my cover song music video of “Peacemaker.”  This is sure to be one of Jim’s favorite sessions of the year, so it may be difficult to outdo myself next week.  And yet, I suppose I’ll just have to try… 🙂

See you next session!

“Bob Dylan’s Dream” (Bob Dylan Cover)

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By Chris Moore:

Thanks for coming to the best acoustic cover song music blog on the Internet!  Today, our featured cover is “Bob Dylan’s Dream.”  Bob Dylan, believe it or not, is the original songwriter.  Who would have guessed?  Well, I guess anyone could have…

This song was originally released on Dylan’s early folk album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and it is what you would call a deep track, as it was never a hit, no one that I know of ever covered it for an album, and it never appeared on any live compilations.  At least, not official ones.  But, regardless of how little attention it has received, I think that it is a perfect candidate for the Laptop Sessions treatment.  First, it’s originally acoustic, recorded once as a “live-in-the-studio” recording, which makes it easily translatable to an acoustic cover song.  Second, it has a really nostalgic feel to it.  By nostalgic, I don’t mean that it sounds like an oldtime song or anything like that.  Rather, I mean that it really makes you think about your own “first friends” — those people that you spent your youth with, engaged in simple activities that brought indescribable happiness.

Well, those “first friends” very rarely make it into your future.  And while it’s always nice to look back and remember them, it can be very sad to think about the exits they took from your life.  Like Bob Dylan, I would pay a good deal of money to go sit “simply in that room again.”  But you can never go back…

…you can only write and sing songs like this one that describe the feeling!  Another thing I love about the song is that it starts off with the line, “While riding on a train going west…”  It gives the feeling of someone nodding off as a train barrels on down the tracks, and as that person just drifts off, these memories of his life come rushing back to him.  I think that’s a great way to start the song.

While this is certainly not my first Bob Dylan cover song — it’s one of many Bob Dylan songs I’ve learned and performed — it is one of the few that I haven’t known for years.  Many times, when I record a Dylan music video, I just dig back to a song that I used to play all the time and re-learn it.  This song was new to my acoustic cover song repetoire, so it was really fun to learn it.  And, of course, a little harmonica on a Dylan song goes a long way…

I hope that you’ve been noticing and enjoying all of the changes and additions to the blog these past few days.  The home page has been rearranged a bit to make it easier for newcomers and longstanding fans alike to find the band categories and search for their favorite material.  In addition, the first seven volumes of the new and improved Laptop Sessions FREE MP3 albums are avaiable in the left column.  Finally, last week saw the addition of a truckload of new live music from the Fusco-Moore team.  All you need to do now is go to the Fusco-Moore Store and choose which concert you want to listen to — some music is FREE and some is avaiable for a low, low price.  I really hope you’ll go over and check it out.  We really worked hard to make some quality sets, and it’s interesting to be able to look back now.  Well, listen back — there’s no video, but it’s really the sound that matters, right?

That’s it for me for now, but don’t forget to hurry back tomorrow for another all-new acoustic cover song music video from our very own Jeff Copperthite.

See you next session!



WCJM Free Internet Radio Station: “The World Series Show” – 2000

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By WCJM Free Internet Radio:

The Subway Series.  Every New York baseball fan’s worst nightmare.  Everyone was getting on the World Series bandwagon, so WCJM free Internet radio decided to also.  This show came on the night of game 1 of the series, and had the regular cast back of Chris, Jim, Mike, Alberto, and Dave after the 3/5 cast of the Comedy Show.

This is the first Moore Hits in the Morning program to be recorded digitally on an MD, and the sound quality is impeccable.  All the songs have a theme that intertwines with the World Series.  For instance, the Mets’ motto is “You gotta believe”, and the song “I’m a believer” by the Monkees was played.

Probably the most significant part of this show was a tribute done by Dave for the victims of the USS Cole, playing a song in their honor.

But the newest addition to the WCJM family made his first appearance on the show.  A little, cute, stuffed bear named Stuffy the Bear.  Well, he made a four and a half minute clip and instantly made the whole cast uproar in laughter.  Making fun of everyone on the show, it was a non-stop laugh riot that would appear on all future shows.  Stuffy has entered the building!

This ground-breaking episode is one of many available at no charge through the WCJM free Internet radio website!