Law & Order: Overload

I had the TV on last night and I did a double take when I heard the announcer mention “Law & Order: Toronto”. Toronto? Nothing against the city, but it seems like their writers have literally run out of ideas. The original concept has already spun off into the following Law & Orders: Criminal Intent, Special Victims Unit, LA, Organized Crime, UK, and that’s NOT even all of them!

Here are a few ideas for new Law & Orders I’d like to contribute:

Law & Order: Detroit Rock City. The original KISS lineup reforms to investigate crimes in the Motor City. Each episode ends with lead guitarist Ace Frehley crashing the KISS patrol vehicle into a different building while Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley focus on songwriting. Episode 1 features Ted Nugent and James Jamerson as guest stars. Somehow the Red Wings hockey team and Peter Criss are also involved.

2. Law & Order: Steve Miller Band. Steve Miller rides a white Pegasus horse with rainbow wings (like the one on his “Book of Dreams” album cover) while he solves crimes with harmonica player Norton Buffalo. Miller is originally from Texas so it will be set there. Episode 1 will involve heinous crimes committed at various locations of Whataburger. Law & Order’s infamous gavel “cha ching” will be fit nicely in Miller’s “Abracadabra” guitar solo.

3. Law & Order: Grunge. Set during 1990s Seattle, flannel clad detectives investigate crimes while hanging out at Starbucks and writing songs in dropped guitar tunings. This will obviously spinoff into Law & Order: Unplugged Grunge and will feature bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains. No one better think about “coming to snuff The Rooster” on their beat. Ticketmaster is also involved.

4. Law & Order: Bo Diddley. Bo Diddley rides his motor scooter around Chicago with his red square guitar on his back and maraca player Jerome Green in tow. Naturally, they investigate crimes and the theme song now features the Bo Diddley beat interspersed with the “cha ching” sound. In Episode 1, George Thorogood reprises his role as a pool hustler from the “Bad to the Bone” video and Leonard Chess makes an appearance.

5. Law & Order: The Rolling Stones. The beauty of this version is each week the cast lineup will change to include different guitarists from the band’s history including Brian Jones, Mick Taylor, and Ron Wood. Detectives Jagger and Richards’ contentious relationship doesn’t keep them from investigating crimes in England and beyond. Episode 1 features a deep dive into urban legend Spring Heeled Jack. Episode 2 features a trip on the fabled “Route 66” including their version of the song bearing its name.

Well, those are a few ideas I have on yet additional spinoffs to Law & Order. It seems NBC is on a similar mission as the NFL, which is to ram their product down the throats of every person on the globe. I think it’s working.

Till next time, keep your Mojo on the Horizon!

No Fading, Buddy – Pt. 1

There are cover songs and then there are COVER SONGS. Do you know what I mean? Some songs seem to just keep going perpetually, which I find fascinating. Case in point is “Not Fade Away” which is associated with Buddy Holly, but has also been recorded well over 100 times. While the songwriting credits go to Buddy Holly (real name Charles Hardin Holly) and Norman Petty, the rhythm of the song is most closely associated with Bo Diddley. Believe it or not, this song was actually a “B-side”, with “Oh Boy” as the “A-side.”

In addition to the number of times the song has been covered, what I find interesting is this — the musical arrangement is fairly simple, but so damn catchy. It’s a three chord thing (E, A, & D) with some backing vocals, infectious percussion, and a non-shredder guitar solo.

I’m going to share several different versions of “Not Fade Away”, but the one by Missouri native Sheryl Crow just came my way recently (and inspired this blog/series).

For whatever reason, I missed this one in 2007. I like this version. It’s true to the original, but simultaneously has Crow’s unique vocal stamp on it. Apparently, Crow’s version also went to benefit breast cancer research. I guess I don’t find myself in a Revlon rich environment too often. There is some harmonica on it, which I will revisit in other chapters.

Personally, I think the first time I heard “Not Fade Away” was when I purchased “Buddy Holly -23 All-Time Greatest Hits”, a double length cassette. That’s a fairly random number, but I definitely got my money’s worth out of it. I also let a linebacker on the college football team dub a copy of it during my freshman year. His comment upon seeing my cassette collection was, “You have Buddy Holly…that is sweet!”

Till next time, keep your Mojo on the Horizon!

Judging Emilio by the Cover

“Young Guns” popped up on one of my free movie channels so I watched it again recently. It got me thinking about how big of a movie star Emilio Estevez was during the 80s and 90s. He was in so-called brat pack flicks like “The Breakfast Club” and “St. Elmo’s Fire.” Those were pretty well-known, but he did some other interesting ones like “That Was Then, This is Now”, “Wisdom”, and one called “Judgement Night” (1993). Nothing on the film’s soundtrack really grabbed me so I’m opting for Bo Diddley’s “You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover.”

I always enjoyed the vocals and the fun vibe Bo Diddley seems to be having on this recording. Plus he rhymes the words “cane” and “main” (man). I’ve always liked The Fabulous Thunderbirds’ cover of this song, too.

Getting back to “Judgement Night”, I would put this into a sort of B plus movie category. The plot seems simple enough. Old friends take an RV to a local sports arena, get off at the wrong exit, and wind up fighting to stay alive. It’s a pretty interesting cast. Denis Leary plays the bad guy while Estevez’s buddies are played by the likes of Cuba Gooding, Jr., Jeremy Piven, and Stephen Dorff. It’s a violent movie that makes you think about what you would do in certain situations.

Till next time, keep your Mojo on the Horizon!

My Best Friend’s Riff

The Cars. They had massive radio airplay and hit records, not to mention frontman Ric Ocasek wound up with supermodel Paulina Porizkova somewhere along the way. Recently, I’ve been learning the guitar parts to “My Best Friend’s Girl”, which is an absolutely great piece of catchy pop music. There’s one thing I didn’t realize about the song until I started playing it. It falls into a special category of songs which were recorded in one musical key (E), then the recorded tape was sped up into a higher key (F). There are a good deal of these songs which fall into this category, but that’s a whole other discussion.

Something I recently noticed while watching a video guitar lesson, is one section of the song sounds a lot like the Bo Diddley song “Crackin’ Up.”

Listen around the 4:30 second mark on this lesson, and you’ll hear what I’m saying.

It took me a minute, but I knew I recognized that guitar riff from another song. I can’t remember if I heard the Bo Diddley original version of “Crackin’ Up” first or the version by Paul McCartney on his Russian Album.

This part is a repeat, but years ago, I took some guitar lessons with this ponytailed dude. He was the one who told me “My Best Friend’s Girl” borrowed heavily from a song on The Beatles’ White Album. I scratched my head at first, but then determined he was talking about the beautiful Paul McCartney song “I Will.” As a whole, the songs don’t really sound alike, but there is a guitar riff which certainly does.

Ric Ocasek got the songwriting credit for this song, but give some credit to Cars’ guitarist Elliot Easton for his contribution on this one. I even found a YouTube video with Easton showing how he played the guitar solo on it. All in all, it’s a psychic convergence of music.

Till next time, keep your Mojo on the Horizon!

Hypno-Pretty-Diddley-Thing

Bo Diddley: the dude who had his own beat named after him. Willie Dixon: perhaps the greatest blues songwriter of all time (in my humble opinion). In the mid-fifties, these two teamed up to write a song called “Pretty Thing” which has been playing on repeat in my car for weeks now. The version that I’ve been digging is by John Hammond Jr. and The Nighthawks.

I’m not exactly stumped as to why I love this version, but it’s easier said than explained. Obviously, the Bo Diddley Beat is a big part of this song. Somewhere along the way, I learned that I like songs with good percussion in them and this has to qualify as one of them. I saw an interview where Bo Diddley’s guitar style was described as “percussive.” He approaches it more like a drummer might, but I think there are also some surf elements to his playing.

Diddley’s original version also features maracas (played by his right hand man Jerome Green) and harmonica as well. Apparently, Pretty Thing was the “A” side of the original Bo Diddley single with “Road Runner” on the “B” side. A few other versions I’ve encountered include ones by Social Distortion and The Steve Miller Band. There’s also a British group who named themselves (The Pretty Things) after this song.

On an unrelated note, perhaps the greatest high school black comedy of all time “Heathers” features this quote: “Who does that guy in the coat think he is, anyways, Bo Diddley?”

Till next time keep your Mojo on the Horizon!

Cars, Chicks, and Bo Diddley

I was dying to put something different on my car’s CD player this morning and I found a gem on on unlabeled disc. I had a bunch of great songs on this random disc I burned from iTunes, but I pretty much kept the first cut on repeat all day. That song was a cover of Bo Diddley’s “Ride on Josephine” by George Thorogood and The Destroyers.

This version could be both my favorite Bo Diddley cover and my favorite Thorogood recording. Thorogood’s version is a loose rocker that oozes rhythm from the intro on the song. Listening to it, you can tell he is a big Bo Diddley fan. (The video for his signature song “Bad to the Bone” featured Bo as a pool shark back in the day.) Thorogood not only keeps the rhythm going, but also throws in some guitar licks from Diddley’s “Who Do You Love” as well. “Josephine” was on the 1977 album “George Thorogood and the Destroyers”. If you’re into roots rock or slide guitar, I highly recommend it.

There are some differences between Thorogood’s version and the original early Sixties release by the songwriter Bo Diddley. The biggest one to my ears is the gospel-style chorus on Bo’s. There’s also a cool guitar lick.

I think both versions are great. Bo Diddley’s sense of humor in the spoken word bit adds even more fun to this romp and Thorogood has a great time with it, too.

Another thing that jumps out at me about this song is its lyrics remind me of a Chuck Berry styled tune. Sure it’s a car and chick thing, but it’s also a pretty frantic set of lyrics. It makes me think of both Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business” and “Maybellene”. There are other versions of “Ride on Josephine” out there, but the Thorogood version is hard to beat.

Till next time, keep your Mojo on the Horizon!

Greatest song you’ve never heard?

Do you ever scratch your head and wonder why certain things aren’t bigger or as well-known as they should be? For me, one of those songs is “Road Runner” by rock n roll icon Bo Diddley (Ellas McDaniel). The song was originally released on Checker records and enjoyed some time in the charts during 1960. It’s ironic — my favorite Bo Diddley song does not feature the rhythm of the Bo Diddley beat.

As for the song itself, you could describe it any number of ways. The twangy guitar riff is probably what initially grabbed me, but there are other elements to the song. For starters, it’s just PLAIN FUN. The backing vocals of beep beep and ahhs add a lot to the original recording and Bo sounds like he’s having a pretty good time himself. It’s your basic 12-bar blues song structure, but it has a sort of surf rock feel to it with pick scrapes in it and stops — which make it a great song for adding our own touch to it. Now, it’s not that this song is completely unheard of, but it just blows my mind some of the garbage that makes it to #1 on the Billboard charts, while other songs like this one don’t.

For whatever reason, this song had a big impact on me. Maybe that guitar riff hypnotized me in some way? In any event, I was obsessed with this song for a time. I couldn’t get enough of it. I tried to track down as many covers of this song as I could. There are some good ones out there. If you’re going for obscurity, American garage band The Gants is the version to seek out at the record shows. A couple of other American bands you might know have also recorded it — Brownsville Station’s version rocks pretty hard. Aerosmith even did a tasty cover of Road Runner on their Honkin’ on Bobo release in 2004.

Across the Atlantic, the song was recorded by several British Invasion bands including The Rolling Stones and The Animals. There’s an interesting version by Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders. I’d argue the recording by The Pretty Things could be the best cover of the lot. Adding the harmonica to it works for me.

If you think you heard the song recently, it was featured in a Mazda commercial. I think you can even buy that version on iTunes. To make things a little harder, you should know there are other songs with the same title, but you’ll have to dig through the record bins yourself. That’s what I did. In closing, all that’s left to say is THANK YOU, BO DIDDLEY for this garage rock classic!

Keep rocking and keep your Mojo on the Horizon!