Weblog of Leland Rucker

Johnny Hoogerland wound up tangled in a barbed wire fence. Just a second earlier he was going 35 miles an hour with the breakaway.) LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/Getty Images)

I’m not usually that enthusiastic about the first week of le Tour de France. It’s always been a good time to slowly settle into the ebb and flow of the race and listen to Versus commentators Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen chatter on contentedly about the world of cycling. Except for general nervousness and a few crashes as the riders settle into the tour’s routine, the leaders generally let the sprinters strut their stuff and try to keep from doing something stupid.

This year, however, the first week was anything but predictable; it’s easily the most chaotic (and exciting to watch) first nine stages I’ve ever seen in the tour, though I’m sure the riders would use the same adjectives. From the first stage, when race favorite Alberto Contador got caught behind a huge crash and ceded more than a minute and a half to his main rivals, to Sunday’s ninth stage, when a television vehicle struck one of the stage leaders and half a dozen riders abandoned after some serious accidents, the race has been nothing but chaos at 30 miles per hour.

This is our eighth tour, and until this year the race has always begun with a short, ceremonial individual time trial, with the Swiss rider Fabian Cancellera lately the favored winner. This year, however, it was a full-on first stage, with several crashes and Cancellara nowhere near the yellow jersey.

Since then, all the leading riders save the Schleck brothers and Australian Cadel Evans have suffered one ignominy after another. Broken collarbones have forced top riders like Bradley Wiggins and Jurgen van den Broeck to withdraw. Both Tom Boonen and Chris Horner (one of the oldest riders, and my own personal favorite after watching him win the Tour of California in May) left the race dazed and confused with serious concussions. The Radioshack team, which came to the tour with three contenders for the yellow jersey, only has a bruised Andreas Kloden left to compete after he got caught in a pile-up.

On that vicious crash on a mountain descent Sunday, Alexandre Vinokourov broke his right femur in a massive tangle that also ended van den Broeck’s and David Zabriskie’s tours. If that wasn’t enough, a television car, in front of motorcycle cameras and ignoring race radio instructions to stay back, sideswiped Juan Antonio Flecha, one of the riders in a breakaway that was ultimately successful, sending him skidding into the pavement at about forty miles an hour and tossing Johnny Hoogerland, who was having a rousing first tour, at full speed into a barbed-wire fence. The peleton seems afraid, which can date back to the death of cyclist Wouter Weylandt in the Giro d’ Italia in May. The riders seem especially nervous and shaky.

I watched the Giro this year, and Contador defeated his opponents (none of whom included Evans or the Schlecks or Wiggins or Levi Leipheimer) with hardly a spot of bother, as commentator Paul Sherwen likes to put it when a rider is in full control. But Contador has fallen four times (that we know of) in nine stages, and he’s going to be hard-pressed to gain back the time he has lost to Evans and Andy Schleck, both of whom can be expected to stay with Contador, especially if he’s riding with leg injuries, through the high mountain passes this weekend.

French rider Thomas Voeckler, riding for a new team, Europcar, was the main beneficiary of the Stage Nine carnage. He barely escaped being hit by the car and wound up taking a minute and a half lead on the yellow jersey contenders and ending a week in yellow for Thor Hushvod, who deserves credit for keeping the yellow jersey on a course that seems much harder than most first-week sprinter stages.

Voeckler won the yellow jersey several years ago and kept it for almost ten days through brute tenacity and strength, impressing even Lance Armstrong. I expect him to tenaciously try to keep yellow as long as he can, even into the Pyrenees this weekend,, but he will be hard pressed to keep it.

And who will be wearing the yellow jersey come Paris? Like everything else about the 2011 Tour, I don’t have a clue. But I can’t wait to watch it unfold.

For some reason, I came to this show thinking that I was going to see Richman and the Morells, at this point in time my favorite live band, putting their collective energies together onstage. I should have known better. As my friend Joe Klopus puts it, Richman is always alone. Even back-up musicians are incidental. And it was really about the Morells, all Richman fans, wanting to turn Midwestern audiences onto his unique music, most of it released on the delightfully titled Beserkley Records.

So on this night the Morells, generally the headliners when they play Parody Hall, come out and kick ass for a couple of hours, working the audience to a frenzied peak, bassist Lou Whitney leading the descent into musical bliss.

After the set is over, everybody is hot and sweaty and obviously still ready to rock, and on comes Richman with just an electric guitar turned down singing some song about “Bermuda.” The audience is confused from the get-go. Some are walking around the dance floor, while others are sitting on the front of the stage drinking, talking, drinking, talking, paying no attention to the headliner. A hardcore group of Richman freaks can be spotted in the seats in the front middle, calling for favorites. The dancers don’t know what the hell to do.

There are plenty of Richman dissenters in the crowd, but at least they didn’t boo or heckle the guy. Richman seems oblivious to the fact that people come here to dance and sweat. He just goes from one song to another in his shy, graceful way.

Most of the dissenters left, and about thirty minutes into the set, the uninitiated were bouncing along with Richman’s eccentric, slightly warped, simple, moralistic songs. Not dancing, but almost …

As the set wore on, a theme emerged. One song used “someone you love, someone you care about” as the chorus, another called “Affection” was about how people don’t really communicate easily with each other and that he feels isolated and that this whirling mass of humanity is overpowering him. And yet he just sings on, and he completely wins over the remaining crowd. A very gutsy performance.

Among the songs he played on this night were “Rockin Robin,” “Egyptian Reggae,” “Ice Cream Man,” “Here Come the Martian Martians,” “That Summer Feeling,” “Trust Your Friends,” “Something You Love,” “Abominable Snowman,” “Neighbors” and “Tahitian Hop.”

I talked with Richman for a couple minutes just before he went on, and he said he met the Morells backstage at a Steve Forbert show in New York (the Morells backed Forbert here one night) and that he had been corresponding with guitarist Danny Thompson ever since. Thompson invited him to work with them if he ever wanted to tour the Midwest, and he took them up on it.

It has been a couple of years since his last album, and he said he had severed all ties with Matthew Kaufmann and Beserkley Records, his label of many years, and hired another manager and was working on a new record deal.

“He and I have differences about business,” he said as he leaned away and smiled as the Morells banged out “Jackson” about ten feet away. I asked him about a recent bootleg on Mohawk records, and he made a motion with his boots, leaned over and said he’d like to break the owner’s head. “I don’t get any royalties for that stuff.”

(This is one in a continuing series of recollections and notes I made while covering music for The Kansas City Times in the late 1970s and early 1980s.)

This year we were joined by Lenny Bruce, Mick Jagger, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon and Dennis Hopper.

I took the bus over to 4/20, the Smokeout that has taken place at 4:20 p.m. on April 20 at least back into the 1980s on the Quad of the University of Colorado. Waiting at the bus stop on Table Mesa, I watched groups of kids mostly, with surfboards and phones, walking toward the campus, talking and texting. At every stop, more people piled on, more than I’ve ever seen on a Dash, almost all of whom got off at Euclid south of the Quad. Four other people on the bus were writing; I was the only one with paper, which at least I found amusing.

A group of people made their way through the crowd with signs that suggested burning weed instead of oil.

I met Gil at the Pleasant Street stop a little after four, and we joined the throngs walking into the Quad, which was already jammed with smokers, hangers-on and the curious by the time we got there, just like the other time I attended two years ago. Airplanes dove in close, one with advertising trailing behind it, others, no doubt, filming. Police stood around looking bored, although there were, according to the paper, 11 people arrested for possession, a minor offense in Boulder.

A string band played quietly near the south steps of Old Main, where a photographer was stationed on the roof. Since cell-phone times are a bit off, there was a solid cheer and the smoke became thicker at 4:19, at 4:20 and 4:21. This one has become more of a media event than anything else. I found myself taking pictures of other people taking pictures of what was going on.

This magic moment: Balloons bounced and flags flew through the thickening smoke as the time grew closer to 4:20.

The papers said there were 10,000 people there, but the number could just as easily have been 15,000, many no doubt lured by the publicity generated by local media and a chance to get a buzz with strangers.

That was about it, and we were back in Gil’s office by 4:35.

A string band played quietly over by Old Main.

For all the media attention given it — Playboy magazine (it still exists?) declared CU the top party school in the country mostly because of this three-minute event, TV stations hype it because they have video from last year, and the local paper, the Camera, has been hyping this for days  — this is a real snoozer of a happening.

The cutline beneath this illustration actually says: "An optimistic artist's rendering of a fully operational Maritime Laser Demonstrator." And this is what is off limits to the budget debate?

I found this “news story” from LiveScience on the MSNBC website It begins with a catchy headline and lede to draw your attention, but it’s really just a glorified press release.

Navy Raygun Disables Boat With Laser Weapon

“With their (sic) new high-energy laser weapons, the U.S. Navy has succeeded in combining buccaneers and Buck Rogers. Called the Maritime Laser Demonstrator, the ray gun quickly disabled a small boat in a recent test.”

Wow. Cool. Just like in the movies. Ray guns. Buck Rogers. Buccaneers. It even includes a video of the “Maritime Laser Demonstration.”

The story goes on to explain that the high-energy laser properly functioned as a weapon on the high seas, something “offensive lasers” have had difficulty with, and that “the lessons learned while developing the laser may prove more valuable than the laser itself.”

And here’s the clincher: “Such lasers could one day protect military vessels from the same kind of tiny boat that almost sunk the destroyer U.S.S. Cole by augmenting the small machine guns already aboard American warships.”

The U.S.S. Cole, you will remember, was attacked by al Qaeda suicide bombers from a small boat on Oct. 12, 2000, in Aden harbor, Yemen. Seventeen U.S. soldiers were killed and 39 injured in the blast, which blew open a huge hole in the destroyer. The story says “ONR developed the laser in conjunction with the defense company Northrop Grumman. The program had a ceiling value of $98 million, and took about two and a half years to complete.” Which begs two questions: a) How many other “offensive lasers” have we built before this one? b) is the U.S. spending at least $100 million and probably a lot more to make sure a small boat with suicide bombers can’t take out a destroyer in a harbor again?

And you gotta love the use of  “could one day” to remind us that this is an early test of some weapons system designed for the future. The cost doesn’t matter, though, because it’s part of the military budget, which makes up enough of a percentage of the total U.S. budget that cuts in its excesses alone could probably make up for most of the one percent our lawmakers and president spent six weeks dithering on about while network news ran countdown clocks on the government shutdown. And that those of us whose money goes toward it have no idea what the hell’s going on.

But what’s interesting is that while we just endured one of the most disgusting, embarrassing debacles in executive/legislative history over a total of one percent of the total budget – with more to come on another couple of percentage points – our government develops weapons programs that we “could” use years down the road and probably will sell to other countries for their wars. And all we ever hear about it is some MSNBC press release that today passes for news in the U.S.? Or this intriguing “infographic” explaining how laser technology can be used to create mayhem and blind people? (Apparently not the laser technology that optometrists use.)

This is just the tiny tip of the iceberg? When will we have a debate in this country over our secret military budget? When will we even be able to see the military budget? When will we ask why, in the name of “security,” we as a country are the major arms supplier in the world? When will we ask why not cut back on future weapons programs instead of arguing over Planned Parenthood?”

I don’t remember much about my father, but one thing has stuck in my mind over all these years: It’s this little story he would tell while sketching a funny character on a piece of paper. I have not been able to remember the story, or what the cartoon actually looked like, but I distinctly remember Garold drawing this little caricature and telling a story around it as he penciled it in.

I have tried everything to figure out what that illustration was.

Seeing this face gave me a wild case of déjà vu.

Now, all those decades later, that little mystery has been solved. One of my RSS feeds is linked to the Urban Legends Reference Page, and I recently found one about the Kilroy Was Here phenomenon. I took a look at the drawing and got an wild sense of déjà vu.

I began looking around for more about Kilroy and the illustration. Its etymology is unclear, but it is certain that G.I.s in World War II got into the spirit of spreading “Kilroy Was Here” around the globe. The stories are legion, but their ubiquity during this time helped them become synonymous with U.S. presence around the world. YouTube has several Kilroy Was Here items, including this old novelty recording of “Kilroy Was Here,” by Ted Fio Rito and his Orchestra, with Bozo the Clown as the voice of Kilroy – perfect for the character as drawn, don’ think?

Among the many stories about Kilroy on the semi-official website for Kilroy is this one: “(Under Water Demolition – later Navy Seals) divers swam ashore on Japanese held islands in the Pacific to prepare the beaches for the coming landings by U.S. troops. They were sure to be the first GIs there! On more than one occasion, they reported seeing ‘Kilroy was here’ scrawled on makeshift signs or as graffiti on enemy pillboxes. They, in turn, often left similar signs for the next incoming G.I.s.”

This is probably where Garold ran into Kilroy, and, along with the déjà vu,  it strengthens the case that Garold, who was shipped home from the beaches of New Guinea with malaria in 1945, impressed his young sons in the early 1950s by telling a story while drawing four horizontal lines in the same plane. Then he added the nose and fingers as he explained more to fill in the blank spots in the lines. Then the eyes, the head and finally a little sprig of hair, and Kilroy, with his long nose, is peering over the wall. You couldn’t really tell what it was until he added the last lines, and he would say, triumphantly, “Kilroy was here.” I loved it and would ask him to do it over and over again, and he obliged many times.

At this point, I am grateful for any knowledge of my father. Thanks to Kilroy for giving me another small morsel.

When we think of the great songwriters of the 1950s, we usually concentrate on Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Ray Charles. Leiber-Stoller doesn’t immediately come to mind. I didn’t even know their first names – they have always been Leiber-Stoller to me.

All that changed after reading Hound Dog: The Leiber-Stoller Biography (Simon and Shuster 2009), written with David Ritz. Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber were at least as important as songwriters as Berry or Holly, but like their first names, we don’t remember them because they weren’t performers.

Both of them grew up on the East Coast, but they didn’t meet until they had moved to Los Angeles, and their partnership, which began in 1950, has lasted through many decades, if their popularity and creativity pretty much dried up by the 1970s. But they will be remembered for the many songs they wrote for the Drifters, the Coasters and other great doo wop groups of the 1950s.

They were young Jewish men completely enchanted with black music. Stoller, a pianist, studied jazz and classical music and wrote all the music for the team. Leiber was a lyricist literally without peer at the time, and the pair created some of the most fascinating songs of the era: “Smokey Joe’s Café,” “Riot in Cell Block #9,” “Kansas City,” “The Chicken and the Hawk,” “Young Blood,” “Yakety Yak,” “Along Came Jones,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Little Egypt,” “Stand by Me,” among them.

Oh, yeah. And “Hound Dog.” “You know, gentlemen, no matter how many beautiful songs you write or how many other achievements you may realize in your lifetimes, you’ll always be remembered as the guys who wrote ‘Hound Dog,’“ Atlantic Records co-owner Nesuhi Ertegun told them. They knew he was right, naming their autobiography after the song and highlighting the quote on the first page.

One thing not many know is that along with their songwriting skills, they were involved in producing records before we came up with the term “production” in the making of records. Listen to the Dixie Cups’ “Iko Iko,” and read how they came up with the recording. The Cups were in the studio to put final touches on a song they recorded a few days earlier, “People Say,” and warming up their voices with the old Mardi Gras standard “Iko Iko.”

Stoller writes, “We decided to cut it there and then. No band was present … Jeff (Barry) and Ellie (Greenwich) picked up a coke bottle, a plastic bowl and a few can openers. That became the percussion. There was also a souvenir kalimba box from the West Indies, a sort of giant version of an African thumb piano. I found a way to tune it and used it to play a bass line. The Dixie Cups sang the song with tremendous feeling and authenticity. When we were finished, we loved it … We had another Top Twenty hit.”

There are plenty of stories like that one in Hound Dog, their on-off involvement with Elvis Presley and Col. Parker, their experiences with everybody from Phil Spector to Shadow Morton to Norman Mailer, as well as many other stories about the early days of rock and roll. And I finally got their names right.

We'll be celebrating Bob Dylan's 70th birthday (it's May 24) early on Roots & Branches April 3.

I just finished Sean Wilentz’s “Bob Dylan in America,” a series of essays that looks at Dylan’s career, many of them about the later parts of it.  Like Wilentz, I have been fascinated at Dylan’s reincarnation after a period of confusion that lasted through much of the 1980s as a kind of minstrel, performing regularly as well as becoming involved in other kinds of creative expression.

Dylan is marking 70 years next month, so I put together a special KGNU (88.5 FM) Roots & Branches show for Sunday, April 3, 9-11 am MT that will argue that the last twenty years of Dylan’s career will be a period that be considered one of his most fruitful. (Download the show here until April 17.)

Nothing could possibly match the evolutionary path Robert Zimmerman took from the moment he first stepped onto New York streets fifty years ago in January to the release of Nashville Skyline nine years later. But he hasn’t done so bad of late, either.

In Chronicles Dylan relates that he realized by 1987 that he had been coasting, riding the laurels of his legend, performing erratically and releasing albums that seemed little more than pale reflections of his glorious past. He minced few words about his predicament, which coincided with an injury to one of his hands that he feared might end his playing days. “Always prolific, never exact,” he wrote, “too many distractions had turned my musical path into a jungle of vines.”

At the same time he writes that he realized that he would have to change the way he wrote and presented his music. “By combining certain elements of technique which ignite each other I could shift the levels of perception, time-frame structures and systems of rhythm,” he wrote, “which would give my songs a brighter countenance, call them up from the grave – stretch out the stiffness in their bodies and straighten them out.”

He also describes a musical numerical system, which I still don’t understand, that he says the guitarist Lonnie Johnson taught him. But for whatever reasons, things began turning around for him.

In 20 years, he’s released two albums of traditional songs (Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, four albums of original material (Time Out of Mind, Love & Theft, Modern Times and Together Through Life) and eight editions in his bootleg series that includes a couple of three-disc sets. He published the first of a three-part memoir, Chronicles, which offered his own memories of his early days in New York City and two other periods of his life where he felt at a crossroads. He let Martin Scorsese direct No Direction Home, a three-hour-plus documentary on his life to 1966, that included two more albums of outtakes and other interesting material.

He wrote, directed and produced Masked & Anonymous,  an apocalyptic film that starred some of Hollywood’s finest acting talent. He curated and was host of Theme Time Radio Hour for three years, producing 100 hour-long programs that featured his obvious love for all kinds of music and American history and featured his oddball sense of humor. He let Twyla Tharp try to adapt his music for dance.

He plays about a hundred concerts a year, which isn’t an unusual number of shows except, it seems, in Dylan’s case, when it’s called the Never Ending Tour. His paintings are now hung in galleries around the world. He made Christmas in the Heart, a fantastic Christmas album and donated the money to charity. You probably wouldn’t have called Bob Dylan charitable in 1965, but you might today. He seems to have grown comfortably into old age with the same instincts and curiosity intact that have, except for a period in the 1980s, always sustained him.

And his most recent work, as Wilentz relates, recasts him as part of a long American tradition. In many ways, it’s no more than an extension of what he has always done. In Chronicles Dylan relates, as a voracious reader from an early age, how he dug into historical texts in friend’s apartments and the New York City Library. Early on he paid tribute to his heroes by copying them – his own tribute, “Song to Woody,” steals the melody of Woody Guthrie’s own “1913 Massacre.” Today, he finds different ways to connect with music and literature from, as Greil Marcus once dubbed it, the old, weird America, and spit it back out at us in different ways.

I think I make a strong case for his recent success, but the proof is in the music. Time willing, here’s the playlist for Sunday morning. The show will stream from kgnu.org, and I’ll post the link to the podcast Sunday afternoon.

Introduction, Bob Dylan Concert 2009
Blind Willie McTell, Bob Dylan Bootleg Series Vol. 1, Disc 3.
Tomorrow Night, Lonnie Johnson Bluebird single
Tomorrow Night, Bob Dylan, Good As I Been To You
Money Honey (take 2), Bob Dylan Unreleased
Nashville Skyline Rag, Bob Dylan, Nashville Skyline
Love Sick, Bob Dylan, Time Out Of Mind
Not Dark Yet, Bob Dylan, Time Out Of Mind
Tryin’ To Get to Heaven (Oct. 5, 2000, London, England), Bob Dylan, Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
Marchin to the City, Bob Dylan, Tell Tale Signs Bootleg Series Vol. 8
Things Have Changed, Bob Dylan, Wonder Boys
Having Myself A Time, Billie Holiday, Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia 1933-1944 (Disc 4)
Bye & Bye, Bob Dylan, Love & Theft
Po’ Boy, Bob Dylan, Love & Theft
High Water, Bob Dylan, Love & Theft
Come Una Pietra Scalciata (Like A Rolling Stone), Articolo 31. Masked & Anonymous
Down In The Flood (New Version), Bob Dylan, Masked & Anonymous
Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking    Bob Dylan & Mavis Staples, Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs Of Bob Dylan
Spirit On The Water, Bob Dylan, Modern Times
Beyond The Horizon, Bob Dylan, Modern Times
Cross the Green Mountain, Bob Dylan, Tell Tale Signs Bootleg Series Vol. 8
Checkers by Dylan, Theme Time Radio Hour: Dogs
Sinatra and Kennedy, Theme Time Radio Hour: President’s Day
Dylan GPS rap, Theme Time Radio Hour: Street Map
Life is Hard, Bob Dylan, Together Through Life
It’s All Good, Bob Dylan, Together Through Life

It was ten years ago, on March 24, 2001, that Sweet Lunacy: A Brief History of Boulder Rock, was first screened at the Boulder Theatre, the opening act for the 25th reunion concert of Dusty Drapes and the Dusters.

Don Chapman and I had worked on and off for more than two years on the documentary, commissioned and funded by a grant from the Boulder Arts Commission for Boulder Municipal Channel Eight. We filmed a host of people who had been part of the music scene in Boulder from the 1950s, when Ray Imel Sr. and Rex Barker opened Tulagi, through the Astronauts, Flash Cadillac, the Dusters, Michael Woody and the Too High Band, Judy Roderick, Zephyr, Firefall, Big Head Todd and the Monsters and many others  into the 1980s, when the Fox Theatre began hosting live shows, and boiled down more than 30 hours of interviews into a one-hour documentary.

Don put the finishing touches on it that morning, and standing there watching it amongst my friends and more than a thousand people for whom it was made was one of the great hours of my life. It has been showing regularly since its release on Channel Eight.

But for ten years, that’s the only way people could see it. Because of budget and staff cuts, Channel Eight no longer makes copies of the film available. At present, it is only available if you have access to Channel 8, and it is not on a regular schedule, so it is truly accessible to only a scant few people.

Meanwhile, requests for it have remained pretty steady over the years. It was originally made for VHS (remember that?), and in a digital world many people who only have it in that format might no longer be able to access it. Others who were interviewed or played a part in the film have never seen it. I get emails inquiring about it, but beyond burning and sending a physical copy, there is no legitimate way for people outside of Boulder to see it.

The arts commission’s only charge to Don and me was to get it in front of as many people as possible, and the way to do that today is to make it available on YouTube. It needs at least the chance to go viral.

It’s now at sweetlunacyboulder, chopped into four easily digestible 15-minute segments, thanks to the lovely and talented Lauren Winton. I have added some notes so you know what’s in each segment, and I’m sure I’ll be playing with annotation and other stuff to make it more easily understood. More about Sweet Lunacy and its making here.

If you are interested in screening the film, please contact me at leland.rucker@gmail.com. But most of all, please, enjoy.

Here’s the set list for a special Roots & Branches look at one of rock’s most beloved and influential groups. Hope I can get through all these in two hours. I also direct your attention to a piece I wrote about Music From Big Pink that graciously wound up on the unofficial band website.

The house at Big Pink.

“Ain’t Got No Home” (Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry) Clarence “Frogman” Henry The Complete Buddy Holly, Vol. 10
“The Great Pretender” The Platters Rock N’ Roll Era: 1954-1955
“Saved” LaVern Baker Atlantic Rhythm & Blues Disc 4: 1947-1974
“The Third Man Theme” The Band Moondog Matinee
“She’s Nineteen Years Old” The Hawks A Musical History
“Who Do You Love” The Band A Musical History-Selections
“He Don’t Love You” Levon Helm & The Hawks Across The Great Divide [Disc 3]
“The Stones I Throw (Will Free All Men)” Levon & The Hawks A Musical History
“I Ain’t Got No Home [Live]” Bob Dylan & The Band A Musical History
“Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” Bob Dylan The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live, 1966: The Royal Albert Hall Concert [Live] [Disc 2]
“Orange Juice Blues (Blues For Breakfast)” (Outtake – Demo) The Band Music From Big Pink
“See You Later, Allen Ginsberg” Bob Dylan & The Band Genuine Basement Tapes Vol 4
“Yazoo Street Scandal (Outtake)” The Band Music From Big Pink
“We Can Talk” The Band Music From Big Pink
“To Kingdom Come” The Band Music From Big Pink
“The Weight” The Band Music From Big Pink
“Look Out Cleveland” The Band The Band
“Rag Mama Rag” The Band The Band
“The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show” The Band
Stage Fright
“Life Is A Carnival” The Band Rock Of Ages [Disc 2]
“The Last Waltz Refrain [Live]” The Band Across The Great Divide [Disc 3]
“The Shape I’m In” The Band & Friends The Complete Last Waltz
“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”  The Complete Last Waltz
“Stage Fright” The Band & Friends The Complete Last Waltz
“Go Back To Your Woods” Robbie Robertson & Bruce Hornsby Storyville
“Ragtop” Danko Fjeld Anderson Ridin’ On The Blinds
“You Don’t Know Me” Danko, Manuel & Butterfield Lone Star Cafe, New York City NY, September 19, 1984
“Atlantic City” Levon Helm Band FestivaLink Presents Levon Helm Band MerleFest Ramble At MerleFest, NC 4/26/08 [Disc 1]
“I Shall Be Released” The Band Live At Watkins Glen
“Acadian Driftwood (Neil Young & Joni Mitchell)” The Band & Friends The Complete Last Waltz
“Theme From The Last Waltz [Live]” The Band Across The Great Divide [Disc 3]
Slippin And Slidin’ [Live]The BandAcross The Great Divide [Disc 3]

Here’s the playlist for the Morning Sound Alternative for Jan. 24, 2011 on KGNU. The only restriction for this show is that the singer is not the author of the song.

Everybody Wants To Rule The World    Patti Smith    Twelve    4:07    2007
Rebel Rebel    Seu Jorge    The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou    2:24    2004
Coffee, Coffee, Coffee    Freedy Johnston    Real: The Tom T Hall Project    3:02    1998
The Third Man Theme    The Band    Moondog Matinee    2:49    1973
It’s A Long Way To The Top    Lucinda Williams    Little Honey    4:56    2008
Angel Of The Morning    The Pretenders    Pirate Radio [Disc 3]    3:32    1994
Words (Between The Lines Of Age)    Chip Taylor    Harvest Revisted (MOJO )    5:09    2010
A Day In The Life    Jeff Beck    International Forum, Tokyo JP, February 6, 2009    5:14    2009
This Wheel’s On Fire    Neil Young and The Sadies    Garth Hudson Presents A Canadian Celebration Of The Band    3:28    2010
Lean On Me    Eric Bibb, Rory Block & Maria Muldaur    Sisters & Brothers    4:07    2004
Superstition    Old School Freight Train  Heart of Glass      3:23
Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky    Peter Wolf    Midnight Souvenirs    2:12    2010
Gonna Move    Susan Tedeschi    Wait For Me    4:26    2002
Never Gonna Give You Up    The Black Keys    The Black Keys (Brothers)    3:41    2010
Angel Dance    Robert Plant    Band of Joy    3:49    2010
Run Through the Jungle (Gunmen soundtrack)    Los Lobos    Rarities, Covers & Radio Shows    3:46
Garden Party    John Fogerty    The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again    3:51    2009
She Belongs To Me    Rick Nelson    Legacy (Disc 3)    3:03
Lonesome Town    Bob Dylan With Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers    Lonesome Town [Disc 2]    5:30    2002
Burn Down The Cornfield    Charlie Musselwhite    Sanctuary    3:30    2004
Louisiana 1927    Sonny Landreth        3:59
Losing You    Mavis Staples    You Are Not Alone    2:52    2010
Just One Smile    Al Kooper    Soul of a Man (Disc 1)    6:09    1994
Gone Dead Train [Movie-Soundtrack]    Randy Newman    CD 3: Odds & Ends    2:54    1970
Everybody’s Talkin’    Harry Nilsson    Greatest Hits    2:46    1968
Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood    Nina Simone    Broadway Blues Ballads    2:48    1993
Hey Gyp    The Animals    Retrospective    3:50    1966
Voodoo Child (Slight Return)    Angelique Kidjo, Buddy Guy, And Vernon Reid    Lightning In A Bottle. A Salute To The Blues Soundtrack Recording [Disc 2]    5:17    2004
I Am Waiting    Ollabelle        4:15
Walk Away Renee Linda Ronstadt & Ann Savoy    Adieu False Heart    3:26    2006
When Doves Cry    The Be Good Tanyas    Hello Love    4:02    2006
Soul Serenade    Aretha Franklin    I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You    2:39
State Trooper    Deana Carter    Badlands: A Tribute To Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska    3:46
Paint The Town Beige    Bill and Bonnie Hearne    Watching Life Through A Windshield    3:39    2000
Glad & Sorry    Golden Smog    Down By The Old Mainstream    3:34    1996
Don’t Knock    Tom Jones    Praise & Blame    2:15    2010
Perfidia (Guitar)    The Ventures        2:03    1960
Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power)    Tim O’Brien    Red On Blonde    4:03    1996
Al Vaivén De Mi Carreta    Afrocubismo    Afrocubismo    5:00    2010