Sunday? Under Covers? I got one... (Mudhoney meets Jimmy Dale Gilmore)
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Artist:
I don't know how many of us are familiar with Jimmie Dale Gilmore's lovely, introspective meditation on life and things like that there, "Tonight I Think I'm Gonna Go Downtown", which was first recorded on the first Flatlanders album.
JDG is of a mystical bent - another song on that album was "Bhagawan Decreed" - and that sort of mindset resonates through "Tonight..."
It sort of echoes Dylan's "My Back Pages", as well - Dylan says "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now...", and Jimmie Dale says he's looking for "...somewthing I could not see when this world was more real to me..."
It's a lovely song.
This version is not that version
Some years ago, i picked up a five-track CD featuring JDG and Mudhoney. I'd seen similar ones - SubPop, i think - in which two bands/individuals each contributed a song, which both they and the other half of the deal both recorded - and then they recorded a fifth song (by someone else entirely) together.
The songs on this particular CD were "Buckskin Stallion Blues" by Townes Van Zandt, recorded jointly, Mudhoney's "Blinding Sun" (not a bad song, in my opinion, though not one i'll ever have in as heavy a rotation as almost anything by the Beatles, Kinks, Frank Zappa or Commander Cody) ... and Jimmie Dale's "Tonight I Think I'm Gonna Go Downtown".
And, while Jimmie Dale's version is a classic JDG country blues (in his classic "high lonesome" country voice), Mudhoney's ... isn't.
But i love it.
Locating MOG account...
Comments (3)
Here's a Flatlanders version - not the very first, on the album rereleased a few years ago as More a Legend than a Band, which featured the musical saw much more prominently, but it gives you an idea just how much (and to how much unlikely good effect) Mudhoney tinkered with the song for their version:
My favorite version of this remains the studio version Joe Ely recorded, but it's such a good song. And yeah, I'm a Mudhoney fan basically from their inception (although I heckled Green River the one time I saw them), and a retroactive Flatlanders fan starting with Ely's Down On The Drag lp (1978?)
Have you heard the Steve Earle/Supersuckers 5 songer? Similar turf, although I don't think any of it's as good as when the Supersuckers show up on Steve's El Corazon lp. Actually, I think we've discussed this before. What the hell, there's no talking too much about Steve and the Supersuckers.
Cheers man, thanks for this.
Love the guitar parts in the Mudhoney version..Love JDG,too. Can't sway my wife over to him though. I think I'll heckle her..