The Dave Edmunds Band: I Hear You Rockin' -Live

The Dave Edmunds Band: I Hear You Rockin' -Live

1986

Columbia

Format I Own it on: Vinyl

Track Listing: 1. Girls Talk  2. Here Comes The Weekend  3. Queen of Hearts  4. Paralyzed  5. The Wanderer   6. Crawling from the Wreckage  7. Slipping Away   8. Information  9. I Hear You Knocking   10. I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll)  11. Ju Ju Man



Oh, man. I have a vacation for the next two weeks...I'm so psyched for this...Not a single alarm clock in sight for the next 16 days...I'm just holing myself up in my apartment, with a buncha beer and my goal is to not see sunlight for two weeks straight...My goal is by the end of vacation, is to look like this...

...only with glasses...and fatter...

Alright, so let's kick off the hermitage with a blog post...Here we go...

Dave released an album in 1984, called "Riff Raff" that I haven't been able to find...Whenever I hit a record store, I always make a beeline to the "E" section and look for it, but I haven't had much luck...So whenever I do manage to find it, I'll post a review of it...



"I Hear You Rockin'," released a couple of years after "Riff Raff," (but not containing any of its songs)  is an ultra-pro, studio enhanced live record from Dave Edmunds,who unsurprisingly doesn't subscribe to the whole "raw, ragged" live thing...Essentially, it sounds like a Dave Edmunds studio album with less harmonies and crowd noise dubbed in...

 Dave plays his most well-known songs, using the exact arrangements that appeared on the record, with a band of well-seasoned studio musicians... As a result, it's hard not to simply lump this in as a greatest hits package...Which might have been his intention, since this marked the point where his studio output would be reduced to a  sloooow crawl (2 albums in the last 16 years)...There's a couple of tracks that sweeten the deal, as they never appeared on a proper studio album..

 Notable Track #1: A cover of Elvis Presley's "Paralyzed," and thankfully Dave doesn't ham it up with some hammy Vegas-y Elvis impersonation...It just sounds like a Dave Edmunds song...Ah, the undeniable power of restraint...

Notable Track # 2: A cover of  Dion's "The Wanderer"...It goes against Dave's predilection for obscure gems, but it's hard not to view "The Wanderer" as the template for a lot of Dave's career...From the opening, "WEEELLLLLL..." to the precarious balance between pop and rock that results in one side never taking precedence over the other...A totally obvious, but well chosen cover...If you had to explain Dave Edmunds' recorded output to someone who was unfamiliar with his work, "A new wave version of "The Wanderer'" wouldn't be too far off..

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 Sure, it would have been great if Dave's first live album would have been with Rockpile, but we have to take what we can get...And what we have here is just a slick little recording full of hits and a surprise or two...

Here's "The Wanderer" by Dave Edmunds...Enjoy....