Silver Stallion is of course made famous by 80s country super group the Highwaymen, see a live version of them doing it (with beautiful classic Nashville Tele playing) here. It has inspired some great covers, most notably from Cat Power and another one I really like by The Heavy Horses, it was written by Lee Clayton, this is the original.
I think everybody should do a cover of this song, it would help it in becoming a contender for the National Anthem of Australia. Clearly its only a matter of time considering the elemental force of this 80s classic by The Triffids, written by the late David McComb (who is finally getting some recent belated interest) and containing such intense longing.
So. Here is the Beardwagon contribution, sounding drunken earnest & distorted like it was recorded live by a few friends in a garage on a hot afternoon after much BBQ tending, casual revelation and beer drinking.
And the full res version for download. 40mb wav file.
There was something desperate I always loved in this song, I heard it first on a Blondie greatest hits album. They recorded it as the first track on Parallel Lines and it was a cover of a song from a few years earlier by The Nerves. There is a great pop punk playing energy there, but its the phrasing & delivery Debbie Harry gives it that gave it a special place in my heart, the upfront delivery and the fullthroated rockout undercut by the weird scene being played out in the lyric. This was recorded in one take with some minimal voice doubling overdubs & an extra keyboard, mostly just live guitar & voice late at night in a room.
Outdoor Type was written in the early/mid 90s sometime by Tom Morgan from Smudge and popularized by the Lemonheads not long after. When I first heard it around that time it was blaring onto the footpath from the Half a Cow shop in Glebe Point Rd & seemed to crystallize everything about the slacker indie rock aesthetic of the time while mocking it with some of my favourite lyrics.
Outdoor Type 24bit (50mb)
I started writing this song in my head while we were watching an old Aki Kaurismaki film on SBS one night. I love his films. There was nothing happening, someone was standing drunk in a doorway waiting for a taxi, oblivious. Seemed to be early morning, I only caught twenty minutes of it but it might have been Shadows in Paradise. This one was recorded in a pretty loose fashion & I seemed to be following the sound of that cavernous kick drum weaving through the verses. Again Shannon O’Neill mixed this so it scrubs up OK.
What Part of That 24bit (50mb)
Jim Jones was written as late as 1907 according to Wikipedia, though the narrator in the song is singing from the late 1700′s about his transportation to Sydney in convict chains. I came across the lyrics reading a newspaper article about the history of Sydney & found a version with a chord sequence on the website of a Boston Folk Society. I’m not sure if these are the chords that are most used for the song, although it is a Colonial Classic of sorts I’ve never heard another version, though I read here that Bob Dylan did one on his early 90s acoustic album.
It seems to lend itself to being played fast (and for me this is quite fast), it’s the sort of song I could hear The Pogues doing a version of. This version was recorded pretty quickly (I think this is the first take) and mixed just as fast.
24bit master wav (60mb)
In 2007 a few months after the idea of Beardwagon was formed this debut alum was released. Called Poolside because it was mostly written beside a pool in Ubud, it got airplay on all the hip radio stations back in those heady days (ie: fbi, zzz and RN). You can still get it on iTunes & many other places or you could download it here track by track as a zip bundle of mp3s or a big zip bundle of high quality 24bit wav files. The album would never have come together without Shannon O’Neill who produced and mixed the record in his Enmore studio during the winter nights that year as we worked our way through a case of Penfolds Shiraz.
Track 8 – We Rock So You Don’t Have To
Download all the mp3s as a bundled zip. Download the 24bit master files all zipped together.