Reworking the North Carolina Jukebox

Two Dollar Pistols: "Driveway to Driveway"
Southern Culture on the Skids: "Everybody Wants My Baby"
(from Songs for Sixty Five Roses 2006. Buy or download.)
Superchunk: "Driveway to Driveway"
(from Foolish 1994. Buy or download.)
The Moaners: "Everybody Wants My Baby"
(from Bandwidth: Celebrating 10 Years of Internet Radio on WXYC-Chapel Hill 2004. Download here; other Moaners stuff to buy or download.)

Songs for Sixty Five Roses is a stellar compliation of Triangle talent that features a host of local artists covering classic and obscure tracks by songwriters with current or former local ties. So you've got Eric Bachmann of Crooked Fingers (ex-Archers of Loaf) covering an old Let's Active tune, Portastatic reworking Ryan Adams' "Oh My Sweet Carolina", Nikki Meets the Hibachi covering a Des_ark song, and so on. The artists comment on their choices here. I'm certainly not the first blogger to mention this album, but there's no way to keep something like this off the Oak Room.

It's a pretty great compliation on the musical merits, but it's also a fundraiser for a very worthy cause. "Sixty five roses" is a child's pronunciation of cystic fibrosis, and the proceeds from this album go to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. The impetus for this project was local producer/engineer/mixer John Plymale, whose daughter Allie was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis in 2004. He's had a hand in a lot of great local music, and the artists rushed to his support -- apparently this album was pulled together in a month or so. (An interesting background article is here.) Whether or not you buy this album (but do!), think about supporting CFF directly.

You can hear samples of the whole thing here and stream some tracks here. I decided to post a couple of tracks that have had more radical reworkings and let you hear the originals as well. Two Dollar Pistols give a great honky-tonk spin to Superchunk's classic "Driveway to Driveway", and Southern Culture on the Skids do their inimitable rockabilly thing with the Moaners' bluesy "Everybody Wants My Baby".

There's a benefit show at the Cat's Cradle next Friday (3/31), featuring at least 12 of these bands, so it'd be well worth checking that out too.