1000 Followers Strong: Twitter Giveaway

For anyone interested in the stats game, Cover Me has seen a lot of big, round numbers recently. Yesterday afternoon we put up our 500th post (Eric Lauritsen’s epic roundup of dozens of live covers by Wilco). Then this morning we gained our 1000th Twitter follower (hi @u2acro!). As I’ve been promising on @covermesongs for a while now, that’s an occasion for a Twit-sclusive giveaway. No, scratch that. Five Twit-sclusive giveaways.

Here’s the deal: Tweet out a link to a page on Cover Me. Could be the homepage, could be a favorite post, could be our archives on a favorite artist (find ‘em here). Whatever. Include the hash tag “#CoverMe1000” in your post. Do this as often as you like over the next week—as long as you’re tweeting a different page/post each time. Next Friday I’ll pick five tweets randomly. Those five tweet-ers win one of the following:

• CD: John Legend and the Roots’ Wake Up! (more info here)
• CD: Garden on a Trampoline’s new compilation It’s Only Love (three copies, more info below)
• CD: The Morlocks Play Chess (more info here) Continue reading »

At Cover Me, we like to give stuff away. Read on to learn how that stuff can be yours.

Tribute albums to famous artists are a dime a dozen. Tribute albums to famous labels though…well, that’s something else entirely. The Morlocks Play Chess is a great title with a greater concept behind it. San Diego garage rock quintet the Morlocks cover the hits of Chicago’s legendary Chess Records. And what hits! Without the 45s of Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and other Chess artists, rock and roll wouldn’t be where it is today.

Though shut down in 1975, the label has experienced something of a revival in the popular imagination recently. The 2008 film Cadillac Records spotlighted the label with help from Adrian Brody (who played Leonard Chess), Mos Def (Chuck Berry), and Beyoncé (Etta James). Just a few weeks ago Chicago podcast Sound Opinions devoted a whole show to unearthing some of the label’s history.

Enter the Morlocks. The band first popped up in southern California in 1984. Three years and a few local hits later, things collapsed. They returned a decade later with their raw garage sound as frenetic as ever. The Chess Records catalog fits them perfectly and they know it. Continue reading »