Joal Rush and The Wares cover entire Tom Petty album on stage

CONCERT REVIEW

I love cover songs. Any chance to hear a band interpret another band's music is always met with interest by me.

When I heard that Joal Rush and The Wares were going to be covering one of my all-time favorite albums, Tom Petty's "Full Moon Fever," at Fiery Ron's Home Team BBQ in West Ashley, I knew I had to check it out.

Home Team occasionally has a band cover an entire album by another well-known act. The results have been mixed, but never boring. Last Friday night Rush and his band played a few originals to warm the crowd up.

At first I thought the song that the band kicked things off with, "Imagination," was also a cover. I could have sworn I had heard another band perform that tune. Then I realized that I had heard The Bridge radio station play Rush's version. The five or six original tunes that Joal Rush and The Wares played were catchy without being slick, and reminded me of the kind of stuff you might get from Matchbox Twenty or Counting Crows. The band has a new CD in the works and I look forward to hearing more of Rush's music.

After a short break the band returned to the stage and prepared to cover the entire "Full Moon Fever" album. Covering an album is different than playing a set of cover songs by different artists. When you cover an entire album, especially a popular one, you have people listening who all have their own way of interpreting that sequence of songs. Try and play too fast and loose with someone else's notes, and things can quickly turn ugly.

Fortunately, Joal Rush and The Wares, who had changed its name to The Petty Thieves for the occasion, were in no mood to completely rewrite Petty's classic riffs. Kicking off with "Free Fallin'," the band treated the material with reverence. I hadn't listened to that album in awhile, and as the band played I consulted with The Critic from The Bridge, trying to remember what great Petty song came next.

After "Free Fallin'" came "I Won't Back Down," which had the entire bar singing the "Heeeyyyy baby!" part, then "Love is a Long Road" and "A Face in the Crowd." Rush played guitar and sang, while Brian Sansbury played keyboards, Preston Hayden manned the bass, and Nathan Bocock played the drums.

Sadler Vaden of the band Leslie also filled in on guitar and background vocals on a couple of songs, most notably on "Runnin' Down a Dream," where he provided the six strums that absolutely make that song's chorus. After playing the tune, Vaden was grinning from ear to ear and told me that it may have been the most fun he had ever had playing guitar.

Rush even recited the "Hello CD listeners" track that separated the songs on "side one" from "side two." At the time "Full Moon Fever" was released, vinyl records were on their way out, and this was an attempt by Petty to preserve the listening experience since one couldn't physically turn over a CD. A note for note cover of the Byrds' "Feel a Whole Lot Better" by Petty to open side two was faithfully recreated by Rush, meaning they were covering a cover song.

The rest of the album, "Yer So Bad," "Depending on You," "The Apartment Song," "All Right For Now" and "A Mind with a Heart of Its Own," went down smooth as can be. Only "Zombie Zoo" faltered, but that wasn't Rush's fault. That tune was always the black sheep of the album, seeming to owe more to producer Jeff Lynne than Petty. Aside from a few mixed up lyrics, Rush and his Petty Thieves did a great job of covering one of the best CD's of the last twenty years.

Incidentally, I was nineteen, just out of basic training in the army, and on my way to Europe when that album hit the shelves in 1989. Listening to Joal Rush and his band cover "Full Moon Fever" really took me back.

Contact Devin Grant at chucktowncritic@yahoo.com.