Hello Mary Lou!

Hey folks, I'm back. As usual, there's a backlog of hundreds of e-mails and thousands of RSS entries to wade through to catch up on the happenings in the past few weeks. A couple notable changes in the cover world:

• Cover Me has moved off the blogspot to covermesongs.com with a slick new interface. Update your bookmarks accordingly!
  
• Covering the Mouse is also back in business with a little revamp of its own after a couple weeks of technical difficulties brought on by Blogger's discontinuing of FTP publishing
  
• EDITED TO ADD: While I was gone, Leopold Stotch of Versions Galore was unceremoniously dumped by Blogger and has resurfaced at http://www.versionsgalore.com

Here's a trio of covers I love and don't really know why I've put it off for so long... three of the greatest all-time rock bands putting their own personal touches on 1961's Hello Mary Lou, originally performed by Ricky Nelson and written by Gene Pitney and Cayet Mangiaracina, whose songwriting credit has its own interesting story.

Creedence Clearwater Revival - Hello Mary Lou [originally performed by Ricky Nelson]
This is the first version of the song that I ever heard and fell in love with. Of course, as with many cover songs, it would be years before I realized it was not the original.

Queen - Hello Mary Lou [originally performed by Ricky Nelson]
From their Live at Wembley '86 album. In a 1998 interview with Guitarist magazine, Brian May listed James Burton's guitar solo in Hello Mary Lou as one of his top 10 guitar solos.

Led Zeppelin - Hello Mary Lou [originally performed by Ricky Nelson]
Non-Zeppelin fans may balk at a 23-minute live Whole Lotta Love, but in their scorching live shows the band would often use the song as a springboard for a set of R&B and blues covers. The phenomenal How the West Was Won live album, culled from two 1972 California gigs, featured perhaps my favourite rendition of Hello Mary Lou sandwiched between Elvis Presley's Let's Have a Party and St. Louis Jimmy Oden's Going Down Slow.