8 Track Highway Brings New Excitement, Verve to Familiar Songs at "Twilight in the Park" July 10

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, July 10) I went to the Organ Pavilion in San Diego’s Balboa Park for the third night in the row to catch the rock covers band 8 Track Highway, whom I’d seen there before but seemed quite a bit better now. They advertise themselves as a band covering California rock from the 1970’s and 1980’s, so it was a welcome surprise when they kicked off their set with a late-1950’s classic: Buddy Holly’s “It’s So Easy.” While it soon became apparent that they’d learned the song from Linda Ronstadt’s cover – especially when they went into the a cappella vocal break Ronstadt inserted – it was still a nice way to open the show. After a second song which appeared to be called “We Got Love,” the band’s front person announced that their next song would be something by the band Pure Prairie League, whom I’d heard of in the day but didn’t remember actually having heard. My best guess of the title was “Baby, What You Want to Do,” though it turned out to be their biggest hit, “Amie” (pronounced “Amy”), and it was a nice enough song. Then they started playing pieces I recognized again: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Lodi” (I once interviewed a band called Flying Circus who’d played Lodi, and when I asked them what the experience was like, their leader said, “You know the Creedence song ‘Lodi’? It’s exactly like that!”), the great Stevie Nicks/Tom Petty duet “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” a song by Huey Lewis called “Workin’ for a Living” (I heaved a sigh of relief when they announced a Lewis cover that wasn’t “The Power of Love”!) and another Creedence song which I thought at first was “Run Through the Jungle” but turned out to be “Born on the Bayou.”

The next song they played was America’s 1972 hit “Ventura Highway,” which was originally an acoustic folk-rock number but was apparently the inspiration for Prince’s song, album and film Purple Rain (the words “purple rain” appear in “Ventura Highway”) and was extensively sampled by producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis for Janet Jackson’s “Someone to Call My Lover” (2001). As they had through much of the evening, 8 Track Highway played it louder, harder and edgier than the original, which was good in my book. Then they played a song by Bruce Springsteen, “Fire,” justifying it by saying that even though Springsteen famously hails from New Jersey instead of California, the California-based Pointer Sisters had covered it and actually released their version before Springsteen’s own. After that came a song I utterly loathed when it was new: Christopher Cross’s “Ride Like the Wind,” a putrid song that I thought at the time ripped off a great one, “Me and My Uncle” by The Mamas and the Papas founder John Phillips. After that they played the Doobie Brothers’ first single, “Listen to the Music,” whose original featured Tom Johnston on lead vocal before Michael McDonald joined the band. (That was especially ironic because Michael McDonald had overdubbed a backing vocal track on Christopher Cross’s “Ride Like the Wind.”)

Then they played what they announced as a medley of two obscure “B”-side singles by The Eagles, but it wasn’t really a medley – they stopped after the first song for audience applause and then went into the second. And they were hardly obscure singles, either; they were two of the Eagles’ most iconic songs, “Hotel California” and “Life in the Fast Lane.” They closed their official set with the song “Footloose,” and for their encore they did yet another Creedence cover, “Fortunate Son.” I’d seen 8 Track Highway before at a previous year’s “Twilight in the Park” concert, but I liked them better this time around. A lot of that had to do with a key change in personnel: Chris, their former drummer, had moved up in the lineup to play rhythm guitar (much the way Dave Grohl went from being Nirvana’s drummer to lead guitarist and singer for his own band, Foo Fighters). They needed a new drummer, and they found one in Chris’s sister Laura – who was damned good. (The only major otherwise all-male band I can think of with a woman drummer was the original Velvet Underground with Maureen “Moe” Tucker.) She beat those skins quite energetically and was more powerful and drove the band better than I recall Chris doing when he was the drummer – though even back behind the drum set he’d still sung lead on all the Creedence covers. It was a fun and quite exciting night, proof that you can be a cover band and still add your own slant to familiar songs and play exciting, powerful music.