I've mentioned Dr. Lüst and the Chiefs of the European Space Agency several times here on the blog. It was the first real band I was in and I wrote a whole bunch of songs for/while in the band, including Solitaire, Insecure, Gonna Be Around, and Hubris (among many others). The other members of Dr. Lüst also wrote songs for the band, especially Dan Schmidt, and he's continued to play some of those songs in his successor bands (as I have with mine).
We also played a ton of covers, of course, and that's what I'll be posting today. Four of the five band members lived at or were alumni of the East Campus dorm at MIT, and that was where we would practice, but we only played the East Campus Spring Picnic once--my senior year of 1991. This would be our penultimate live performance, the final one coming at Bexley's Beast Roast a week or two later (not counting the inevitable reunion performance at a party in 1992).
I'm posting here five cover songs from that performance. We were pretty loose (to the point of sloppy) with some (all?) of these, but they're reasonably representative. Since I'm not sure how Dan, John, or Doug would feel about my posting their songs here I'm just going to stick to songs that I sang (along with one of Pat's):
1. When The Girls Get Here Pat sings this Young Fresh Fellows classic, in part because everyone else wanted to sing it and Pat was the only real compromise candidate.
2. Different Strokes I don't know what came over us but somehow we hit upon doing this song, which became a staple of our performances. We followed it up with The Facts Of Life at Bexley.
3. Head Over Heels Man, I loved this song. I took it with me to Jury Rig and Science Diet, though only Dr. Lüst had the keyboard part going.
4. Super Freak/U Can't Solve This A different version of this song appears early on in the blog's history. We'd been playing this one for years, and it shows as we wander through it injecting in-jokes and interrupting each other a bunch. I love playing this song.
5. Free Bird You can hear the crowd yelling for Free Bird through most of this set, as they did through many of our sets (as was the style back then), we learned the song in response and as a way to punish the crowd. The audio tape ran out most of the way through our performance, so you don't get to hear the response from the crowd once we finished: "Free Bird!"
