23

Dec 11

Dave Edmunds: “Run Rudolph Run”

  •    
  •    

Clearly, Dave wore the shades to ward off snowblindness.

Nobody plays Chuck Berry-style rock like Dave Edmunds and his cohorts in Rockpile (Nick Lowe, Billy Bremner, and Terry Williams) — you take a group of musicians that good and closely knit, and they’ll simply rock like no other. There are some, I’m sure, who like their Berry-style rock a little sloppier, not quite as clean-cut and damn-near perfectly played, but hey, you can’t have your Stones and Edmunds too, as we might loosely adapt the famous saying about cake.

So in this case, for this week’s Christmas Cover Friday, Edmunds and company covered Chuck Berry’s “Run Rudolph Run,” releasing it as a single in 1982. (The song was actually written by Johnny Marks, famed Christmas songwriter who also wrote “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree,” “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” and “Holly Jolly Christmas,” among others, but Berry was the first to record it.) As would be expected, they did the best recorded cover version of it to this day, even though Keith Richards’ drunken-sounding version is a lot of fun to listen to as well. You might even say that they equaled Chuck himself, but that might be coming a little too close to rock ‘n’ roll blasphemy.

2 Comments

  1. Vassilis says:

    Great song! Haven’t heard of this either, although I had a knack for Edmunds (this means many records and searching for collaborations! ) And since I am a big fan of Dire straits, I was bound to, since Edmunds played at one of the bands that Knopfler also played:Brewers Droop and of course Terry Williams was a member of Dire Straits for a sort period.

    1. I’m a bit surprised you haven’t heard this one — it got lots of play in America back in the ’80s. But of course, maybe it didn’t get any play in Greece. Didn’t know about the Rockpile/Dire Straits connection — thanks for the info!

Comments, please…

%d bloggers like this: