"Cutting Their Own Groove"
Greatest Love Of All
Like A Virgin
Graceland
Once In A Lifetime
The Living Years
Money For Nothing
Hold On
Ice Ice Baby
Welcome To The Jungle
I Still Haven't Found
Born To Run
Memory
I Want Your Sex
Nothing Compares To You
Help Me Make It Through The Night
Cutting Their Own Groove
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant, yet hilarious!, July 15, 2005
Mark Johnson “boy genus” SLC, Utah
This brilliant album should have sold a few million when it first came out, but as with all good things, you don’t realize what you had until after it is gone.
The band’s approach of arranging contempoary songs in the classic style of the 50’s and early 60’s (or “making old versions of new songs”) has never been better on this album. I challenge you to listen to their covers of “Ice Ice Baby”, “Help Me Make It Through The Night” or any other tracks without laughing and tapping your feet.
Their style is truley unique. The 90’s and the 00’s are, as Dr. Demento called them, the decades of covers. And while current artists (like the Fabulous Bud E. Love, Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine, The Lounge O'Leers, and even Paul Anka!) put a retro, lounge spin on old songs, Big Daddy has been reworking songs since 1983. But don’t think that these guys are merely a lounge act. They are also the original Mash Up artists. Their cover of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” is done with the instrumentation of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”, while keeping Vanilla Ice’s melody. It takes real musical chops to pull this one off and these guys do it like no one else.
By Michael Weber “fairportfan” Atlanta
As to their stylings — yes, their version of “Living Years” takes off from “Leader of the Pack” — but it finishes up somewhere around “Dead Man’s Curve”, sliding smoothly from one to the other.
Their “Ice Ice Baby”, as noted, retains the structure of Vanilla Ice’s thing — but, harder than that, it takes the Queen/David Bowie piano riff that Ice sampled, makes it into a Chuck Berrie riff… and still lets you hear the original riff.
And their “Born to Run” is simply wonderful…
Oh — and i think that their version of “Memory” is based on “Speedo” by i-forget-who, rather than “Unchained Melody”…