Songs Of Their Own | Jakedown Street – Standing On The Moon

As we cross the official halfway mark, we’re ready to confirm what hasn’t been explicitly said yet: Songs Of Their Own is a 50-day tribute featuring a daily cover of a Grateful Dead original song, culminating with our grand finale 50th video on July 5, the day of the final Fare Thee Well show in Chicago.

The video series so far has exceeded our loftiest expectations, both in the quality of performances we’ve captured and in the reaction from our readers. With so much excitement building for the Fare Thee Well shows, JamBase chose to present this video series as our way of paying tribute to the band’s stellar songs. Bob Weir recently said in a Rolling Stone interview (published after Songs Of Their Own began) that, “The Grateful Dead is sort of famous for its Americana songbook,” and despite Bobby’s modesty, this we know: the Grateful Dead songbook is nothing short of legendary.

Our aggressive goal of publishing 50 videos in 50 days has been immensely exciting as we’ve hosted fantastic artists at our San Francisco offices, received videos from our partners in the series Telefunken in Connecticut, and have shot remotely around the Bay Area at the Fox Theater, Great American Music Hall, Terrapin Crossroads and even the San Francisco Civic Center BART station.

We’ve got a few more tricks up our sleeve for inventive locations, some top-notch artists still set to record, and a lot more.

Scheduling recording sessions for this series has been a constantly moving target, and after an unexpected cancellation yesterday, rather than rush to publish a previous taping that wasn’t quite complete, we instead took the opportunity to have JamBase team members David Onigman and Jake Alexander step out from behind the camera and record song #25. DaveO & Jake have been producing the series while juggling their regular day-to-day activities, Jake especially hasn’t been sleeping much, often turning around the post- production of these videos in less than 24 hours. With about an hour lead time, the pair worked up this rendition of “Standing On The Moon” shot from the JamBase kitchen.

“Standing On The Moon” made its live debut at the Grateful Dead’s February 5, 1989 show at  Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland. Played live a mere 75 times, the Garcia/Hunter song was recorded for the band’s final studio album, 1989’s Built To Last. The Dead’s final live rendition came June 30, 1995 at Pittsburgh’s old Three Rivers Stadium.

We toyed with a lot of band names for this debut of this duo – “More Than Jake”, “Jake’s On A Plane,” “Jake Of The Flood” (nearly everything rhymes with “Jake” and not much rhymes with “David”) – but ultimately settled on “Jakedown Street.” That’s right, Jakedown Street.

Watch all of the Songs Of Their Own entries including Jackie Greene, Strangefolk, Midnight North, Anders Osborne & Luther Dickinson, Keller Williams and more via the YouTube Playlist below.