I'm a-walking in the rain, tears are falling and I feel a pain (Del Shannon) #324

Bonnie Raitt Runaway/ Louise (Warner Bros., WBS 8382 25, 1977)

Bonnie Raitt has a wonderfully rich vein of authenticity running through her. 

When she tackles this cover of the Del Shannon song she puts her heart and soul into it, pretty much as she does everything she tries. 

That voice is full of so much honest emotion. Bravely, she is not afraid to take an iconic song and give it a rootsy treatment with guitars and blues harp to the foreground. 

Hidden gem: Louise is another cover - this time from Paul Siebel. It's a real country weepie that Bonnie again manages to bring a freshness to. 

I'm just a prisoner of rock'n'roll (Scooter and The Big Man)

The No Nukes triple live album from 1979 is a wonderful collection which in retrospect was the last musical gasp of the 60s/70s hippy counter culture movement. When the big stars came out to play after this they did so for Saint Bob and for starving Africans but there was no live album at all!

No nuclear energy/weapons is a really hippy cause, and by the mid Live Aid eighties the music business was a different corporate beast.

The album is a real period piece - no one is going to sing songs like Jesse Colin Young's Get Together or Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin' during an event like this again without a huge dollop of cynicism being attached to it.

I do love this album though. The highlights are many and evenly distributed over the six sides:

• Bonnie Raitt
• Jackson Browne
• Raydio
• James Taylor with and without The Doobie Brothers
• Bruce Springsteen and The E Street band

all turn in amazing performances and the lowlights are few:

• Chaka Khan
• Jesse Colin Young's aforementioned naive Get Together

I remember going to see the film of the concert with friends who were really turned off by the Springsteen section - the James Brownisms turned them off but I loved his performance.