Corvette On The Tracks
Jim Bessman
Billboard Magazine
January 26, 2001

Acclaimed New York City band Mary Lee's Corvette has released a live CD, Blood on the Tracks, recorded last year at So-Ho club Arlene's Grocery. As the gig was part of the club's "Classic Album Night" series, the disc contains the band's full concert transcription of the truly classic 1975 Bob Dylan album, from which, it turns out, the group actually borrowed when it started playing in the '90's.

"It's one of my favorite albums of all time," says Mary Lee Kortes, the band's singer/guitarist/songwriter, "mainly because of the song 'Buckets of Rain': We've been doing it since we first started performing at (now-defunct) Sin-e in the East Village. The lyrics stretch from the personal/spiritual - 'I've been meek and high as an oak' - to the direct, physical one-on-one with someone else - 'I like the way that you move your hips.' That encompasses just about everything any of us could care about and really pulled me in."

But all of the album's songs "ring true in some way," Kortes notes. "They hook you somewhere on an unconscious emotional level - like great music does. It becomes part of your nervous system and your own personal history."

So Kortes was understandably elated when Arlene's Grocery innocently asked if her band would perform Blood on the Tracks. "They didn't know it was one of my favorites," she explains. "But then I got really scared as I listened to the record, because I suddenly realized I didn't know quite as many songs by heart as I thought. So I started to panic and almost canceled twice."

One rehearsal was apparently all that was needed. "It wound up being a fantastic, religious experience," Kortes exults. "To have those words pass through my lips, and to sing all those songs back-to-back really late on a rainy Sunday night to a totally jammed room that was like a hungry crowd waiting to be fed, it was just such an honor."

Kortes wanted to make the experience "more permanent" by releasing the concert CD on her own Leonora Records label. "It's getting talked about and reviewed on all the Dylan sites," says Kortes, who's been flooded with e-mails. The CD sold 25 copies in the first three days of its availability on both the label's and her band's Web site.

Incidentally, Leonora released Mary Lee's Corvette's 1997 eponymous debut CD. The 1999 follow-up, True Loves of Adventure (Wild Pitch), crowned this critic's top 10 list that year (Billboard, December 25, 1999). Currently unsigned, Magda Lane Music (ASCAP) writer Kortes is now halfway through the group's next album.