The Big Push, from the U.K., covering "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," live on the beach, in the fall of 2025. This has become my favorite cover of this song, eclipsing the Guns N' Roses version from 1990 on a soundtrack, and 1991 on the Use Your Illusion II album.
Bob Dylan wrote this song for the soundtrack of the 1973 movie, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.Dylan even played a role in the movie. The song was released a couple of months later as a single, and became one of several songs Dylan is best known for. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" has been covered by all kinds of people, in several different styles, ever since. Here are some of the best versions over the years.
I have question marks on a lot of the dates because I'm going by the year it was loaded onto YouTube, and the performances may have been recorded earlier.
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OK, there's a story behind this post, I'm not trying to be totally morbid. I was at McDonald's the other day, talking to a friend, and Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" came on in the background. I said, "I want this song to play at my funeral." He replied, "You're crazy." I agreed, laughed, and said, "Yeah, I want the hearse to be bumpin' this song really loud as they drive to the cemetery. He just shook his head.
But I was serious. OK, I'm homeless (living in a "tiny home community" at the moment) and basically broke. If I don't get my shit together at some point, there's a pretty good chance I'll just keel over on the sidewalk somewhere, some day, and get cremated or put in a potter's grave, with no funeral service. But on the chance I get my shit together, and someone actually has a funeral for me, or some kind of memorial service, I want people to remember the times I made them laugh, or the times they laughed with me, or even the times the laughed at me. I truly do want to put the "FUN" back in funeral on my way out of this life.
With that in mind, I wrote down two or three songs that I'd want to play at my funeral or memorial service. I started thinking about those songs this morning, and wound up with a list of 21 songs. To be clear, I'm in no hurry to kick the bucket, but I figured I might as well go ahead and make a funeral music playlist. I like to plan ahead. I just put the whole thing on my YouTube channel: Steve Emig's Funeral Playlist. So it's there, for anyone who wants to check it out.
Here are the songs I selected, in order. I lined them up so that if this music was playing in the background of my memorial service, or the hangout meal afterwards, most people probably wouldn't really catch the theme of the playlist until about halfway through. Yes, I have a dark, fucked up, sense of humor. It's served me well many times. This is another example of that.
