NO SONG IS SET IN STONE. Sometimes, just sometimes, the original, no matter how successful, distinctive or divine, can be matched, even trumped. The heaven is in the detail. A more imaginative arrangement, a contrasting tempo, a more heartfelt delivery, a more expressive voice, a guitar where a piano once reigned. The difference need not be vast, but difference there must assuredly be.
Whether it’s Wendy/Walter Carlos dishing up electronic Beethoven, Keith Emerson microwaving Mussorgsky, Mark E Smith ransacking Lost In Music for its inner punk, Roxy Music depriving In The Midnight Hour of any vestige of soul or The Band and The Who vying for the roughest, rockiest version of Marvin Gaye’s Baby Don’t You Do It, the history of popular music has been littered with cover versions good, bad and plug ugly. Here are some of the most inspired…
1. Gonna Take A Miracle – Laura Nyro and Labelle
As generous a donor of hits (Three Dog Night, The Fifth Dimension, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Barbra Streisand) as she was a sensitive and creative interpreter, Ms Nyro was in a class of one. Her versions of Walk On By, On The Roof, Come Get These Memories, Dedicated To The One I Love, Stevie Wonder’s Creepin’ and Smokey Robinson’s Sexy Mama and Ooh Baby Baby all refreshed parts that the originals, for all their undoubted qualities, didn’t know existed. Abetted and enhanced by the richly complementary lungs of Patti Labelle, her 1971 covers album, Gonna Take A Miracle, was as good as that tarnished genre gets, most notably on The Bells – a gorgeous revival of The Originals’ hit, co-authored by Marvin Gaye – and this tearjerking title track, a minor 1965 charter for The Royalettes and another plaintive lament liable to reduce grown men to gibbering, simpering wrecks. White girls really can sing the blues.
2. I’m So Proud/Ooh Baby Baby/La La La Means I Love You – Todd Rundgren
This medley from A Wizard, A True Star lacks nothing in sweet soul chutzpah. Paying homage to Curtis, Smokey and Thom Bell in turn, it would have been incongruous on an album full of psychedelic allsorts had it not been preceded in the running order by Todd’s own delicious Sometimes I Don’t Know What To Feel. Fairly faithful renditions rather than dramatic reinterpretations, albeit with a synthesised twist, all three showcase a sorely underrated voice that knows no bounds and offers even fewer hints of its owner’s white suburban roots.
3. When You Walk In The Room – Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band
Available only on bootleg, this take on the Jackie De Shannon-penned Searchers gem retains the jangly, McGuinn-inspiring Mike Pender guitar intro while adding further layers in the shape of The Boss’s urgent vocals, a suitably slower pace and a more romantic and resonant outlook.
4. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – Them
When they were living in Woodstock, the way his then-wife Janet “Brown-Eyed Girl” Planet tells it, Van Morrison spent an unhealthy amount of time outside Bob Dylan’s nearby home but was too intimidated to knock at the door. “Van fully intended to become Dylan’s best friend, but the whole time we were there they never met,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1998. “Every time we’d drive past Dylan’s house – Van didn’t drive, I did – Van would just stare wistfully out the window at the gravel road leading to Dylan’s place. He thought Dylan was the only contemporary worthy of his attention. But back then, Bob just wasn’t interested in him.” The two would eventually join forces for a BBC documentary, and share a stage in The Last Waltz, but their most meaningful and lasting connection came via this song, as proud and daring a Dylan cover as any before or since. The one area in which Van inarguably has the edge is his singing, and never did he emphasise this as convincingly as he does here.
5. Walk Away Renee – Rickie Lee Jones
How do you cover a cover? Just like this. The Left Banke posted the original poppy 1966 hit, whereupon The Four Tops, according to received wisdom, soon cut the definitive version, but it took a woman to fully unwrap the bittersweetness, not to mention the ambivalent sexuality. Extracted from her largely-live 1983 album, Girl At Her Volcano, Rickie pulls it down a rhythmic notch, takes on Levi Stubbs and wins.
6. Betcha By Golly, Wow – Prince
The Stylistics’ run of luxuriant Philly hits in the 1970s owed much to Russell Thompkins Jr’s falsetto, still more to Thom Bell’s songs and lush production, though they were never better than on Bacharach and David’s You’ll Never Get To Heaven (If You Break My Heart). This 1971 charter occupied the same sublime terrain but Thompkins’ tenor was a Nutrasweet too far for some, allowing The Artist Then Known As Squiggle to cap it on his cruelly-neglected 1996 triple-CD, Emancipation. Ironically, on the same recording’s regrettable attempt at La-La Means I Love You, he actually out-shrieks Thompkins, but this sumptuous reading amply compensates.
7. Alabama Song (Whisky Bar) – The Doors
Kurt Weill wasn’t half a clever bustard, cloaking Bertolt Brecht’s prickly subjects in tunes of purest gold, which perhaps explains why most of the more individualistic postwar singers have had a dart at his enduring Weimar Republican ditties. Bobby Darin and Sting (live) both pulled off vivid stabs at Mack the Knife, while Lost in the Stars – The Music of Kurt Weill featured Lou Reed’s cracking September Song and Stan Ridgway’s typically idiosyncratic Cannon Song. Best of the lot, though, remains this drinking song from The Doors’ swaggering debut, wherein Ray Manzarek’s jaunty fairground-organ accompaniment and John Densmore’s military drumming prove the perfect foil for Jim Morrison’s worldly, understated vocals. “Oh show me the way to the next whisky bar…” – the boy knew all too well whereof he sang.
8. Somewhere – Tom Waits
Has any musical invited so many interpretations by rock royalty as West Side Story? Yes and Todd Rundgren both proffered adventurous and convincing re-reads of Something’s Coming, but Uncle Tom takes the honours with this rare dive into the treacherous waters of melancholy. A gravel-paved road to romantic Utopia that can be relied upon to fill the most resistant throat with a brick-sized lump.
9. Take Me To The River – Talking Heads
Al Green wrote and performed it first, and Springsteen sneaked a snaky verse into a swaggering version of Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out on his rousing 2000 E Street Band reunion album, Live in New York City, but the Heads’ first UK hit is the killer, still as fresh, funky and irreverent now as it was three decades ago.
10. Young, Gifted And Black – Bob and Marcia
Nina Simone penned and recorded this peerless rallying-cry at the height of the Civil Rights movement, but the jauntier, reggaefied reinvention by the Jamaican duo – which, perversely, became a skinhead anthem as it climbed the UK charts in 1970 – contained the one element Nina’s statelier rendition omitted: joy. Sacrilegious as it may be, the instrumental B-side, piano to the fore, stands testimony to the sheer universal melodicism of it all.
MENTIONED IN DISPATCHES
Turn, Turn, Turn – The Byrds
Mama Told Me Not To Come – Three Dog Night
Stoney End – Barbra Streisand
Say You Don’t Mind – Colin Blunstone
So You Wanna Be A Rock’n’Roll Star – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
Sexy Mama – Laura Nyro
The Fever – Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes
Because The Night – Patti Smith
Don’t Do It – The Band
We Can Work It Out – Stevie Wonder
Go Now – The Moody Blues
(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman – Aretha Franklin
In A Silent Way – Weather Report
Sail On Sailor – Man
Beyond The Sea – Bobby Darin
Light My Fire – Jose Feliciano
California Dreamin’ – Jose Feliciano
