While doing fake internet research for my last post I stumbled across two videos that were too good not to share, but I didn't have any place to casually insert them. So here they are.
First we have Otis Redding doing his thaaang on British television when... oh, hi there, Eric Burden! And from that point to the end of the video there is nothing else awesomer. Sweet percussion, horn sections, and a whole truckload of gyratin'. NOTHING.
And then there's this. It requires precisely zero explanation. Just make sure you wait for the printer.
First of all I apologize for the video-heaviness of this post. Just give it a second to load up or crash your browser or do whatever it is it's going to do.
Now, this is about cover songs. But this is about cover songs you may not have known were cover songs. Or maybe you did know they were cover songs and you were just keeping it a secret. Either way, I hope you enjoy this mass of information I'm suddenly heaping upon you.
Cover songs! Popular ones! From the 1960s!
When there weren't yet very many songs to cover!
"Twist And Shout"
The Beatles were so good at songwriting that people forget about their early-year cover songs. And they performed those cover songs so well that people forget that they were cover songs in the first place. Take "Twist And Shout." Listen to John Lennon lose his mind and lose his vocal chords. The story goes he was sick as a dog, but the vocals absolutely needed to be laid down. So Lennon guzzled a carton of milk and tore through the track in one take. Or something like that. Another version I heard describes how he screamed the words while lying on his back. Milk was still involved. Who knows how much of that is true. Regardless, the song is now -- and forever will be -- a Beatles song, despite the fact that it's a hand-me-down.
The Isley Brothers had taken "Twist And Shout" to #17 on the charts in 1962, and while a lot of people actually do recognize that the Isley Brothers recorded the song a year before the Beatles did, not too many people know that a year before that a little-known group called the Top Notes (guided by a young producer named Phil Spector) first recorded the song. The Top Notes' 1961 version, titled "Shake It Up, Baby", is an agitated little rock number and sounds absolutely foreign next to the Isleys and the Beatles. In fact, the song's co-writer, Bert Russell, felt Spector screwed the whole thing up and decided to produce the song himself with the Isley Brothers. Spector would later become a world-famous producer and thus had the last laugh, but now he's in prison, so maybe not.
"Land Of A Thousand Dances"
If you don't recognize the title, you definitely recognize the NA-NA-NA-NA-NAs. And Wilson Pickett absolutely crushes it, shoving so much soul and swag and funk into your ears that if the song was a couple minutes longer your head would very literally explode from awesomeness. Pickett's tune peaked at #6 on the US charts in 1966, but DID YOU KNOW the song was a moderate hit the year before for a peculiar little band called Cannibal & The Headhunters.
The Headhunters came from east LA, which automatically made them tougher than any of the other bands in the mid-1960s. They gave themselves individual nicknames like Scar and Yo-Yo and Rabbit and Cannibal. And they recorded their creepy version of "Land Of A Thousand Dances" a year before Pickett decided to turn it into something less unsettling.
But, like the Isley Brothers and "Twist And Shout," "Land Of A Thousand Dances" is often attributed to the Headhunters and not to its true originator. R&B singer Chris Kenner wrote and recorded the song in 1962. As you listen you'll notice two things: 1) Kenner's got soooul, and 2) no NA-NAs. Cannibal & The Headhunters added the NA-NAs because apparently somebody along the way forgot how the song went. It turned out to be the most endearing part of the song, and that's why Wilson Pickett kept it when he recorded his version, and that's why up until you started reading this blog you thought it was simply called the NA-NA song.
"Respect"
Quick, what song do you think of when I say Aretha Franklin? You think of "Respect" because that is her signature song and also because I used the song title as the header. But yeah, "Respect," not "Freeway Of Love." However, lemme tell you about a fellow named Otis Redding.
Otis Redding's Wikipedia page is full of fascinating material, but basically it comes down to Redding being an intense man of music. Not only was he a prolific songwriter, his live shows were soul-tastic. You know him for "Dock of the Bay" (which became his only #1 song, and only after he died in a plane crash, because the universe hated Otis Redding), but he also penned and recorded a funky little ditty in 1965 called "Respect." That song went to #4 on the R&B Singles chart and up to #35 on the plain old white people music chart. In 1967 the song was presented to Aretha Franklin (with tweaked lyrics) and she recorded the "Respect" you know and love today.
Is is ironic, then, that Otis gets no "respect" for writing a song called "Respect"?
I once listened to a recorded live performance of Otis Redding performing "Respect." With an audible shrug he talked about how Aretha had taken the song from him, and that he, in this very performance, was going to take it back. And then he commenced to sing the holy living soul-funkin' crap out of "Respect." But he could never really take the song back because Aretha had turned it from a juicy soulful romp into a palpable soul-pop nugget. And nothing is more delicious than soul-pop nuggets.
"House of the Rising Sun"
This is one of the most popular songs from the 1960s. You know it. I know it. And we both sound awful when we try to sing along. But you've probably gathered at this point that The Animals were not the first to record it.
You can find "House of the Rising Sun" on Bob Dylan's self-titled 1962 debut album. It's all mournful and warbly and folky, and with good reason because Dylan's version was heavily influenced by New York folk legend Dave Van Ronk. Here is a clip from the excellent documentary No Direction Home regarding the song.
Though Van Ronk's version would not appear on a record until 1964, he had been performing his arrangement of the song for years. And guess what? Though Van Ronk arranged the song into the familiar tune we know today, he wasn't the one who originally wrote it. In fact, nobody knows for sure where "House of the Rising Sun" came from because it is OLD. Van Ronk picked it up from somebody in the 1950s, who had picked it up from a Kentucky girl on a 1930s field recording, who had learned it from God knows where, and so on and so on until one day somebody discovers the lyrics on the other side of the Rosetta Stone.
"Turn! Turn! Turn!"
The Byrds were folk-rock staples in the late 1960s, pumping out hit after hit that were really actually electric-guitar'd Bob Dylan covers. I'm not even joking. In 1965, after recording and releasing two consecutive Dylan-cover singles, the band instead turned to a Pete Seeger song. "Turn! Turn! Turn!" was something Seeger had arranged in 1959 and was recorded by a few other folkies in the following years. A group called the Limelighters recorded the song in 1962 and left quite an impression with the band's back-up guitarist, a fellow named Roger McGuinn. McGuinn would rearrange the song for Judy Collins in 1963, and then again for himself and his own band, The Byrds, in 1965.
But where had Pete Seeger glommed those lyrics? If you were good at Bible Quiz you would know the answer already. Turn with us, in your King James Bible, to Ecclesiastes Chapter 3, starting from verse 1. Read until you get to the words "worketh" and "laboureth" because those aren't in the song. Nobody is one-hundred percent sure who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, but there's a pretty good chance it was King Solomon. I don't know if he gets royalties or not.
