‘Cover Me’ salutes songs that didn’t remain the same
Otis Redding knew he had surrendered any claim to “Respect” the minute he heard Aretha Franklin’s version.
“Ain’t no longer my song — from now on, it belongs to her,” he once told Jerry Wexler, the man who had reinvigorated Franklin’s career by signing her to Atlantic Records.
Redding was smiling when he said it. Juiced by horns, Franklin’s sisters on backup vocals and an exuberant arrangement by Alabama’s legendary Muscle Shoals musicians — Franklin anchoring the band on piano and tossing in the famous “R-E-SP-E-C-T” line on the spot — the Detroit-born singer imbued true gospel power into Redding’s plea for spousal understanding, transforming “Respect” into a racial and generational anthem that reverberates well past its release in 1967’s riot-tossed Summer of Love.
When the Queen of Soul died this past summer, none of her many other hit songs seemed to sum up her regal, monumental career quite so well.
Done right, a cover song can change the world.
“A good cover is something that brings something of the performing artist to that song,” explains Ray Padgett, author of “Cover Me.” “I always say the worst cover of all time is a tie between every cover that doesn’t change a note.”
The term “cover song” is a holdover from a (barely) less scrupulous age. In ours, covers are ubiquitous. But in the middle of the past century, the jobs of “singer” and “songwriter” rarely if ever combined in the same artist. When a song became a hit for one record company, its shameless rivals would rush their own version into production, often going so far as to strategically ensure their copycat covered up the original on store shelves.
With the dawn of rock ’n’ roll, top artists such as the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Beatles — all of whom got their start by playing other people’s songs to one degree or another — made performing their own material a mark of artistic maturity, which quickly became the industry standard. Even before that, many fans recoiled from the unseemly impression left by covers such as Pat Boone’s “Tutti Frutti,” whose version stripped most if not all of the excitement from Little Richard’s original, and, more problematically, any traces of the singer’s African-American identity.
Within the rather staid environment of ’50s pop music, it was not the more established Boone but upstart Elvis Presley who emerged as the central figure in this cultural shift surrounding cover songs. One of Elvis’ first, and biggest, hits was “Hound Dog,” written by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller and originally recorded by onetime Houstonian Big Mama Thornton.
Rather than Thornton’s “deadly blues” version, however, the future King of Rock ’n’ Roll adopted the uptempo performance style he showcased on national TV — infamously serenading a basset hound to promote the single on Steve Allen’s show — from a Las Vegas show band called Freddie Bell and the Bellboys.
“My argument is Elvis marks the transition point when cover songs became a genre unto themselves,” Padgett explains. The fact that Presley prospered from “Hound Dog” while Thornton would never have another hit even close to its stature “is an indictment of the system as much as anything,” he writes.
“I thought (the song) introduces a lot of the themes that come up with covers again and again: ‘How much can you change a song and still have it be recognizable?’; ‘Are you allowed to change the lyrics?’,” Padgett adds. “And of course various forms of appropriation.”
In detailing 20 examples of artists singing someone else’s songs, for better or worse (but mostly better), “Cover Me” provides a fascinating recent history of America’s pop-music industry, in all of its chicanery and complexity. “A lot of the covers I write about are, in some sense, the music business correcting its failings in the past,” Padgett says.
Lavishly illustrated by vintage photos, 45 and LP covers, and the records themselves, “Cover Me” is an outgrowth of his thriving 11-year-old website, covermesongs.com. He says the idea came to him in college when he heard ’60s soul singer Billy Stewart’s uptempo version of “Summertime” on Bob Dylan’s satellite-radio program “Theme Time Radio Hour,” a radical departure from the sluggish arrangement normally associated with George Gershwin’s pop standard.
“It was fast, it had scatting and drum solos and false endings and soul belting,” Padgett recalls. “I’m recognizing the lyrics, but everything else is unfamiliar. I’m thinking to myself, ‘I literally didn’t know you could do this with a song.’ I didn’t know you were allowed to change a song this dramatically; it had never occurred to me.”
As for his book, “one thing I like about (it) is that cover songs touch on all these different music-business trends that are much wider than cover songs, but (covers) have their tentacles in everything,” says Padgett, a senior music publicist for Shore Fire Media.
Featuring original interviews with hit-cover alumni including Devo (“Satisfaction”); The Who (“Summertime Blues”); and Weird Al Yankovic (parodies and covers are “cousins of each other,” Padgett says), “Cover Me” is a gold mine for music-trivia lovers. Padgett delves deep into the backstories of hit songs such as “Midnight Train to Georgia” (original title: “Midnight Plane to Houston”); “Unchained Melody” (which debuted in the 1955 prison flick “Unchained”); or “I Will Always Love You” (the long a cappella introduction to Whitney Houston’s version was Kevin Costner’s idea).
Seeking respect from Bay Area peers the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival came up with the extended free-form “jam” section it attached to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” long before even deciding to cover the Marvin Gaye song. The success of the band’s take on Rev. Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” so unnerved David Byrne that he resolved Talking Heads would never again record another cover.
“Killing Me Softly With His Song,” meanwhile, was a hit cover twice: first for Roberta Flack and nearly 25 years later for the Fugees. The rappers were forced to spend hours in the studio after Lauryn Hill changed a lyric to “killing the sound boy.” To be classified as “derivative,” which requires permission from the original songwriter (and was denied in this case), a true cover must be word for word.
Perhaps the craziest chapter in “Cover Me” has a strong regional angle to boot: the curious case of the Gourds’ cover of Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice.” Kevin Russell, one of two frontmen for the Austin-based backwoods bohemians, debuted his version as a lark at a friend’s birthday party (his sister was a big rap fan), and it quickly became a footstomping closer at Gourds shows. Eventually they recorded it, somewhat reluctantly, and released it on an EP with some live tracks and a couple of other covers.
Then their label went bankrupt, and the EP went out of print. And just as the Gourds were doing all they could to avoid becoming known as “those Americana dudes who do ‘Gin and Juice,’ ” their cover wound up on Napster, the mushrooming file-sharing service that was rapidly upending many preexisting notions about the music industry. It went viral before hardly anyone even understood what the newly minted term meant.
But instead of at the very least reaping a PR boon out of the song’s success, the Gourds’ cover was mistakenly attributed to Vermontbased jam band Phish. Subsequent uploads of the same song showed up miscredited to artists ranging from Blues Traveler to Garth Brooks. (For his part, Snoop loved it.) Though the Gourds ultimately became quite successful, especially in the Southwest, the “Gin and Juice” affair cast a shadow of what might have been across the rest of their career.
“Again, we’re talking about cover songs reaching into all the different various tentacles of the music business,” Padgett says. “(This) overlaps in such an interesting way with this sudden Wild West of digital music, where this band has a massive hit with a song they recorded but no one knows it’s by them.
“Years later, they’re still so conflicted about it,” he adds. “That was one of the first chapters I wrote, and I still think it’s one of my favorites.”