For ages, I thought “Machine Gun” by the Commodores was done by Billy Preston.
:smack:
Thank you.
He did write it. I think you can be forgiven though; until your post I had no idea that Three Dog Night did songs that weren’t covers.
For years I wondered who did a song I like. I didn’t know the name or the artist, but I could have sworn it was done by Bryan Adams.
Nope, just a few years ago I learned it’s called “The Breakup Song” by the Greg Kihn Band.
And this will sound silly, but for the longest time I always wondered if “Peace Train” was sung by Burgess Meredith. I mean, I was familiar with Cat Stevens, but for years had no idea he was the one who sang that song.
Another convincing entrant in the Elvis ripoff stakes was Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe”.
For years I assumed the mid70s hit “Right Back Where We Started From” was by the Captain and Tenille. It’s a bouncy piano song with a female voice so you can see why I thought it. Turns out it wasn’t.
Going back to the OP, the Hollies are probably the hardest band in history to remember which are their songs. They’ve lasted an amazingly long time. They were formed in 1962 and are still touring and recording (but no longer charting) with two of the musicians who aren’t quite original members but who joined in 1963. During that time they’ve managed to sound like everybody else who ever slightly influenced them. It would be easy to dismiss them as copycats with no original ideas of their own, but the fact is that they are a good band with a lot of interesting hits which don’t all fit in any easily remembered genre.
Thanks so much. This makes me feel a little less an idiot.
Going back to post #13, what you’ve got to remember is that Kenny Rogers wasn’t at all the grizzled old country star he is today when that song came out. Here’s a clip from The Smothers Brothers Show with him and his band doing the song:
You can see from the way the show has set up the stage and added special effects what image they want to give for them. The band in this clip has a post-British-Invasion, pre-Acid-Rock look. Everybody’s hair is modishly long, the clothes are consciously hip (for that time), and both the music and the special effects are implying that everybody associated with the band and the show had just dropped some acid.
Kenny Rogers has had a weird musical history:
He did doo-wop, then jazz, then folk, then acid rock, then a long stretch in middle-of-the-road country, then jazz again, then country versions of Christmas and gospel songs.
Continuing with the Hollies: When I heard “Look Through Any Window” I thought it was The Beatles.
For me it’s the Go-Betweens “Streets Of Your Town”. I only knew it from the radio and always thought it was by Prefab Sprout. Years after first hearing the song, a coworker lent me “16 Lovers Lane”, and I saw my mistake.
I thought that “Lightning Strikes” by Lou Christie was by the Four Seasons or at least a Frankie Valli solo. I think the switch to falsetto fooled me.
You think so? Back in the day it was generally referred to as “the best song Bob Dylan never did.”
My entry: “Rescue Me”, which I only recently learned was not by Aretha Franklin, but Fontella Bass.
I also used to think that the Byrds’ version of “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” was by the Grateful Dead, but that was long ago. (I think it was the pedal steel that fooled me.)
cjepson, your thing about “Stuck in the Middle with You” and not-Dylan helped me remember a Not Sousa March
I consistently have trouble remembering which band did which song in the combined catalogs of Foreigner and Journey. It totally doesn’t help that the two bands both rock, and have frequently toured together and presumably cover each other’s songs in such concerts.
Can you group this list of songs by band? Unfortunately in this case, YouTube videos like this always label the artist, but see how you do if you close your eyes after clicking.
“Cold As Ice”
“Separate Ways”
“Don’t Stop Believin’”
“Juke Box Hero”
“Urgent”
“I Want To Know What Love Is”
“Wheel In The Sky”
“Any Way You Want It”
What? No mention of Neil Young’s “A Horse With No Name?”
But Neil Young’s horse is named Crazy. I thought everybody knew that. So there’s no way he’d ever sing about a “horse with no name”.
Side-track: Richard III might have had a name with no horse. 