What’s the shortest time between the chart debut of an original song, and the chart debut of the first cover version of the same song, in the rock era? (sorry, I was channeling Casey Kasem there for a moment)
Chart debut means first appearance in the charts of any country. The cover version need not necessarily chart in the same country to count.
As an example, Do They Know It’s Christmas by Band Aid debuted in the UK charts in December 1984, and was then covered by Band Aid 2 in December 1989. Five years. But I’m sure you Dopers can do better.
I’m not sure if this counts as a cover or not, but the English and German versions of Der Kommissar by After the Fire and Falco were within a year of each other, IIRC.
Seems to me I remember an old SD column where Cecil talked about various other groups in the 60’s doing covers of Bob Dylan’s “Mr Tambourine Man” but couldn’t release them because Bob hadn’t even released the original yet.
I got a “Could not find” error message, otherwise this would have been first. But it’s still relevant.
There are millions of better examples than that. For instance, the most successful is probably “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” which was a #2 hit for Gladys Knight and the Pips in 1967 and a #1 hit for Marvin Gaye in 1968. And neither one was the original.
Depending on what you call the beginning of the rock era, it was not uncommon in the late 1950s for artists to cover other records as soon as they heard a recording. There have been as many as five different versions of a song in the Top 40 at the same time!
Many of these were white covers of black originals, which may or may not have made the regular top 100 charts. Here’s a famous one: “Long Tall Sally.” Little Richard’s version hit the charts on April 7, 1956 and stayed there for 12 weeks. Pat Boone had his on the charts by April 28, 1956 for a run of nine weeks. Amazingly, for the day, Little Richard hit a high of #6 and Boone’s never got over #8.
I’m not sure how many months elapsed between release dates, but Proud Mary was released by both Creedence Clearwater Revival and Ike & Tina Turner in 1969.
Something like -20 some years. Simon and Garfunkle’s “Red Rubber Ball”. Cyrkle managed to release Simon And Garfukle’s song before S&G and S&G’s version wasn’t released until the early 80s’
I’m not sure if this qualifies because I don’t know if either one ever charted, but, recently, The Bangles released their version of “Tear Off Your Own Head” about one year after Elvis Costello’s original came out.
I don’t know of any evidence that Simon ever planned to put these out as S&G tunes.
Ironically, though, the third of the Simon/Woodley songs, “Cloudy,” appeared on the Cyrkle album in 1966 before it appeared on the Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, & Thyme S&G album, although neither released it as a single.
Jimi Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower” was actually released before Dylan’s original version. Dylan really wanted to stick it to his label that month, and at the time that was his only way of doing it.
I was thinking of that example, but didn’t know when Hendrix took it to the charts. Dylan debuted it on 1/27/68. I wasn’t sure if it was before or shortly after Hendrix did it.