Pretty good for aWhite Boy.
I thought he was blind for a long time.
So did I XD
Bob Dylan
I’ll bet everyone already knows what song this is.
You’ll have to ignore the video, that’s not him, but the song is. For the rest of you, that still never knew this was Bob singing, well, I had one really bad video of it, but lost it so you’ll have to go looking yourself. It appeared to be a cell phone video from a 2007 concert.
I knew what song that’d be.
In the pre-internet days of the early '90’s, when these guys had fallen off everyone’s radar, I would’ve never guessed the singer was an adult male from California.
Not a woman and not white. Probably my favorite rendition of the song.
Dumbledore sang Macarthur Park. I mean, really?
Not black.
I still am struck by the uncanny resemblance between Peter Gabriel 's and Phil Collins vocals during the transitional albums where one left and the other took over. I still hav to do a double check to know for sure who’s singing, And to think that Colins still ended up singer after over 400 possibles were auditioned.
I didn’t think it was Anne Murray singing the song, but his voice was such that I thought he was a woman, and in my minds eye, that woman looked like Anne Murray or a butchier Olivia Newton John. I have no idea why, but that’s the mental image I had of the Air Supply singer. I was very surprised when I saw that it was a short, fuzzy guy like Leo Sayer.
Re: NeverEnding Story
In all fairness, the background vocalist doing the “aaah-aaah-aaahs” is a woman which really enhances the effect. Oh, and for that song, in my mind’s eye the singer was an adult woman who looked like Noah Hathaway, who played Atreyu. BTW - when the movie came out, we somehow saw it in a class setting and Atreyu’s first appearance caused a huge debate about whether or not Atreyu was a boy or a girl until the dialog cleared it up.
I didn’t realize for a long time that this was an Aerosmith song, and after hearing a DJ attribute it to Aerosmith I thought “Huh, I didn’t know Aerosmith used to have someone other than Steven Tyler as their singer.” No, that is him! I guess on Aerosmith’s first album he just hadn’t developed his characteristic Steven Tyler-y vocal mannerisms yet.
Oh, I didn’t know that song was by Bronski Beat. I never really paid attention before, I guess. I think Bronski Beat is the reason that, like someone else up-thread, I expected the singer from Yaz to be a guy. Initially, only having heard them at school dances and not even knowing the name of the band, I had a mental picture of some guy who would look right at home in Erasure or Bronski Beat, rather than Alison Moyet. My mistake was dispelled as soon as I found out who they were, so it didn’t feel as big a surprise as seeing Limahl sing “NeverEnding Story” for the first time on YouTube.
It’s odd you mentioned that. To me, that’s always been a quintessential Aerosmith song. I think Steven really nails all his mannerisms in that song without going overboard on them. OTOH, I have a friend who absolutely cannot stand anything Aerosmith, yet Dream On is one of her favorite songs.
I was seven years old when this song was a hit, and I pictured the singer to be a man. I even remember picturing “his” face in my mind. Maybe 5 years later, I realized it was not a man.
On a semi-related note, I keep thinking Lindsey Buckingham is a girl’s name.
I’m not really familiar with Aerosmith other than the big hits, so it may be that Tyler’s vocals on “Dream On” resemble those on plenty of other Aerosmith songs. But thinking of their '90s hits I’d say maybe Tyler did start to go a bit overboard. His vocal mannerisms on later Aerosmith hits seems sort of exaggerated* compared to “Dream On”. Then again, there’s something to be said for having a clearly recognizable style!
*I’m afraid I don’t know enough about singing to describe this more precisely, but this live 1994 version of the song sounds obviously “Steven Tyler-y” to me in a way that the original 1973 version does not.
I think I’ve heard it rumored that it wasn’t even Tyler singing on “Dream On.”
I always compared Dream on to the rest of his catalog the same way one might compare (for example) Will Farrel on SNL to his movie career. Will was great on SNL, but then they took the funny things he did on SNL, the things people loved about him, extracted them and stretched them out into 90 minute movies. We all loved seeing Will jump around in his underwear for 35 seconds, but watching him do it for 20 minutes…not so much. So you take Dream On, you hear that scream that he does Dream OoOoOoOn…okay, we like that. But then you listen to a song like Livin On the Edge and think STFU already. (I still like that song, but I think that’s how some people feel). Make sense? A little? You’re not the first person I’ve heard say exactly that same thing (Hate Aerosmith, love Dream On), this is normally how what I think is going on when people say that. They took the mannerisms people latched onto as recognizable and exploited them, some people still liked the band, some people abandoned them. You could, in a sense, call it selling out.
That’s basically it, although to be clear I don’t hate Aerosmith. I don’t really have strong feelings about the band one way or another. I wouldn’t necessarily say “Dream On” is even the Aerosmith song I like the best, but it strikes me as different enough from their other big hits that I can see how someone could like “Dream On” but hate all the other Aerosmith hits.
I wouldn’t go that far, I’d just say that Tyler is guilty of sometimes hamming things up a bit too much. And that is to some extent a matter of taste – I could name singers I love (e.g. Eddie Vedder) who have been accused of overdoing it with the vocal “tricks” too.
If I were going to accuse Aerosmith of selling out, it would probably be for doing a Diane Warren-penned power ballad for the soundtrack of a Michael Bay movie. 
But that’s not really a game I like to play; I mean, we’ve all got to make money somehow, and plenty of people have done worse things than sing cheesy songs for money.