Whatever happened to ubiquitous cover versions?

Cafe Society
1

In the 60’s, it was commonplace for contemporary hit songs to be covered by other recording artists. I’m sure the statistics are out there to be googled, but offhand I’d say there’s at least a hundred different recordings of Yesterday and Satisfaction (just to name two) that were made between 1965-1975.

Nowadays, of course, there are still cover versions, but there is almost always a waiting period of several years between when the hit was released and the cover version came out, unlike the sixties, where the time spread could be a matter of weeks. In addition, there is nowhere near the proliferation of different versions of the same song like there was in the ‘old days’ (yikes!).

What happened? Is it too expensive to pay the rights to record the cover version of a song nowadays to make it worthwhile? Or what? It sure the heck is easier to use someone else’s material than to compose an original. Wot’s uh, the deal?

2

Because the audience prefers to hear the original artist. Once that is a hit, people aren’t interested in other versions.

People don’t buy (or, more accurately, the record companies don’t think they’ll buy) covers of recent songs. Now, you can sometimes sneak in a version early by taking a good, or obscure song from an existing artist, but it’s rare that anyone is going to bother to record a cover version of a current tune, since they’re very likely to lose out to the original.

Over time, the original is forgotten and a group can record a cover successfully (e.g., the recent “Big Yellow Taxi,” which is much superior to the verion by The Neighborhood, though not quite as good as Joni Mitchell’s original).

3

The most recent song I can think of that I’ve heard a cover of is Baby Hit Me One More Time :eek:.

But as far as ubiquity in recent music, or at least not oldies or classic rock station, music goes, you can’t really beat How Soon is Now. I’ve heard at least 4 covers of it and there are at least 2 more out there.

4

I think a lot of the incentive to produce covers has gone away.

E.g., a white artist covering a song recorded by a black artist. Pat Boone does Little Richard and all that. Certainly not going to miss that reason.

Or the fact that most major singers didn’t write their own material (or have it written specifically for them). So Dean Martin walks into a studio and 4 hours later there’s 12 tracks laid down of Other People’s Hits. Such cover albums used to be made in huge numbers since they were so cheap to produce and the singers had a builtin fan base that automatically bought whatever crap thay spewed forth.

There used to be a lot of radio stations, “adult contemporary”-ish, that played just watered down covers of pop tunes. “Look what they’ve done to my song” as performed by Pete Fontaine is an unfortunately memorable example. Now, such light pop stations have Celine Dion and the ilk that they can play.

Even Muzak ™ has given up remaking pop tunes, they play the originals now.

5

At least a hundred covers of Yesterday? The number of covers passed 2000 several years ago and is probably at 3000 by now. I can’t find an exact number with a quick Google, although I did see over 2500 on one site.

Although the other posters got the basics, a few more reasons apply.

Throughout the history of popular music, much of the truly innovative work would appear first from small, even tiny, record labels who were willing to take chances that the majors weren’t. The problem would always be that these small companies didn’t have the distribution strength to get their records out everywhere. Although white artists in the 50s routinely made “safe” versions of songs by black artists, many of the covers were almost duplicates of the originals. It was a way of getting good music out to the public who would never have heard it otherwise.

Additionally, songs as songs were more important then. If a good song came along, you recorded it. And the public didn’t care much who the singer was. There were times in the 50s when five versions of the same song hit the Top 40.

That changed somewhat in the 60s, when the singer/songwriter and songwriting band came along. But not completely. Everybody who recognized a good song covered the good songwriters, and covers of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, and the other greats appeared on everybody else’s albums, especially those people who happened to be sleeping with them at the time. And in the 1960s that apparently was everybody.

Then there was Motown. Motown was a throwback to the old ways, with their writer/producers who churned out songs and gave them to their individual stable of artists - and stole them from the other writers’ stables. You’ll find that many Motown hits had earlier versions by other Motown groups, but with inferior productions that didn’t quite work. The most famous is “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

Written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, it was first recorded by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles but not released until put onto a later album. Then the Isley Brothers recorded it, but Motown never released that version either. Then Marvin Gaye recorded his superhit version - and they buried that as well.

It wasn’t until Gladys Knight and the Pips took the song to number two in late 1967 in yet another totally different version that anybody at Motown realized that the song might have some real value. After letting a year go by, they put out Gaye’s version and had one of their biggest hits ever.

And they didn’t stop there. Whitfield had two other of his groups - the Temptations and the Undisputed Truth - also record the song.

There really aren’t any production factories like Motown around any more.

A related reason for covers in the 60s was the difficulties of getting records distributed across the Atlantic. All the British Invasion groups from the Beatles on down loved the odd little 45s that their obsessive selves managed to get their hands on but which never got formal air play in the U.K. And so a million songs from “Chains” to “Diddy-Wah-Diddy” are covers of obscure U.S. songs and b-sides.

Same thing in reverse. American producers would hear a British song and create a cover band to do it in America before it could get distributed, the most famous being the Shadows of Knight and their note-for-note cover of Them’s “Gloria.”

That’s mostly not necessary any longer either.

Today bands cover songs just because they feel like it. And it doesn’t always take years to do so either. When you have the time and patience, go carefully through The Covers Project for more covers than you ever realized existed in this universe. And remember that it is a very partial, selective, and half-assed job of amassing them.

6

I think the real reason is, the singer/songwriter craze in the '60s linked songwriting with the notion of “integrity” and stigmatized the use of outside compositions. It had nothing to do with white versions of R&B songs being crappy (many of them weren’t), listeners preferring originals (most didn’t care), or innovation (singer/songwriters existed in profusion througout the 20th Century and were nothing new). It was merely a paradigm shift of the sort that occurred when the reign of traditional pop ended and rock ‘n’ roll began. Unfortunately, people tend to like what they know and hate what they don’t understand, so many listeners are quick to dismiss the music from the days of Tin Pan Alley and professional songsmiths, or from before the rock ‘n’ roll era, and make ignorant (but memorable) remarks like Lennon’s claim that, “Before Elvis, there was nothing.”

Ironically, the trend toward artists composing their own material led to a great dumbing-down in addition to some fine music. Few people can truly write, sing, produce and perform their own material and be tops in every area, and so there has been a gradual lowering of expectations. The art of arranging has suffered a steep decline, melodies have flattened or disappeared, and the world of professional music makers is much less “professional” than it once was.

7

Isn’t Shania Twain’s “IT ONLY HURTS WHEN I BREATH” a cover of someone else’s recently released song? I may be wrong, I don’t follow music closely, but it seems like I have heard two versions recently.

8

LiveBetter is closest, I think. In the early days of pop music, the model was very different: there were singers, and there were songwriters. The twain rarely, rarely met. Singers chose from a wide library of popular songs to “interpret”–the concept of “cover” didn’t really exist then. A song was like a play script, a singer was like a stage actor. You wouldn’t say Kevin Kline is “covering” Lawrence Olivier when he does Shakespeare in the Park, would you?

And then, as pointed out, the folkmusic boom of the fifties and sixties brought about a new creation: the “singer-songwriter.”

The days you’re talking about, when every singer who appeared on the Tonight Show covered a Beatles or Doors song, was the transitional period: singers from the old days were just choosing from the wider library of popular songs as they’d always done.

9

Argh. I hate hate hate this cover. :mad:

It’s Melissa Ethridge, and it’s a cover of a song by Greenwheel called “Breathe.” The original song was good stuff – kind of Matchbox 20ish, but still much better than her typical crap-assidy Cher-like over-singing.

Every time I hear her version, I just want to gag.

10

Wow, got so worked up over that song that I neglected to throw this in:

The last time I remember the same song done by two different artists on the charts at the same time was “How Can I Live” done by Leann Rimes and Trisha Yearwood. This was 1997ish.

I’m still not sure how this happened. Surely some dispute over who held the rights to the tune. Maybe a music scholar can shed some light.

11

I sorta agree. Actually, I didn’t like Melissa Ethridge’s version either, so I hate both versions that I heard. I do enjoy some of Shania’s stuff, but not this.

12

Other people probably don’t cover recent songs because they don’t have to. I’d say every half decent songs has been made into umpteen million different versions, from hip hop versions, to dance versions, to metal versions. Another artists can’t remake the song in their own style if every style has been used. But there are still covers going today for instance Joss Stone’s version of the White Stripes Fell in love with a girl aptly named Fell in love with a boy. Also people still want to see covers, a friend of mine would love to see a heavy metal band cover Britney Spears’ Toxic

13

I posted Billboard’s take on this in a prevoius thread.