YouTube's got a nice, even more bluegrassy live version available too.Īnother mean-spirited number, with Margo Timmins breathing menace and the rest of her band dumping grisly feedback on their blues. Earle's laid-back rendition is a case in point the groove feels good and mean, and that Southern drawl works better for sneering than the Liverpool accent. The Beatles loved their Carl Perkins, and their songs often work surprisingly well with a country twang. Not sure who the stiff male singer is, but he's got a good evil villain laugh. Paul's smirking parable about fame and favors is a natural fit for New York art hipsters. Village Voice writer Cristina's breathy come-on cozies up to lounge, flirts with disco, and bats its eyes at jazz and no wave - but irony, beautiful irony, is always her first love. (Their live version of "Help!" is also worth a look.) Meanwhile the band with all their instruments grin as if rejoicing in her pain and Richard looks past her like a be-sweatered zombie. Karen Carpenter's voice wrings every bit of longing out of "Ticket to Ride" and leaves it to shiver picturesquely on the winter landscape. She's a big animatronic tease, that mannequin. The Beatles have become such repackaged and recycled products at this point that YMO's reimagining of "Day Tripper" as ersatz electronic muzak almost seems more the real thing than the original. But if you can make a harmonica sound that right, getting through "there's no time for fussing and fighting my friend" must seem like a cinch. He grabs the lyrics with such authority that even their awkward doofiness seems commanding. Definitely one of those tracks where you can hear the performer thinking loudly, "Yeeeeaaaah, man." But hey, the Beatles were hippies too.ĭionne Warwick has a nice version of this, but Wonder's still seems like the definitive take. Jeff Beck mashes up a funk strut, stinging blues licks, and a voice box to turn the Beatle tune into mismatched easy-listening fusion. Redding's "Day Tripper" is one of my all-time favorite performances of anything ever, but since I already put it on a list a couple weeks back, I figured I'd embed his also quite wonderful live performance of "A Hard Day's Night." Unlike the Beatles, he actually does sound like he's putting his back into it so exhausted by his own soul workout that he's got to let the band finish some of his lines for him. Yes buries the simple tune of "Every Little Thing" under ridiculous prog arrangements as the song's celebratory hopes for eternal happiness lurch gloriously toward self-parody and squiggly keyboards. Philips' Beatles cover benefits from its restraint, but excess isn't always a bad thing. The Beatles admired her version enough to bring her out to perform in England. Paul sounds a little stiff and a little saccharine on the original, but Phillips rectifies those lapses, singing with such grace that her confidence sounds like wisdom rather than a jingle. This one is great, though replacing the band with a simple guitar backing gives Winehouse's voice room to sell the song. There are some dreadful soul/jazz versions of Lennon-McCartney - Sarah Vaughan's Beatles tribute is worse than you'd think anything by Sarah Vaughan could possibly be. Robbed of every iota of aggressiveness, the song actually becomes creepier the big beat of teen consummation sliding toward a barren, looming twee. Wray turns cheer to menace Daniel Johnston goes the other way around and replaces Paul's lascivious Little-Richard "oooo" with naif vulnerability. ![]() Neanderthal garage rocker Link Wray takes a smiling, happy early Beatles single, clubs it with an ax, and splits it open to reveal the grease and switchblades in its interior.ĭaniel Johnston, "I Saw Her Standing There" These are the best ones I could find, though. So, I won't say that the songs below are the 30 best Beatles covers, because I don't think anyone has listened to, or even could listen to, all the Beatles covers. But it doesn't take long poking around YouTube to figure out that even these exercises in obsessive uber-completeness are the tip of an enormous iceberg. ![]() ![]() Both Wikipedia and the Covers Project have lists that can give you some sense of the extent to which everyone and their mother and their poodle is out there covering the Beatles. If the Beatles fell out of bed and jangled a nearby guitar, you can pretty much bet that there is a Britpop, a rock, a soul and a country cover of that random jangle. Due to massive popularity, critical bona fides and more massive popularity, the Beatles are probably the most covered rock band ever.
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