Sample Chapter: Otis Redding

DRIVE MY CAR

Keynote: Beatles 2000 Conference Jyväskylä, Finland, June 2000 

LENNON AND MCCARTNEY songs now form so much a foundation of the pop firmament that we rarely question singers’ motives in singing them anymore. The mere familiarity of a Beatles song can gain your attention the way few other songwriters can, and there will be catalogues devoted to discographies of “Yesterday” by so many Paul Ankas and William Shatners. And yet few covers ever compete with the Beatles’ own recordings of their material. Why is this so? Even with singers as great as Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin, who all covered Beatle songs, few would rate even these singers’ versions above the original Beatle track.
Of course, the Beatles were themselves masters at covers, chiefly during their apprenticeship during their BBC appearances. I chronicled this as much as possible in Tell Me Why, and since 1988, we’ve added The Beatles at the Beeb, and the Royal Dane bootleg, The Complete BBC Sessions, to the source catalog. The Dane box is as detailed a map of their musical nervous system as you could sketch: here, the Beatles discovered their own ensemble and songwriting potential through a catalog of stylistic affections in other people’s songs. It is in no small measure of their accomplishment that we now think of songs like The Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout” and Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music” at least as much Beatles’ tracks as their writers’. These recordings do more than reveal new potential in the context of the emerging Beatles mythology: new young British voices adopting American sounds as building blocks of their emerging style, and of rock’s future. The best Beatle covers rival their originals by balancing an exquisite sense of tribute with poetic imitation: copying that goes far beyond imitation to uncover new layers of meaning, color, and texture in an otherwise static form. The Beatles took defining moments in rock and created tributes that became new defining moments.

In the same way that Elvis Presley made “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Down in the Alley” and “One Night of Sin” his own, even though he was covering songs written by Leiber and Stoller and others, the Beatles based their original sensibility on what would become rock standards. Their stylistic sensibility was born of a desire to bring their record collections, and rock history as they understood it, to life in their own hands and voices.
In fact, this turns out to be a constant in the Beatles’ career, long after they break up and go solo. The January 1969 Let It Be sessions often dissolved into cover songs as a way of killing time, searching for lost ensemble magic, and reviving shared passions. John Lennon’s 1975 Rock’n’Roll album is his adult return to the rock songs where he first recognized himself as a teenager. Widely dismissed as a mid-life aesthetic crisis at the time, it survives as a towering vocal legacy.
And Paul McCartney’s Run Devil Run (1999), is a cover record, with two originals (“Try Not to Cry” and “What It Is”) snuck in almost invisibly. It’s as though McCartney conceived his new songs as living in the same realm as the oldies he surrounds them with. One of the key stories to emerge from these sessions was the question one of the musicians asked of McCartney: “Who did that one [originally]?”, presuming McCartney had dug up another long-lost Eddie Cochran or Gene Vincent B-side, when in fact the number they were listening to had been written that same month. McCartney took pride in snowing his players into thinking that his original song was in fact a golden oldie. I think this points to the reverence he holds for the concept of covers as a formidable rock’n’roll form, a recording feat analogous to writing what we used to call a “standard,” or “fakebook” song for other singers to perform. And it also points up how intoxicated with rock history McCartney remains to this day.

The Beatles took defining moments in rock and created tributes that became new defining moments.

The first and best crop of Beatle covers, from the era’s finest soul singers, emerges while they were still writing and performing, and underscores a fundamental feature of their achievement. The soulsters in the ’60s and early ’70s I’ll explore here take on Beatle material in a much different way, both socially and aesthetically, than most of the others. The crossover from British pop band to black southern soul reverses the typical rock’n’roll prototype of white on black, and so assumes added weight when pursuing the issues of influence and originality in this music.
With Motown and the Memphis Stax label, the rise of American soul in this period was symbolically linked to the Civil Rights Movement. So in one immediate sense it made much more sense for soulsters to embrace British white music. But even for figures as powerful as Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and Ray Charles, it took an expansive creative ego to take on a Beatle number contemporaneously. At the time, this was the musical equivalent of climbing into the ring with Muhammad Ali. Automatically, listeners would compare the Beatle version of “Eleanor Rigby” with Ray Charles’ version, and the threat was that the comparison might not be favorable. Ray Charles, of course, held the status as an untouchable modern pop singer. Revered by Paul McCartney and every other sentient being, his covers had less reputation riding on them than did most of these others. But Charles is the exception.
In recordings like Wilson Pickett’s “Hey Jude,” Stevie Wonder’s “We Can Work It Out,” Al Green’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Got to Get You into My Life,” the very people who the Beatles once paid explicit homage to were paying homage to the Beatles. Specifically, this includes the Motown shop, where the Beatles learned from songwriters like Smokey Robinson, and the Brian Holland–Lamont Dozier–Edward Holland team; to the robust Stax ensemble sound of Booker T. and the M.G’s. It’s a well-known story that McCartney pushed his Abbey Road engineers towards a fuller bass sound after hearing Motown bassist James Jamerson. What’s not as well established is how these recording properties quickly became written properties in the Beatles own song-to-studio process.
These soul covers speak to that particularly ’60s ethic of ambition and pretension as a kind of aesthetic badge. And the fact that these soulsters didn’t completely fall on their faces says plenty about their innate talent and approach. In paying tribute back to the Beatles, these soul recordings cast some intriguing aesthetic shadows.

Why were so many soul singers drawn to Beatle material in this period? Why are soulsters the ones to make the most accomplished Beatle covers? What can the best of these covers tell us about the Beatles’ songwriting and production skills? Do any of these covers compete with the Beatles’ own original recordings? Inside this dialogue between originals and covers, a kind of large-scale call and response, defining moments and the salutes that become new defining moments, lies a story that traces many things: not least the peculiar British-American envy that turned into a style all its own.
The fact that these soulsters didn’t raise the stakes or challenge the Beatles’ own recording standards argues very strongly for the new aesthetic the Beatles were putting forward. Very few critics or musicologists would choose Wilson Pickett’s version of “Hey Jude,” or Stevie Wonder’s “We Can Work It Out,” or Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Got to Get You into My Life,” as better than the Beatles’ original recordings of these songs, and the reason for this unanimous aesthetic judgment reveals just how far the Beatles took the popular song: from music and lyrics to a recording. In the Beatles’ hands, music and lyrics become a starting point for a recording, and the recording itself becomes the finished product; the production of the song becomes indistinguishable from the song itself. The Beatles’ recordings of these songs crystallize so much more than the words and music that they become a new paradigm: song plus performance plus overdubs plus tape edits plus final mix. The recording is the new standard of achievement, not just the song. My goal here is to demonstrate through these covers just how much more the Beatles made of their influences than anybody who dared cover them.
To begin with, the early Beatles were as conscious of the layers of racial contributions in the music as the era’s most sophisticated writer-producers (Leiber and Stoller, Phil Spector, or Carole King). There are those who would cast the early Beatles “cavern club” sound as it emerged in late 1962 as a rather raw, garage-flavored take on American rhythm and blues, with their Arthur Alexander pool of songs as exhibit A. And this theory has its strengths. There are simply few more fervent sounds in the Beatles’ early repertoire than the sound of Lennon aping Alexander during “Anna,” especially during the bridge, when he sings “All of my life…I’ve been searching for a girl/To Love me like I-hi love you-oo___.”
And yet it’s not stressed often enough that although the Beatles’ early sound was certainly raw in the R&B sense, it was also as dependent on white writers as it was on black stylings. Even in the rather simplistic teenaged vantage on romance exemplified by, say, the Cookies’ “Chains,” the Gerry Goffin–Carole King song, the psychological vantage of entrapment, and the sly ironic verve the Beatles give to it, is at least as strong as the backbeat that carries it. In fact, it is this seasoned sensibility that, when heard in the comparatively demure shadings of the Shirelles singing “Baby, It’s You,” by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, that gives the Beatles’ girl group affections such a macho subtext. In fact, these black teenage women singing pop swag by white hired guns are the earliest reversal of white on black we see in rock’n’roll: think of Phil Spector, the skinny pop geek who spoke through black women like the Crystals and Tina Turner. The layers of irony and mischief the Beatles bring, between what it means to be a young man singing a girl group song, and investing it with the generational fever of social rebellion, are what make it so much more than a simple declaration of love.

The larger tradition of “covers” in pop history mixes tribute with expediency. The exception proves the rule: Bob Marley’s “And I Love Her” (1965) is clearly a spark plug meant to turn over his career’s engine, although not unappreciable. (After all, this is the same Marley who covered “What’s New Pussycat?”.) For our purposes, however, all these acts were well-established, didn’t need to hop onto the Beatle wagon of “aesthetic credibility.” Stevie Wonder didn’t cover “We Can Work it Out” until 1971, nearly six years after the song appeared, and it worked as a signal of his own coming-of-age in the pop business between two top ten hits: “Heaven Help Us All” and “If You Really Loved Me.”
In fact, the larger irony is that most of these soulsters had even bigger hits with other people’s material: Otis Redding’s take on the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” was not just a bigger hit but a better fit for his sensibility than “Day Tripper.” Aretha Franklin’s “Let it Be” was just a scrimmage for her transcendent remake of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which many critics would and should choose over the original. And while Ike and Tina Turner did a respectably gritty “Come Together,” it was John Fogerty’s “Proud Mary” that resuscitated their career. (Tina Turner in particular owes a much greater debt to Mick Jagger’s “Honky Tonk Woman,” which she pulled out at LiveAid, and the Stones in general than she does the Beatles, even though well into her solo career, she made an exhaustingly literal reading of Lennon’s “Help!” into a stage set-piece.)
Two performances (out of many) exemplify this Beatles-soul camp: Wilson Pickett and Earth, Wind & Fire. Otis Redding’s “Day Tripper,” Stevie Wonder’s “We Can Work It Out,” Aretha Franklin’s “Eleanor Rigby” or “Let it Be,” Tina Turner’s or Michael Jackson’s “Come Together” also deserve the microscope, but think of Pickett and Earth, Wind & Fire as stand-ins for the others.

Wilson Pickett cut “Hey Jude” at the suggestion of Duane Allman, who had been recruited to play guitar on the session by producer Rick Hall, at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in the fall of 1968. Pickett was understandably reluctant, seeing as “Hey Jude” was not just a huge hit at the time of the session, but remains a singular Beatle achievement, on a par with “She Loves You,” as a song that towers over many other great songs. After the wilting Magical Mystery Tour TV program in the Christmas of 1967, “Hey Jude” followed “Lady Madonna” in signaling a return to form, a casting off of psychedelic excess toward a new maturity. After MMT’s uneven experimentalism, these two songs alone carried the burden of a return to the formal grace the Beatles had been famous for.
Pickett’s approach typifies the soul stylings of the period. His reading is lusty, it begins at high pitch and sustains a considerable level of torque throughout its four-plus minutes. By pushing phrases ahead of the beat, and trailing some phrases behind, he indulges in the typical soulster’s license of contorting the melody’s rhythms to heighten the sense of emotional spontaneity, the sense that this song is fighting its way out of his throat.
In Pickett’s rendition, structure and momentum give way to pure mood. He has so much pent-up emotion that the transition from the final verse to the coda spills over in excitement, and then loses momentum for the rest of the track. He starts so high, he winds up running fast to stay in place.
There are some fluid ironies here: Duane Allman, at the beginning of his session career, answers most of Pickett’s phrases, in much the way George Harrison had suggested he echo McCartney’s vocal, but was vetoed. Allman’s playing is relaxed, easygoing, but not titanic in the way he would soon be in sessions with Clarence Carter, King Curtis, and Boz Scaggs. Legend has it that producer Jerry Wexler heard this track over the phone and proclaimed Allman a “flaming wonder,” and that may be as much a testament to Wexler’s ears as it was to Allman’s restraint. Of course, it’s a famous pairing, Pickett the star soul singer and young Duane, the emergent Allman Brother. But the main point here is that when boiled down to essentials—which is the soul recipe—”Hey Jude” loses some of its grandeur and scope. It would be hard to call this a poor take on the song, and yet it’s difficult for the listener not to reference the original. You can hear it echoing in the back of Pickett’s head while he’s singing; it’s the platform on which he stands. While Pickett carves himself a place in this song, he doesn’t carve the song a new place.

The Beatles’ recording took place between July 29 and August 8, 1968. The single topped Billboard’s US charts for nine weeks between September 28 and November 23. A précis to November’s White Album, “Hey Jude” was recorded during those sessions, but was always conceived as apart from that larger project. In fact, on the day of its release, McCartney overdubs piano and flugelhorn on “Dear Prudence,” which features his drumming during Ringo’s walkout.
Perhaps because Pickett stresses the emotion of the song over its structure, it provides a clue as the Beatles’ accomplishment in their recording. It’s understood that McCartney’s “Hey Jude” vocal is as intimate and powerful as any he ever pulls off. It moves from restrained solo opening to ecstatic scat coda in seven minutes of progressively growing energy, to the point where any single outburst during the finale seems to surf on the withheld intensity of everything that’s come before; there are no “over-the-top” moments in the soaring coda because everything has been so beautifully anticipated.
This is a consistent element of the Beatles’ structural sense: we not only get the climax and jubilant variation, we get the melody straight first, and then the adornments. It’s as fundamental a principle as any young musician learns through a Bach invention or a Clementi Sonatina: don’t play the same thing the same way twice; add a variation, play the theme at a different dynamic. To build anticipation, withhold the return of the main theme instead of rushing into it. With the Beatles, examples of this regard for structure always sound off-the-cuff, and yet are too consistent and well-placed to be accidental: Lennon’s moan just before the second bridge to “Eight Days a Week,” the “la-la-la”s near the fadeout of “Misery,” or McCartney’s “whoo-hoo” during the final bridge of “Oh! Darling.”

The Beatles play on this principle of theme and variation in any number of ways, but in the last verses to “Hey Jude,” the layers accrete: not only does McCartney begin to tamper with the vocal line, but Lennon adds a backup harmony. This backup harmony is one of Lennon’s few moments in the Beatle catalog where his sturdy baritone leaps up above McCartney’s lyrical tenor. (There’s a dissertation subject: the constant variation of the Lennon and McCartney vocal blend, from “If I Fell” through “Don’t Let Me Down.”) There is no other explanation for why this happens in the last two verses other than that the idea of the song has revealed itself to be one of slow, steady momentum, each verse a touch stronger than the last, with the final verse relaxing inexorably into the waterfall refrain. If Lennon had enjoined his partner in any previous verse, the effect would be less satisfying.
In fact, the song itself is simply one long delay of its own refrain, which is anticipated with each passing verse and bridge, but never delivered until the last possible moment: at the end of the song proper. Those ringing “Nah nah nah”s become the late-career rejoinder to the early “Yeah Yeah Yeah”‘s of “She Loves You,” and along with “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl,” springs from the girl group tradition of “advice” songs.

The structure of “Hey Jude” is exquisite. McCartney’s scatting over more than half the song’s coda would not be successful if he hadn’t spent the first part of the song containing that improvisational energy. This is the strategy of the entire recording: approach the climax with such restraint and anticipation that its appearance becomes a revelation, both of energy and melody. The number of songs that offer up such a soaring melodic statement after verse/bridge proper is very few; codas are the exception in finely jeweled pop songs; codas that upstage even the greatness of what sets them up defy explication. (The Crosby, Stills & Nash song “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” uses this template, as does Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” and “Tunnel of Love.”)
The repeated melodic refrain’s vocal seizures and the slowest fadeout in pop history mirror almost exactly the first half of the song’s modesty and finesse. Remove any of these Beatle-related features of the arrangement, and the song is suddenly not the same. This simply wouldn’t be a grand a statement about friendship if Lennon weren’t harmonizing with McCartney, especially given the acrimonious fallout we project on the song with hindsight. It’s always been one of the most telling stories about their collaborating process that McCartney played “Hey Jude” for Lennon with “dummy” lyrics, and Lennon pronounced them finished. He had too much respect for them to tamper.
And so it begins to look like an easy target, the target Pickett himself was wary of: taking on a Beatle song sets up the most outrageous standards of comparison; indeed, it points to one of the reasons these covers exist: both as tribute and sing-alongs. Soul music was enjoying untold popularity during this period, and part of the reason they covered Beatle songs was out of pure symbolic identification. They knew they couldn’t actually knock out the heavyweight champ, but they would look good going a few rounds. It wouldn’t be out of line to say that Pickett’s popularity with this song, a million-plus copies sold that same year, came out of an audience’s urge to participate in that irresistible refrain. In fact, the point of Pickett’s recording may indeed be simply to reference the original: to buy Pickett’s single was a metaphorical way of singing along with the Beatles, even if you already owned their recording.

The other example to examine in detail is a more successful cover for precisely the reasons Pickett sounds wanting. Earth, Wind & Fire pick up “Got to Get You into My Life” in 1978, taking advantage of the Beatles’ own charting version in 1976, the single which supported the Rock’n’Roll Music compilation. (Two years later, the song also appears on Capitol’s Love Songs.) Eight years after the Beatles broke up, a song they had recorded on their best album, in 1966, became a hit single both ten and twelve years later due to a Capitol repackaging campaign and a thunderingly awful Sgt. Pepper movie starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton. The soundtrack to this disaster yields this song, Aerosmith’s surprisingly adept take on “Come Together.”
The Earth, Wind & Fire cover of this song is more successful than Pickett’s precisely because it toys with elements the Beatles themselves underplay. More importantly, though, Earth, Wind & Fire conceive of the song as a recording, something beyond music and lyrics. It may not be as successful as the Beatles’ original, but it is more successful than many of these other soul covers I’ve mentioned because it departs from the model so creatively, and turns the arrangement into an emphatic element of the composition.
In a way, Earth, Wind & Fire’s rendition is an affectionate reversal of the Beatles’ restraint. The Earth, Wind & Fire track is less a cover than a radical deconstruction: a streak of horns at the top, a softcore electric keyboard with finger snaps establish a coy groove, and the slow-rising arrangement unravels to extend the Beatles’ own production elements out into cartoonish musical caricature. It’s almost as if they’re pulling the thread of the Beatles recording and gilding each new idea that pops out with shiny colors. The spine of the Beatles recording is Ringo’s straight 4/4 drive, accented by tambourine; the EWF version is spineless, its darting lines and jagged syncopations are set above an incredibly sharp, but largely imagined, backbeat.
More than the opening sixty seconds of that track is all descending riffs, inversions of those riffs, garishly high trumpets and impossibly cool electric piano, on top of which they strut out a high-stepping verse that makes the refrain almost beside the point. Song structure is underplayed to heighten the effect of all the ear candy. It’s as much of its ’70s moment—of flair and hair and style and effect—as the Beatles’ original cut is tied to soul verities: pert horns and snug drums, compressed screams and thrilling silences.

In a way, this performance sheds light on Pickett’s mistake. Where Earth, Wind & Fire elongate every element of a compact, dense, and intricate song puzzle, Pickett abbreviates “Hey Jude,” which is all about sustained and slowly releasing tension. It’s almost as if they throw the song’s pieces up in the air simply to admire how flashy and colorful each individual element is by itself; they trade in ’60s soul’s street smarts for ’70s flared bellbottoms and platform shoes.
And of course, when you return to Revolver’s “Got to Get You into My Life,” the Beatle context rewards closer examination. After all, this is McCartney’s finale, placed just before Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows”; it’s the big, show-stopping moment that can only be topped by a break with reality; the song works better as a piece of this longer sequence than it does as a single. There is a compactness of elements to this recording that keeps it underrated, even for the Beatles. At the center of course is McCartney’s vocal, a finely balanced turn of control fueled by exhilaration. The horn arrangement plays unisons off of tightly-voiced flares of harmony; ensnaring contrast and innovation in every cell of the song’s arrangement.
And then there’s that glimmering guitar break in the middle (after verse three). There are notable musicological properties to this condensed format: the intervals are leaps of major nine (between the words “stay…there” and “way…there,” the way the minor chords on “ooh…did I tell you I need you” contrast with the bright major harmonies of the verse’s first half). But then there’s that guitar solo, tantalizingly brief and incandescent, which upstages everything around it.
It’s as though the horn section is suddenly compressed, blaring its way out from Harrison’s fingers through his pick-up. There is no exaggerating how irresistible this moment is: near the end of this recording lies a guitar’s only utterance of the opening horn fanfare. It’s both a lift from Steve Cropper’s riff-bound style, and an improvement. The cop is obvious—the Beatles are stepping into the ring with the Stax/Volt crew. The genius lies in the guitar’s contrast with the horns. After examining Earth, Wind & Fire, how Beatlesque it seems to take apart the various components of soul and reimagine their functions: the track opens as horns replace the opening guitar lick, and climaxes as a guitar flares up like a horn section.

The problem with writing about the Beatles in general is how to deal with superlatives creatively. And the problem with making critical distinctions between Beatles’ originals and their covers is that these examples become sitting ducks: easy targets compared to their exemplars. And there are plenty of other Beatles covers I enjoy, even admire, outside the scope of this paper. Rosanne Cash’s “I’m So Tired,” P.M. Dawn’s “Norwegian Wood,” and “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” by the Feelies come to mind. There are even renditions of songs I don’t rate as highly that are quite stirring, like Marvin Gaye’s “Yesterday” on Motown Meets the Beatles. I’d also include the Beatles’ own cover of themselves, “One After 909,” first recorded in 1963, revived in 1969.

There are also a number of Beatle songs still begging for coverage, especially from hip-hoppers and soulsters alike who could be more attuned to their rhythmic and structural appeal. Doesn’t anybody else want to hear Toni Braxton take on “Don’t Let Me Down”? How about Lauryn Hill singing “Drive My Car” or “Sexy Sadie”? If Dwight Yoakam can produce one of the best albums of his career, Under the Covers in 1997, by including a sub-par but sturdy version of “Things We Said Today,” I for one would like to hear him sing “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party,” “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” and “Ticket to Ride,” or “Day Tripper.”
And I would never suggest that the Beatles are an impossible band to cover—there’s simply too much to learn from this material. There are recordings that I think are simply too intimidating to cover, even though it’s been done: “She Loves You,” for example.