Thats A Cover Archives

That’s a Cover?: “Love Buzz” (Nirvana / Shocking Blue)

Posted by Tom McDonald at 11:00 am No Responses »

Jan 092026

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

Anyone alive and actively listening to music in 1991 heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and felt its pull. Listeners by the millions dove into the tar-pit trap of Nirvana and the whole grunge thing. This is common knowledge today. But less well known is the fact the first Nirvana single to get international recognition (if very few listeners) came out a few years earlier, and that was “Love Buzz.”

Released in 1988, “Love Buzz” became the very first single issued by the band. It was also the very first single released by the newly-formed indie label Sub Pop Records, and it remains Sub Pop’s all-time best-selling single. (Of course, it only began to sell after Nirvana signed to a major label and released Nevermind.)

In retrospect, “Love Buzz” seems like a strange pick for a debut single. Bleach, Nirvana’s first LP, offered several better options. How about the album’s opening salvo, “Blew”? Or how about the song Nirvana performed more times than any other–“School”? Finally, the obvious question: Why not “About a Girl”? Buried in the middle of Bleach, “About a Girl” is an order of magnitude more popular than the sludgy and chaotic “Love Buzz.”

Each of these other tracks had the advantage of being original Kurt Cobain compositions. Seems like a songwriter would want their debut single to spotlight their songwriting talent, right?

But no, they went with “Love Buzz,” a cover, and an obscure cover at that.
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That’s a Cover?: “The Twist” (Chubby Checker / Hank Ballard)

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 12:00 pm No Responses »

Nov 032025

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

Hank Ballard and the Midnighters have a solid claim to shaping rock ‘n’ roll music; their song “Work With Me Annie” was a number one R&B hit in 1954. The bawdy lyrics (“Annie, please don’t cheat / Give me all my meat”) led to the song being banned on many radio stations, and a disgusted Dick Clark refused to play it on American Bandstand. But the people who heard it loved it so much that when one DJ joked that there was a sequel called “Annie Had a Baby,” orders poured in for it. The Midnighters obliged with a by-the-numbers song with that title, which went on to sell a million copies and spawned more answer records – “Annie Get Your Yo-Yo,” “Annie Pulled a Humbug” (“That’s not MY kid!”), and “Annie Kicked the Bucket,” to name just a few.

But that was 1954. By 1958, the hits had dried up, and Federal Records dropped the group. Ballard began shopping for a new label, using as bait a demo of a song he wrote called “The Twist.” There are multiple stories for what inspired it – teenagers dancing in Tampa, the Midnighters goofing around onstage. Whatever the inspiration, it led to Ballard writing it up in 20 minutes.

Ballard knew “The Twist” was a potential smash hit. When King Records (Federal Records’ parent company) exercised their option to pick the Midnighters up, Ballard tried to convince Syd Nathan, King’s president, to put it out as the A-side of a single. But Nathan disagreed, and stuck it on the B-side of “Teardrops on Your Letter” — written, in an unbelievable coincidence, by Henry Glover, King’s vice president. “Teardrops” did well enough, but an undeterred Ballard pushed “The Twist” in concert, getting a positive response throughout the South.

“We were doing the Twist for approximately two years before it caught on,” Ballard would say later. When the Midnighters played in Baltimore’s Royal Theatre, some of the kids who attended took it to TV. The Buddy Deane Show, later immortalized in the John Waters movie Hairspray, was a local teen dance program which was at one time the most popular local show in the United States. Deane, blown away by the zeal the kids had for the song, got in touch with his rival Dick Clark. “They’re dancin’ and not even touchin’!” he said.

Clark, remembering Ballard’s risqué songs of the past, wasn’t interested, but a persistent Deane sent Clark a copy. Clark listened to it, liked what he heard, but still thought it too suggestive. He needed a more wholesome artist to put it across to the masses, and he knew just who to ask… Philadelphia’s own Danny and the Juniors. But when the band that brought us “At the Hop” didn’t come up with anything, Clark had another idea.
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That’s a Cover?: “All Through the Night” (Cyndi Lauper / Jules Shear)

Posted by Tom McDonald at 10:30 am No Responses »

Oct 142025

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

An unusual thing happened after Cyndi Lauper released her debut album, She’s So Unusual (an accurate title if ever there was one). Lauper became the first female artist ever to have four singles from one album reach the Billboard Top 5 in the U.S. (Michael Jackson accomplished the feat the year before with Thriller.) We are going to look at the last of those, “All Through the Night,” the sleeper hit, and the only one of the four singles that Lauper didn’t write or co-write herself.
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That’s a Cover?: “A Message To You, Rudy” (The Specials / Dandy Livingstone)

Posted by Mike Tobyn at 9:00 am No Responses »

Mar 072025

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

In November 1979 there was evidence of a remarkable movement in British music. Top of the Pops, the pop music show watched by millions across the country, which had the ability to make or break careers, featured three songs from the 2 Tone record label. An independent collective of the bands The Specials and The Selecter, they had recently taken a decision to sign up Madness, who had similar musical influences. Although a major label marketed them, 2 Tone itself was a tiny, ramshackle outfit. Literally off-beat, as part of their Ska music. Yet here they all were on the UK’s flagship music show. They were on a show with Abba, Dr. Hook and Queen, and the finale was Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand doing “No More Tears.” The Specials and Madness dashed up to the studios from their joint tour to perform, although The Selecter could stay in Cardiff as their part could be reshown from their performance a few weeks before. The single that The Specials were promoting was 2 Tone’s “TT 5-A,” only the fourth single on the label (the first was a joint A-side which both got serial numbers). “A Message To You Rudy” has a clear message and a danceable tune, and is one of the most streamed and covered of The Specials canon. It is also a cover itself.

(Unfortunately, although people get a lot of pleasure from reruns of the series, that episode of Top of the Pops can no longer be shown on TV for reasons unrelated to British youth culture in 1979, so we don’t get the chance to officially relive the moment in its entirety).
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That’s A Cover?: “Got My Mind Set On You” (George Harrison / James Ray)

Posted by Adam Mason at 12:00 pm No Responses »

Feb 212025

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

George Harrison seemed an artist reborn upon the release of “Got My Mind Set On You” in 1987, in a way that compared with Paul Simon on “You Can Call Me Al” the previous year. No sad relic here of a legendary 1960s act with fading powers, whose days of selling gazillions of records were a long, long, long time past. No whiff of recent flop albums, or flop movies. Instead, a pop star wielding an insanely upbeat and wonderfully infectious pop nugget, reveling in an MTV-conquering video, and quite rightly storming up the singles charts in a style we’d come to associate with Madonna, Whitney Houston, and the Pet Shop Boys.

Caught up in the fun of it all, there was no reason to believe the track was anything other than a Harrison original, either, being exactly the kind of catchy rock ‘n’ roll number someone who’d been in the Beatles would come up with (right?). Only with a big 1980s pop sound: big drums, big horns, and big backing vocals. Besides, no other version of the song ever got played on the radio.

But the truth was this: Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set On You” was a cover. And a cover very much in the vein of early Beatles cuts “Please Mr. Postman,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Music,” and more specifically the George-fronted “Devil in Her Heart,” and “Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby.” It was a cover that had everything to do with the American soul, R&B, and rock ’n’ roll that first inspired Harrison as the lead guitarist/singer in what would become the toppermost band in the world. It’s just that the original was by an artist a lot more unsung than the Marvelettes, Chuck Berry, the Donays, and Carl Perkins.

Essential to Harrison’s 1980s revitalization, then, on his biggest solo single since “My Sweet Lord” in 1970, was a mighty sayonara! to years of tribute and soundtrack doldrums and a nostalgic reconnection with an obscure and sorrowful 1962 non-hit by an unsuccessful and largely unknown black soul singer by the name of James Ray. Unlikely, we know! So it’s high time we offered more in the way of explanation. Specifically, the illumination of several key moments.
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That’s A Cover?: “Boogie with Stu” (Led Zeppelin / Ritchie Valens)

Posted by Tom McDonald at 11:00 am No Responses »

Feb 112025

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

If Led Zeppelin had made Physical Graffiti a single album rather than a double, “Boogie with Stu” would not have made the final cut. “Filler” is a dismissive term, but that’s what it was. (Of course, one band’s filler is another band’s gem.) The song was just a spontaneous jam, really, recorded in 1971 on an out-of-tune piano as they worked on Led Zeppelin IV. But when Zeppelin suddenly had an extra album-side to complete in 1975, they cleaned up the old recording and tossed the result onto side four, practically as an afterthought.

“Boogie with Stu” is treated like an afterthought, too, in those always-interesting and usually contentious discussions about Zeppelin covering and plagiarizing other artists. Sure, let’s talk “Dazed and Confused” and Jake Holmes, “Whole Lotta Love” and Willie Dixon, “The Lemon Song” and Chester Burnett, and all the other cases. But the discussion rarely gets around to the strange case of “Boogie with Stu” and Ritchie Valens. Or if it does, it’s only as an afterthought yet again.
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