Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.
Just what is is about the songs of the ’60s that gives them such legs? Are they that amazingly good? Did they appear on enough soundtracks that they embedded themselves in my brainpan? Or is that just my fantasy, born out of a familiarity as long as the life of the songs?
“Light My Fire.” Perfect example. The song started life in L.A.s proto-underground, written and performed by the Doors, one of many groups plying their trade on the strip at the bars, seedy and otherwise, dotted along its trajectory. Jak Holzman, president of Elektra Records (they’d signed the Doors’ friendly rivals Love), liked what he heard enough to give them a contract. Shortly after, they moved to the studio, recording “Light My Fire” and the rest of their debut and eponymous album fifty-eight years ago this week.
Released in April of 1967, in an edit of the full-length version, the “Light My Fire” single spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard chart, getting a further boost when Jose Feliciano delivered the first cover, itself a top-five hit. Over the years, that original version has seen it regularly populate various best-of lists, helping it attain platinum sales by 2018.
Via many of the saccharine cover versions that followed swift behind the Doors’ own rendition, arguably the plight of any perfect song construction, it has been latterly seen as some MOR staple, slipping further and further away from the original menace inherent. Pity. Second Hand Songs shows upwards of 310 versions, and not all of these are weird, cheesy cabaret staples. (You want cheesy? Try Nancy Sinatra, or Shirley Bassey, or the New Jordal Swingers. You want weird? Well, you couldn’t get much weirder than Mae West……) Thankfully, we found five that are not.
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Well, there’s a title for you. “Woodstock” was the song Iain Matthews, post-Fairport Convention, took to the top of the UK charts 53 years ago. Neither he nor his band, Matthews Southern Comfort, actually played at Yasgur’s Farm the year before, but, this side of the pond, it became the best-known version of Joni Mitchell’s song. The band actually fell apart within a year; Matthews was uncomfortable with the fame and bored with the pedal-steel-drenched country tropes now expected of him. Instead, he plowed on with a solo career and with another band, Plainsong.