Every year WXPN solicits listener opinions for a “top 885” list. This year the subject is cover songs, a topic that eliminates less than half of all recorded music from consideration. Thousands of great records have been made by johnny-come-latelies. Many are so much better than the original recording that nobody realizes they’re covers.
I’m nowhere near finalizing my list, but I have singled out a couple (see what I did there?) because of how influential they were. One is the Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which did a lot to launch the entire folk-rock genre. The other is the Vanilla Fudge’s renovation of this Holland-Dozier-Holland soul tune into the bridge between psychedelia and hard rock.
The Supremes had a No. 1 hit with it in 1966, but the Fudge – organist/lead vocalist Mark Stein, guitarist Vince Martell, bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice – thought the Motown version only skimmed the surface of the song’s potential. As Appice explained years later,
“There was a thing going around the New York area and Long Island that was basically slowing songs down, making production numbers out of them and putting emotion into them. The Vagrants were doing it, they had Leslie West in the band. The Rich Kids were doing it, they had this writer named Richard Supa. The Hassles were doing it, they had Billy Joel. It all started from The Rascals, I think. We were all looking for songs that were hits and could be slowed down with emotion put into them. ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’ lyrically was a hurtin’ kind of song, and when The Supremes did it, it was like a happy song. We tried to slow down the song and put the emotion the song should have into it with the hurtin’ kind of feeling the song should have.”
Did they ever. They released their cover the next year. This performance from the Ed Sullivan show archives gives a good idea of what the band was like in concert.
That was the version released as a single. It rose to No. 6 on the Hot 100, but it was barely half the length of full song on their debut album, which had as many similarly slowed-down Beatles covers (two) as original compositions.
