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Song covers that are better than the originals

I was listening to Billy Idol's cover of LA Woman, and I thought to myself that his version is way better than the original. So I thought I'd post a few covers that I enjoy more than the originals and see what others can add. My top five in no particular order:

LA Woman - Billy Idol
Just a Gigolo - David Lee Roth
Feelin Alright - Joe Cocker
Roll Over Beethoven - The Beatles
MacArthur Park - Donna Summer
slanski62
larryi
1,972 posts
 
I like Marianne Faithfull's "Sister Morphine" more than the Stone's version, but, I don't know which is the cover (Jagger and Faithfull co-wrote the song).

Peter Paul and Mary's "Leaving on a Jet Plane" is another decent cover.

I like covers that change the tempo and nature of the song radically. Though not better than the originals, I still like My Chemical Romance's uptempo "Desolation Row" and Nouvelle Vague's down tempo "Guns of Brixton."  For weird and fun, anything covered by Shonen Knife will be fun to hear once in a while.
unsound
6,115 posts
 
Hoiiiiin
unsound
6,115 posts
 
^Sorry about that, not sure how that happened.:-)
Many good ones mentioned above, a few questionable.
Sacrilege I know: but I prefer Stevie Ray Vaughn's cover of "Little Wing" to Jimi Hendrix's original.
martykl
3,563 posts
 
Similarly, one 'Goner chose the well known Santana cover of Black Magic Woman over the Fleetwood Mac original.  A lot of people would agree, but not me.   Carlos Santana rounds off all of Peter Green's sharp edges, and I think that the song suffers for it.  YMMV.
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
4,908 posts
 

What happened with "Superstition" is that Jeff somehow heard the song, and asked Stevie if he could record and put out his version first. Jeff says Stevie agreed, but then put out his own before Jeff could. Jeff was very not happy. Perhaps when Stevie recorded it he realized how good it was! By the way, I consider Jeff a ridiculously talented guitarist (I think his playing single-handedly changed the direction of guitar playing by white men), but he has what I consider very bad taste in accompanists. Bogart and Appice? In musical-sociological terms, pure white trash---no class.

onhwy61, I readily admit my dislike of Jimi’s playing puts me in a true minority (I actually may be alone!). It may even be irrational. I absolutely detest his tone, which is a brittle, nasty, ugly barbed-wire mess. I have heard a Strat sound magnificent in the right hands (those of Ry Cooder, for example), so it’s not the guitar. I saw him live twice, and found him to be okay the first time, bored and lazy the second---just going through the motions. His playing lacks poetry and emotion, being very cold and lacking "humanity"---soul. Plus his playing seems to have very little connection to the song itself---it doesn’t serve the song in any way, if you know what I mean. It’s all about itself. And if that weren’t bad enough, it sounds frivolous.

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