I have this track. It is kinda good. There were lots of R&B covers of white rock songs back then (including tons of covers of 'Day Tripper' since it's beat was the closest the Beatles got to soul music) and this one works better than most since it's an unabashed tough guy boast which works well with Pickett'svocal style.

(Pickett also did a cover of 'Sugar Sugar.' I dig the Archies, but nobody ever accused them of being funky. Pickett makes it so)

Yeah, I think that, for a while in the late '60s and early '70s, a lot of black record companies very calculatingly tried to use covers as a way to, y'know, try to cross over to the white audience--as with, say, the Stevie Wonder Beatles covers, Otis Redding at Monterey Pop, or those amazing Aretha Franklin/King Curtis shows at the Fillmore.

Well, black artists like any other artists had an ear for good compositions and undeniably the Beatles, the Stones et al, produced some. I've been reading a Hendrix bio today and in a segment about one of his first bands it mentions that his favorite songs at the time included 'Sleepwalk' and 'Summertime Blues,' which made a lot of his R&B peers think he was a weirdo. To me it shows what a great ear he had.

No doubt. In some cases, though, the Berry Gordys and Ahmet Erteguns encouraged their artists to record rockin' songs for a hippie audience (didn't Redding call them 'the love crowd'?) (great example from twenty years later: Rick Rubin, Run-DMC and 'Walk This Way').

Well, the ultimate lesson is that a good song is a good song, regardless of how it got there, are truly visionary artists understand that.

(for a great example listen to Otis Redding's cover of 'Tennnessee Waltz, or know that Charlie Parker was a big admirer of Bob Wills & the Texas Playbots.)

Well, who doesn't love Bob Wills and the Texas Playbots? Nobody thought an all-cyborg backup band could make it in the '30s, but they proved 'em all wrong.

Heh.