ALBUM: Vanilla Fudge (1967)
MVC Rating: 2.5/$$$$
Wow, this one is so bad it’s good. Almost.
Their cover of the Temptations’ ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’ was a high charting single and is a successful use of turning an original song inside-out, making it something new and good.
With it’s heavy organ sound and over-the-top rock vocals, it turns the song into something else. It sounds like Deep Purple before Deep Purple.
Unfortunately that formula didn’t work well on the other songs. In fact, some of the album sounds like laughable parody: Eleanor Rigby, Ticket to Ride, People Get Ready, She’s Not There — all covers of music that were current at the time. They were all great songs by the original artists but not by Vanilla Fudge except for ‘You Keep Me Hanging On.’
And therein lies Mike’s 2-pronged better and/or different theorem for a cover song to work.
No. 1: The cover takes a faithful route and blows the doors of the original. Janis Joplin’s Me and Bobby ‘McGee’ cover of the Kris Kristofferson song fits that bill. Michael Bolton’s cover of Otis Redding’s ‘Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay’ fails.
No. 2: The cover has to be so different that it reinterprets the original song. I think Creedence Clearwater Revival’s cover of ‘I Heard it through the Grapevine’ does that with Marvin Gaye’s version. I’m not saying the CCR song is better or worse, they are just different kinds of great with Gaye’s soul strong vocals and CCR’s swamp thing chug.
Now that you got my theorem, back to Vanilla Fudge. Between the cover songs, there are some strange psychedelic interludes (Illusions of my Childhood Pts. 1,2,3) which I won’t describe here but you get the picture.
This isn’t something I threw on my turntable much because there is so much gooey goo to get through to the good stuff.
It would make a great study as part of a look at the origins of psych-rock and heavy metal. Oh, by the way, either the bass player is very good or my speakers are very good — or both.