Rhino’s Got You Covered: Wilson Pickett, The Hollies, Rod Stewart, and Echo & The Bunnymen

It’s Wednesday, so it must be time to take another dip into the Rhino catalog and trot out a new quartet of cover songs that you may or may not have heard before. Let’s get started, shall we?

•    Wilson Pickett, “Born to Be Wild” (1969): Pickett has turned many a rock tune into an R&B belter, including the title track of the album from which this song hails (HEY JUDE), but this take on the Steppenwolf classic is particularly fun.

•    The Hollies, “Witchy Woman” (1972): Yes, we know we spotlighted a Hollies song relatively recently, i.e. when we did our all-Prince edition of the column, but this Eagles cover is one of those tunes that we stumbled upon and had totally forgotten about, so rather than forget about it again, we wanted to spotlight it as soon as possible.

•    Rod Stewart, “Cigarettes and Alcohol” (1998): Stewart’s WHEN WE WERE THE NEW BOYS album found him ripping through a set of mostly covers, including a couple of selections which were clearly chosen to prove that he could still rock out with the best of them. Indeed, in addition to this Oasis tune, he also covered Primal Scream’s “Rocks.”

•    Echo & The Bunnymen, “All You Need is Love” (1984): This Beatles cover originally made its debut on the Bunnymen’s 1984 SEVEN SEAS EP, which bore the subtitle “Life at Brian’s – Lean and Hungry,” that’s “Life,” not “Live,” so it’s not a concert performance, it’s just a studio version, and a particularly weird one at that.