Pop music history: Uncanny sound-alikes

Here’s a fun, albeit completely subjective topic to get your day started. What familiar old songs can you think of that sound as though they could have been recorded by artists other than who actually recorded them? Over the years I’ve found a few.

Again this is totally subjective so I doubt many will agree entirely with my comparisons, but in my mind the 1972 song “Nice to Be With You” by Gallery always sounded as if Neil Diamond were singing the lead vocal, and Electric Light Orchestra’s “Hold On Tight” from 1981 always sounded to me a bit like George Harrison from The Beatles was singing the lead.

Another song from 1972, “Go All the Way” by the group the Raspberries features a lead vocal that sounds, to me anyway, exactly like Roy Orbison.

There’s a 1965 recording of “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” by the Byrds, with Roger McGuinn singing the lead. The song was written by Bob Dylan and it has been covered by a long list of other artists, but to me the Byrds’ version (only their 1965 version and not at all their later and very different remake of the same song) sounds quite a lot like Tom Petty’s voice and style. However, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers would not appear on the music scene until a little over a decade later.

One of the early Beatles’ sound-alike songs, the 1965 “Lies” by an American group called the Knickerbockers even has much of the structure and style of early Beatles’ tunes. My ear hears John Lennon’s voice in that song, it sounds so close! It’s eerie.

There have been a number of different Beatles impersonator bands touring and recording over the years, with names like Beatlemania, or The Fab Four, and they’ve all endeavored to accurately emulate the look and sound of the original band, performing actual Beatles’ songs. But during the 1970s a group was created and marketed as a parody of the Beatles, called The Rutles. Their songs were by design very similar in sound and style to the original Beatles’ music, but most if not all were distinctly different, entirely new songs.

Speaking of Beatle sound-alike songs, I’ve always thought “Because” by the Dave Clark Five had sort of an early Beatle style to it, at least if we could ignore the organ accompaniment anyway.

I remember the first time I heard “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison, almost four decades ago. I initially thought I was listening to a Rolling Stones’ song that somehow had previously eluded me, as it features certain vocal qualities reminiscent of Mick Jagger’s voice. The style of the song, however, does not really strike me as a Jagger-Richards type of composition, although stylistically it is probably not too far removed from the Stone’s “Sittin’ on a Fence.” Another singer I always thought sounded maybe a little like Mick Jagger was Domingo Samudio, better known by his stage name Sam the Sham. Especially in the 1966 song, “Li’l Red Riding Hood” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, I hear similarities to Mick’s vocals.

In the early 1960s there was a campaign to promote Honda motorcycles in the United States and a surf rock band was actually created around this theme, called The Hondells. Their cover of the 1964 Beach Boys’ song, “Little Honda” sounds so close to the Beach Boys’ version that whenever I hear one or the other playing on the radio I have to listen very closely to determine whose version it is.

In 1961 singer and teen idol Bobby Vee recorded his version of a song written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin titled “Take Good Care of My Baby,” which topped Billboard’s Hot 100 in September of that year. I know I’m not the only one in the world who thinks that recording has a definite Buddy Holly flavor to it, even though the plane crash that took the life of Buddy Holly occurred two years earlier.

My last comparison might rightfully draw some ridicule and I’ll admit that nowadays I don’t hear the potential similarities as much as I did decades ago – with the exception of one small part of this song anyway, but when the 1981 hit “Harden My Heart” by the group Quarterflash was first popular I initially assumed I was listening to a new release by Pat Benetar.

So these are some of the singers and songs I’ve considered to be sound-alikes. I imagine there are literally volumes of songs with very similar sounds to other songs out there and I would love to hear from readers about other examples.