The Great Pretender
Song of the Day 10/24/2022
The Great Pretender by The Platters (& Buck Ram)
The Great Pretender by Sam Cooke
There’s nothing better than a good cover. Although original versions are often the superior, more authentic, and fluid versions of a song, I would argue (actually am arguing) that a great cover by the right artist is a far more interesting listening experience. Even more, I think a good singer is better equipped at getting to the core of another artist’s work. Perhaps a writer’s own song hits too close to home—they can sing it beautifully, even stunningly, but the sentimentality doesn’t quite come across. Some distance is required for a song to be perfectly performed, for the emotional aesthetic to hit home. Or sometimes a song is written by a composer and lyricist, only for the wrong singer to perform it first. Music is subjective anyway, one version can be great, another out of this world. Sometimes different versions work in different contexts. Different strokes for different folks. Blah.
Consider Sam Cooke’s rendition of The Great Pretender, originally written for The Platters by Buck Ram in the bathroom of the Flamingo Hotel in under 20 minutes, probably on cocaine. (To support my cocaine theory, I’ll add the small tidbit of information that Ram was convinced the song would be a hit even before he wrote it. If that’s not coked-up behavior, what is? Or maybe I’m too diffident to understand hubris or pride, and instead, just assume that if someone is that confident in their work they must be coked up their ass? Well, he was at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas in the mid-50s. Did they do coke in the 50s? Wikipedia says not really. So, what the hell was he on?) Anyway, I like The Platters’ original version. It has a grandiose, theatrical, epic Scorsese movie quality. It makes you want to sway off into the distance, whatever that means. The Platters’ version seems to be sung toward no one in particular. It comes off, rather, as a quick burst of dramatic desperation, a melodic shout into the void. Cooke’s version, 30 seconds longer than the original, is a slower, more sincere cover that imbues the existential panic in the song with a bit more meaning. It makes sense, while listening to it, that the singer may be having a crisis of identity; the despairing notion of being out of place comes off clearly. Moreover, it seems as though it’s being directed toward one particular person, a sort of personalized love letter to whoever may be listening—though true, this was also Cooke’s genius. There’s also a quite popular Freddie Mercury version, which I’m not a fan of.
Which do you prefer?