How many people have covered ‘Gloria’ by Them?
When garage band Them recorded ‘Gloria’, Van Morrison wasn’t really thinking about the legacy it would create. “I was just being me, a street cat from Belfast,” he said. “Probably like thousands of kids from Belfast who were in bands.”
Written by a teen Morrison in the early 1960s, ‘Gloria’ was inspired by a young fixation with a woman who keeps visiting for sexual encounters. “You know she comes around here at just about midnight,” Morrison sings, “She make ya feel so good, lord, she make ya feel all right…”
The simple act of boasting about getting with someone isn’t especially surprising by today’s standards, but back then, the way Morrison poured such a confident and direct energy into a song heavily hinging on sexual themes was a shock to the system for some. It was a bold move, but one that showed others in rock that it’s often the less you overthink something, the more it pays off.
Its charm also comes from the way the lyrics, as intentional and direct as they seem, float atop a set of arrangements that feel entirely improvised – like Morrison was feeling it as he went, and that sense of lighthearted spontaneity is also what you hear on the recorded version. The perfect breeding ground, you might assume, for endless reimaginations through different stylistic lenses. A blank canvas for reinvention, which is precisely what it became.
Who has covered ‘Gloria’?
Patti Smith arguably did this better than anybody. Where Morrison’s vantage point comes in hot with anecdotes about his “baby”, Smith turns this into a rumination on self-identity, starting her record Horses with a strong statement and completely shifting the song’s tone: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” she says, a legendary one-liner that captured her entire mindset in just a few words.
In ‘Gloria: In Excelsis Deo’, Smith borrows from Them’s earlier anthemic B-side and the hymn ‘Gloria in Excelsis Deo’ to build out her own defiantly poetic stance, shifting it into a mantra for reclaiming herself in an age where attitudes towards religion and desire can spark broader generational shame. It’s punk before people even knew what it was, especially as it uses Morrison’s original sentiment as a weapon against itself and peers from the other side with a different kind of confidence.
Many other covers of the song are worthy of note, including Simple Minds, Grateful Dead, 13th Floor Elevators, a special mix of Smith’s version by Car Seat Headrest, REM, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, AC/DC, and incorporations into live The Doors sets with a re-recorded version included as part of their Alive, She Cried live album.
However, it’s hard to surpass the sheer brilliance of Smith’s protopunk reinvention, starting heavy with a line from Smith’s poem ‘Oath’ and signalling the start of a musical and artistic shift that saw her breaking free from her previous entrapment in religious and other restrictive settings. Considering the song started as nothing more than a sexually-charged jest about hookups, that’s a pretty big task to take on and master.
As Smith explained to Mojo, “It was my statement of independence from being fettered by any particular religious institution, not any statement against Jesus Christ. That’s the start of my evolution as a young person that got me to Horses.”
