The strange tale of the karaoke cover that charted higher than the Kid Rock original
When I rack my brains on things to credit Kid Rock for, not a great deal comes to the fore. However, digging a little deeper into the backstory of his most successful hit, ‘All Summer Long’, I’ve found myself struck by a profound respect for his blind confidence.
Now, cover songs are not entirely unfamiliar in rock music, but while the sort of rock and roll that the aptly named Kid Rock seems to base his music on was famous in the 1960s and 1970s for covering songs, there was something of a humble credibility to how they were approached.
Artists like The Rolling Stones would cover the work of icons like Chuck Berry and Little Richard as a small doff of the cap, but they wouldn’t rehash the formula and then change the title, only to call it a work of songwriting genius. From the opening note of Rock’s ‘All Summer Long’, there is absolutely no mistaking that he is building off the back of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, but just as you think he is going to pay homage to one of the most famous guitar riffs, Rock’s voice swaggers in to tell us about a tale of his sex-fuelled adolescence.
Its crassness would actually be charming if Rock was willing to accept the song as a playful albeit baseless reworking of an American rock classic; instead, he continues to laud his version, which apparently took eight songwriters to pen, as a work of musical innovation.
He said, “I knew the track was solid; it’s got two of the best songs of all time mashed up together [‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and ‘Werewolves of London’], it’s got great melodies, so really, my work was done.”
OK, you may be thinking, this is an appropriately humble start from Rock, who is keen to remove his own contribution and instead pay respect to his influences, but then he carried on, claiming, “I knew people would hear it and know I wrote it. They’d know it was real, and there’d be that connection. And that’s what’s missing in music today. I think people don’t believe half the shit they hear some rapper or some pop girl singing about. But with me, they do. And that’s why people have reacted the way they have to the song.”
Rock’s claims were buoyed by the chart success of the song, and while he may continue to believe his own personal twist on the classic was at the heart of it, other facts would argue that the return of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s riff into the social consciousness was playfully welcomed.
Because when Rock’s confident vocals were stripped away from the song entirely, it went on to achieve even better chart success. After the track was released digitally, a karaoke company whose version was made available on the iTunes Store in North America ended up storming the iTunes charts when Kid Rock refrained from allowing Apple to use his version.
His hopes that his influence would be too strong for Apple were quickly squashed, as sales from the karaoke version eventually caused it to overtake Kid Rock’s original on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States, peaking at number 19. I guess not everyone instantly knew that Kid Rock wrote it, as he had thought.
