Throwback Thursday: Five Songs That Almost Belonged to Somebody Else

What Throwback Thursday Is

Every Thursday, Song Reviews looks back – one short review per major genre, deliberately spread across different decades and eras. These are tribute reviews, not graded ones: the artists on this list are settled business, so the job is giving a reader who already knows the song one specific, checkable thing they didn’t know, rather than relitigating whether the record is good.

Today’s Run

What Connects Them

Every record on this list almost ended up somewhere else. “Respect” started as Otis Redding’s song, a man’s complaint to a woman, before Aretha Franklin and her sisters Carolyn and Erma flipped the gender of the lyric in the studio and built the arrangement’s two most famous moments – the “sock it to me” ad-libs, the spelled-out title – as Carolyn’s ideas, worked out on the spot. Redding kept the writing credit. Franklin kept the song, permanently, the moment it left the building.

Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” has the cleanest version of this pattern: he wrote it as a thank-you gift for Jeff Beck, who’d played drums on sessions for Talking Book in exchange for a song of his own. Motown’s Berry Gordy heard the riff, smelled a hit, and insisted Wonder release it himself as the album’s lead single in October 1972. Beck got to record “Superstition” too, with Beck, Bogert & Appice, and got handed “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers” – written for Wonder’s wife Syreeta – as a replacement. Both songs exist. Only one of them was still Wonder’s to give away by the time Motown was done deciding.

Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” almost lost a writer rather than gaining a complication: John Paul Jones, who built much of the song’s structure across sessions spread from late 1973 into late 1974, didn’t receive a songwriting credit because he arrived late to a key Headley Grange session where Jimmy Page and John Bonham had already started working the riff out as a pair. The credit reads Page-Bonham-Plant. The song itself runs 8:37 and sounds like a studio argument nobody won outright.

Miami Sound Machine’s “Conga” almost never got released at all – their own label rejected drummer Enrique “Kiki” Garcia’s song seven times before finally putting it out in September 1985, on an album that was only the group’s second English-language record after eight Spanish-language ones. It peaked at a modest No. 10 on the Hot 100 but hit No. 1 on the Dance chart and became the crossover moment that made everything after it possible, on the strength of a song its own label spent months not wanting.

And Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” nearly got lost in translation before Butch Vig ever heard what it actually was: Kurt Cobain’s demo cassette, played back on a boombox, distorted so badly the second the drums kicked in that Vig couldn’t make out any of the song’s actual finesse. He heard past the tape hiss anyway, the band cut the real take in three tries, and Cobain – who Vig says rarely gave a producer more than four vocal takes on anything – needed only three to finish it. Five songs, five near-misses, one pattern: the version of music history that actually happened was never the only version on the table.

Hero image: Aretha Franklin, “Respect” single cover art, Atlantic Records, 1967. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.