"I hadn't realised that Kristofferson was the original singer either."
Well, he wrote it, and in those days that meant . . . Back then, and certainly in the circle I was in, covers had to be really damn' wonderful and brilliant and different from the original before they weren't sneered at; as a rule, the only versions we were much interested in were the originals. Of course there were exceptions: looking at Dylan's songs alone you had the Byrds turning them into something completely, shinily other; you had The Band being better at being Dyland than Dylan was, you had complete wild cards like Julie Driscoll with her version of "Wheel's on Fire" or Manfred Mann with "Mighty Quinn" and most certainly Hendrix with All Along the Watchtower. But most often covers were (rightly) regarded as crapola ripoffs.
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"I hadn't realised that Kristofferson was the original singer either."
Well, he wrote it, and in those days that meant . . . Back then, and certainly in the circle I was in, covers had to be really damn' wonderful and brilliant and different from the original before they weren't sneered at; as a rule, the only versions we were much interested in were the originals. Of course there were exceptions: looking at Dylan's songs alone you had the Byrds turning them into something completely, shinily other; you had The Band being better at being Dyland than Dylan was, you had complete wild cards like Julie Driscoll with her version of "Wheel's on Fire" or Manfred Mann with "Mighty Quinn" and most certainly Hendrix with All Along the Watchtower. But most often covers were (rightly) regarded as crapola ripoffs.