COUNTDOWN TO HALLOWEEN (Day 18): 9 Covers of Love Potion No. 9

How about something light for our Halloween Countdown tonight?  You agree?  Well, seeing as how you have no say in the matter, that's understandable.

When I went looking for songs about witches, spells and magic--all the things that fit the theme of the blog for this month--I stumbled upon the classic song "Love Potion No. 9".

It's a simple pop tune about a guy who goes to a witch (see the gypsy with the gold tooth) and drinks a potion that plays havoc with his love life.  But I just couldn't remember who had done it originally, so I knelt at the alter of google and asked the great and powerful web to show me the money, so to speak, and all was revealed.

Written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and first performed by The Clovers all in 1959, it did go on to be recorded and covered by many, many artists.  And once I saw how many known covers there were, I got to thinking about what could be done with this pretty straight-forward song.

And so, here we go with our list of...

The Top Nine Covers of "Love Potion No. 9"

First we have young

Ronnie Dio & The Prophets

(That's right, it's the Holy Diver hisownself,

but way back in 1964...)

Next is Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass jazzing it up with this very stripper-ready version...

Elkie Brooks takes this tune and throws in a spoonful of funk and gives it the blues for a really powerful version...

Nancy Sit visits the song from the East, but keeps to the pop stylings of the original...

Now I want you to imagine The Ramones covering it--it would be pretty cool, right, they'd go fast and the lyrics are pretty close to a lot of the stuff they did.  Now imagine a slower cover band that sounds a little like them covering Love Potion No. 9 and you've got The Hurriganes cover...

Now imagine a Motley Crue/Ratt cover band pulling off a version and you've got BEAU NASTY and you may want to get some antibiotics for that...

Here's a nifty a capella tribal version by The Nylons...

Coffin Nails brings us this neato-daddy-o beatniky Stray Cats take on the tune...

And now for one that shocked me, being that I'm a huge fan of this band.  But then I thought about how many covers they'd do live and how they would always change their set-lists, so I wasn't as shocked by then.  Anyway, here are The White Stripes (live) with their take...