"
Baby, I Need Your Lovin'" was a slower, 1967 cover by
Johnny Rivers. It reached #3 on Billboard Hot 100, topping the original version in chart performance. It is included on his 1967 album Rewind.
"Baby I Need Your Loving" is a 1964 hit single recorded by
the Four Tops for the Motown label. Written and produced by Motown's main production team Holland–Dozier–Holland, the song was the group's first Motown single and their first pop Top 20 hit, making it to number eleven on the Billboard Hot 100 in the fall of 1964. It was also their first million-selling hit single. Rolling Stone ranked The Four Tops' original version of the song at #390 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
Johnny Rivers is known to some rock and roll aficionados as the king of the cover, and not without reason. Over the course of his career, he had several hits (and near misses) with covers of previously recorded songs, as well as with a number of never-before released records. Johnny Rivers had thirteen charted hits in the period from 1964 to 1967, with roughly equal numbers of original and cover recordings. His covers were of modestly successful songs, all of which had received airplay on Top 40 stations in the preceding several years. For example, Rivers released covers of "Memphis," "Maybellene," and "Mountain of Love" in 1964, each of which was recorded in front of a live audience in Rivers' rollicking, rocking style; none would be a giant hit, but his versions of "Memphis" and "Mountain of Love" have become standards in the rock and roll canon. Covers are remakes of records by different artists, but in the rock vernacular there is usually more to it than that. Especially in the mid-to-late 1950s, the term "cover" implied a remake (by a white recording artist) of a record originally cut by a black artist, and therefore not played on the many predominantly white-oriented radio stations. The first "Cover King" was Pat Boone, who recorded several songs after Little Richard, The Charms, Ivory Joe Hunter, or Fats Domino had achieved successes with them, primarily on black R&B radio stations.
