By now it’s an article of faith that the Beatles are great, the Beatles were the best band that ever was, the Beatles changed the world, and the Beatles wrote and recorded the best ten thousand songs that ever were. Naturally the scale of the Beatles’ success, especially in the first 2-3 years after they broke, is a big part of the story. The near-universal love for the Beatles on the part of teenage listeners everywhere caused a massive disruption to the entertainment market—in the mythology of the Beatles, it was what World War I was to modernism.
 

 
The Beatles remain as big as ever, but the weird detritus that accompanied their rise, well, that tends to fade. So we kind of ... forget that for a time there, dozens and dozens of acts copied, mimicked, “were inspired by” the Beatles, and not all of them were especially scrupulous about the consumer understanding whether their LPs were really from the Beatles or really from ... BJ Brock and the Sultans, or the Manchesters or The Original or the Blue Beats or on and on. Actually I think these albums were mostly directed at the teens’ parents who wouldn’t have the ability to remember just what moptop band young Gidget kept babbling about at the breakfast table this morning. You can just envision the heated conversation a day later: “Daaaaaaaaaaad, this isn’t the right one! I wanted the Beatles!!” “How was I supposed to know!? It says ‘Beatlemania’ right there!”

I ran across this video several years ago, and it never fails to amuse and inform. In keeping with the mock-academic trappings of the informal “Adult Education” lecture series held at Park Slope’s Union Hall, its title is “Yeah Yeah ... Uh, No: Exploring the Audiovisual Phenomenon of Beatles-Lookalike Long-Playing Albums,” but it’s really a vastly entertaining slide show, a comprehensive look at the year or two in which the marketplace saw a glut of albums masquerading as Beatles product. Few people know this terrain better than WFMU DJ Gaylord Fields, and it’s a pleasure to behold his geeky wonder (and corny jokes) at the naked greed and deception on display here. Misleading text and pictures, outright lies, all in the name of conning people into thinking that some band’s bassist just might be George Harrison if you squinted just so. It’s a parable for our times, a parable ... of America.
 

 
Really this is a lesson about capitalism first and foremost. You can’t have a mass phenomenon without a mass market, and, as Fields rightly emphasizes, the real start of the story isn’t so much the Beatles themselves but rather the reaction of countless record executives waking up the morning after the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show determined to sell a Beatles album come hell or high water, whether the Beatles were involved or not. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and popularity inspires copycats.
 

 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Beatlemaniac hell-bent on generating army of John Lennons from tooth DNA
Two hours of Beatlemania: ‘The Compleat Beatles’