Lots of Beatles on the blog of late, but that’s okay, you can never have enough Beatles, can you? Of course not!
The Tokyo Beatles were a cover band with a couple of twists (and shouts) that set them apart from other Beatles tribute acts. First off, they were, obviously, Japanese, and sang horribly mangled Japanglish versions of Lennon and McCartney’s compositions. There were also only three of them and their arrangements were kinda, almost jazzy, considering what they were setting out to do. I have a copy of their only album, Meet the Tokyo Beatles, which came out on RCA in 1964. I got it as a gift from Pizzicato Five’s Yasuharu Konishi back in 1994 when I was in Japan.
There is hardly any information on these guys anywhere, either in English or in Japanese. I found an old LIFE magazine article (from an amazing (for its vintage) “Youth in Japan” theme issue) that mentions them and has a pic, but the only real information it imparts is that the Tokyo Beatles were making only $85 dollars a month, in marked contrast to the incomes of the real Beatles and that they had more hair than talent! Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce to you, The Tokyo Beatles!!
Lennon and McCartney are the most covered songwriters of all time (Yesterday is supposed to be the #1 most covered song in history). I used to make a sport of finding great Beatle covers to make mixed tapes with, and let me tell you, there are some really grood ones and then again there are some really crappy ones, too.
When it comes to the bad Beatle covers, none are so awful as the absolutely shit Beatle Barkers novelty album, where the songs of the Beatles are… uh, barked (and it doesn’t even include Hey Bulldog! What gives?).
Eagle-eared Dangerous Minds readers who used to watch my Infinity Factory talkshow back in the day, might recall that the show’s producer, Vanessa Weinberg, used what (kinda) sounds like dogs singing/barking (croaking?) a version of We Can Work It Out during the breaks and at the end of the show. This is where that came from.
It’s painful to listen to, as you might imagine, but there is a level of “so wrong it’s right” to the proceedings as well. It’s not even real fucking dogs, it’s human beings doing the barking! You can listen to the entire thing at the WFMU blog... if you, uh, really want to…
Sometimes it’s the more obscure tracks (relatively speaking) that I get off on the most from the Beatles catalog: Case in point, I tend to rank the non-LP Lady Madonna higher than some songs which are more overly familiar. But my favorite lesser-known Beatles song has to be Hey Bulldog, which was actually recorded during the filming for the Lady Madonna TV promo, a single that was supposed to provide a stop gap between albums whist the Fab Four went on a scheduled four-month long Transcendental Mediation retreat to India with the “giggling guru” Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. We all know how that turned out.
Hey Bulldog is, in my never so humble opinion, one of the very best Beatles songs of all, but as it lived on the soundtrack for Yellow Submarine—only half a Beatles album technically speaking, although the George Martin symphonic music that comprises side two is, to my ears, utterly sublime—it’s from an album that most fans don’t tend to own. Furthermore, when the original US theatrical version of Yellow Submarine was released, they cut the song and it wasn’t until the 1999 remastered version came out on DVD, that the Hey Bulldog sequence was restored to the film’s running order.
Apparently the below video wasn’t completed until that release, either. Editors went back to the original Lady Madonna footage during the Yellow Submarine restoration process and found they were able to sync up the spirited Hey Bulldog performances up 30 years after the fact.
What fun it is to see this! According to Beatles engineer Geooff Emerick, the performance you see below is one of the last times the Beatles performed as a team, with each member bringing real enthusiasm to the task: “Paul’s bass line was probably the most inventive of any he’d done since Pepper, and it was really well played. Harrison’s solo was sparkling, too—one of the few times that he nailed it right away. His amp was turned up really loud, and he used one of his new fuzz boxes, which made his guitar absolutely scream,” he would later write in his book, Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles.
Paul McCartney recalls “I remember (it) as being one of John’s songs and I helped him finish it off in the studio, but it’s mainly his vibe. There’s a little rap at the end between John and I, we went into a crazy little thing at the end. We always tried to make every song different because we figured, ‘Why write something like the last one? We’ve done that’. We were on a ladder so there was never any sense of stepping down a rung, or even staying on the same rung, it was better to move one rung ahead.”
I like the part when Lennon and McCartney are doing the whole dog barking thing and George Harrison looks over at them like they’re losing their minds.
What follows below are a pair of newly uploaded Rock Music Exposed clips from YouTube channeler, Triplexity, and were apparently culled from the two-part ‘89 documentary, Hell’s Bells (which, to my knowledge, remains in VHS-only exile).
The intro, clip 1 of 36 (!) and found here, lays out the Hell’s Bells agenda, “to help people understand the big picture, peel back the veneer of pop culture, and gaze into the bedrock of truth that lies beneath.”
Since it also hopes to serve as, “a wake-up call, an alarm warning of the fire raging just down the hall,” you can bet your salvation its earnest-but-porny-looking narrator means a “Christian truth.” I know, sounds like a snooze. We’ve seen—and smirked—at this kind of crap on numerous occasions.
But readers of Dangers Minds might find far more compelling the below clips, 12 and 13. In them, Hell’s Bells puts under the Christian magnifying glass Kenneth Anger, Mick Jagger, Timothy Leary and The Beatles.
John and I wrote She’s Leaving Home together. It was my inspiration. We’d seen a story in the newspaper about a young girl who’d left home and not been found, there were a lot of those at the time, and that was enough to give us a story line. So I started to get the lyrics: she slips out and leaves a note and then the parents wake up ... It was rather poignant. I like it as a song, and when I showed it to John, he added the long sustained notes, and one of the nice things about the structure of the song is that it stays on those chords endlessly. Before that period in our song-writing we would have changed chords but it stays on the C chord. It really holds you. It’s a really nice little trick and I think it worked very well.
While I was showing that to John, he was doing the Greek chorus, the parents’ view: ‘We gave her most of our lives, we gave her everything money could buy.’ I think that may have been in the runaway story, it might have been a quote from the parents. Then there’s the famous little line about a man from the motor trade; people have since said that was Terry Doran, who was a friend who worked in a car showroom, but it was just fiction, like the sea captain in “Yellow Submarine”, they weren’t real people.
The Daily Mirror story that inspired She’s Leaving Home was about Melanie Coe, then aged 17. Wild child Coe snuck out of her parents comfortable North London home in February of 1967. She was pregnant and afraid of what her mother might do, but had not run off with the father of her unborn child—or “a man from the motor trade,” for that matter—rather with a croupier she’d met. They shacked up for a week before her parents found her. She later had an abortion.
But here’s the weird part: three years earlier Coe had actually met Paul McCartney when he was the judge of a miming contest that Coe won on Ready, Steady, Go! Coe mimed to Brenda Lee’s Let’s Jump The Broomstick and Macca gave her the award. Winning the contest meant Coe would be a dancer on the show for an entire year.
Ringo Starr is saying “who cares” to the Vatican’s late embrace of The Beatles. Starr rolled his eyes at the Catholic Church, which praised the group and expressed forgiveness to John Lennon for his comments that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”
“Didn’t the Vatican say we were satanic?” Starr said during an interview with CNN. “And they still forgive us?”
“I think [the Vatican] has more to talk about than The Beatles,” he added, alluding to the child sex abuse scandal that continues to plague the church.
The Vatican offered its latest peace offering to The Beatles in its recent issue of L’Osservatore Romano, its official newspaper, on Monday.
“It’s true they took drugs, lived life to excess because of their success, even said they were bigger than Jesus and put out mysterious messages that were possibly even satanic,” the newspaper said.
But, “what would pop music have been like without The Beatles?” it reasoned, describing the band’s music as “beautiful.”
The Vatican doesn’t appear to be extending the same kind of olive branch to other popular bands, such as Pink Floyd, Queen, Black Sabbath and The Eagles.
In 1996, those groups were among several - including The Beatles - that Pope Benedict XVI warned youth against listening to when he was still a cardinal, claiming their music contained “subliminal” satanic influences.
Lennon’s full quote was “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” We suspect the late Beatle would feel the same about the Vatican’s volte-face as Starr does.
Ringo Starr tells Vatican to ‘Get Back’; dismisses effort to ‘forgive’ The Beatles (NY Daily News)
Tonight brings a special guest post from Dangerous Minds pal, main Medicine man, and one of my dear childhood friends, Mr. Brad Laner:
Crass has always been one of my favorite bands. While mostly known for their brilliant iconography and lyrics, media pranks, and communal origins/existence, I think they made tremendously creative and musically interesting records. Drummer/lyricist Penny Rimbaud‘s drumming in particular is like none other I can think of. The man managed to work a bizarre martial uh…march feel into nearly all of their material, and therefore made Crass sound like no other “punk” band before or since.
I recently picked up Rimbaud’s autobiography, Shibboleth, and while there is precious little about the actual music, it’s a fun and informative read. An early moment finds teenage Jeremy Ratter (the future Mr. Rimbaud) crossing paths with The Beatles on Ready Steady Go.
As unlikely as that sounds, it’s thankfully preserved for all time on the YouTubes:
It also must be mentioned that Crass created the greatest lost feminist manifesto/concept album ever in 1981’s Penis Envy. I’d be hard pressed to come up with another band that was able to so beautifully marry great heaping mouthfuls of bitterly angry lyrics to almost jubilantly inventive music.
I’m not sure exactly what kind of digital voodoo LiveFeedVideoImaging applies to their historical footage, but the clarity of the following clips is pretty astounding. In clip one, from ‘57, Billie Holiday performs Fine and Mellow from the Seven Lively Arts episode, “The Sound of Jazz.” To compare and contrast the resolution, you can check out the extended YouTube clip here.
At least once a year, I find myself watching the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore version of Bedazzled, a film I find both uproarious and poignant in equal measures. Peter Cook, playing perhaps the most charming devil figure in cinematic history, strikes a deal with hapless fry cook Dudley Moore: seven wishes for Moore’s soul (seeking reentry into heaven, Cook’s working his way to a hundred billion of ‘em). The humor is dry (Cook walks in during a Moore suicide attempt and says, “I do hope this isn’t an awkward moment.”), the direction comes via Singin’ In The Rain‘s Stanley Donen.
The Cook-Moore comedy partnership started in England in the early ‘60s with Beyond The Fringe, and then went on to reach even greater absurdist heights with Not Only…But Also. Many of those early clips have migrated over to YouTube, but just today I stumbled across a Not Only… clip I’d never seen before (above), one claiming to be part of a “prize-winning documentary made for Idaho television.”
In it, Cook and Moore perform their faux Beatles diddy, “The L.S. Bumble Bee,” a song described by the 365 Days Project thusly:
The story goes that a few DJs played the record, “The L.S. Bumble Bee,” claiming that it was an unreleased Beatles’ track, or else an advance from their forthcoming, highly anticipated masterpiece “Sgt. Pepper’s.” True or not, the song managed to sneak its way on to several Beatles bootlegs throughout the 1970s, convincing many more that it was an authentic outtake.
In a letter from December of 1981, Moore offered a bit of insight: “Peter Cook and I recorded that song about the time when there was so much fuss about L.S.D., and when everybody thought that “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” was a reference to drugs. The exciting alternative offered to the world was L.S.B.!, and I wrote the music to, in some ways, satirize the Beach Boys rather than the Beatles. But I’m grateful if some small part of the world thinks that it may have been them, rather than us!”
But what really sticks with you is how perfectly this song captures the lollygaggery of the wondrous hippie fantasy machine that was the late 1960s. Its sparse instrumentation, with distant shimmering pianos, screaming babies, and jangly, seagull-like guitar effects set it apart from other psychedelic satires, but it goes further still. Its inviting lyric is more genuinely hallucinogenic than much of what has been labeled “psychedelic” throughout the years.
Don’t miss the “surprise” guest that pops up at the end. Below you can watch Peter Cook, whom Stephen Fry called “the funniest man who ever drew breath,” singing the Bedazzled theme song.
The Beatles remasters have finally hit the street and all across the world, music fans are gorging themselves on the most fabled and revered repertoire in pop music history. This may well prove to be the last hurrah of the CD age and certainly the marketing gurus at Capital have been working overtime to make sure we’ve all very aware of the Beatles as we approach this holiday season. It’s highly likely that the Fab Four will prove to be the best selling artists of this decade, an incredible feat for a group that disbanded nearly 40 years ago. So the question—the only question, for the Beatles are hardly an unknown quantity—is simply are these new versions worth it? Are they that much different? Should people who’ve already bought these albums umpteen times buy them again? I’ll try to answer that question here for those of you who still might be on the fence.
While my video game muscles have long since atrophied (I was always more a pinball man), and I reach for my Revolver only rarely these days, I read every word of the NYT’s While My Guitar Gently Beeps, which describes the enormous effort that went into pulling off The Beatles: Rock Band. Beyond its account, though, of welcome, surviving Beatles-Yoko Ono-Giles Martin d?ɬ
NASA started to beam the song towards the North Star, 431 light years from Earth at midnight GMT on Monday, drawing congratulations from former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, who mused that it marked “the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe.”
But today’s New Scientist asks whether such signals could expose us to the risk of attack from mean spirited aliens.
