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!!
Here’s a cute and delightful devil doll in a little blue dress. The one-of-a-kind handmade doll is designed by CrateBeforeTheHorse and can be purchased on Ebay.
The original flip sides to everybody’s favorite convicted murderer/hugely influential pop music producer Phil Spector‘s string of mega-hits issued on his own Philles label have never been re-issued in any way. Hell, they aren’t even on the above pictured Flips and Rarities LP ! It’s also damn near impossible to get information about these tracks (mostly named for the musicians playing on them or other members of Spector’s crew) let alone hear them so I was thrilled to find this collection of 15 or so of them uploaded to Youtube in bunches. It’s fascinating listening. Ostensilbly these were instrumental throwaways: Jams, half-songs, pseudo jazz workouts whose pupose, I believe, was to ensure that no DJ anywhere would be confused as to which side was the A side. But it’s obvious that Spector was also using these tracks to really push his sonic experiments: Crazy huge reverbs, echo, overloaded pre-amps (I hear the genesis of The Beatles’ Savoy Truffle horns in here), wild-ass solos, etc. I’d sure love to have these all collected and properly mastered. Until then can someone out there tell me where else to find these tracks collected ?
Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams’s demotion in the amorphous movement—read the foul bit of racial satire he wrote that prompted it—has put the Tea Party’s racial issues in clear focus lately, which made me think of two hip-hop-generation responses to where racial politics stand in the country.
First: Hua Hsu wrote his piece “The End of White America?” for The Atlantic‘s January ‘08 issue, many months before the Tea Party crystallized white resentment. Launching from the refined racial paranoia in The Great Gatsby, Hsu delves into a high-level overview of whiteness and how whites are fleeing both from and into it. The core of it:
Today, the arrival of what [Pat] Buchanan derided as “Third World America” is all but inevitable. What will the new mainstream of America look like, and what ideas or values might it rally around? What will it mean to be white after “whiteness” no longer defines the mainstream? Will anyone mourn the end of white America? Will anyone try to preserve it?
Lots of food for thought, and still highly relevant. Please check it.
Second (and more rhetorically), check Pittsburgh MC Jasiri X‘s new video, based on Nashville anti-racist writer Tim Wise’s essay which asked the same trenchant question:
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.
Today’s resurgence in black rock and Afro-punk has been accompanied by a boosted interest in obscure post-Hendrix black rock from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, as shown by the rediscovery of Detroit bands like Death and Black Merda.
Elsewhere in the heartland, Cleveland’s late-‘60s soul and R&B scene (a role-call of which can be found in this bio for the Imperial Wonders) also boasted a clutch of guitar-centered rock bands, including the excellently named Purple Image. Rising from the 105th St. & Superior area (which took a big hit during the unrest resulting from the 1968 Granville Shootout), PI traded on a thumping, harder-than-Parliament psychedelic sound fortified by powerful group vocals and the two-guitar attack of Ken Roberts and Frank Smith. Unfortunately Purple Image’s excellent self-titled 1970 debut would be their one and only, becoming a rare black-rock nugget before it was re-released by the UK’s Radioactive label in 2007.
It would take another Midwestern black rocker to pick up the
.
