Beatles Fun

Wife's car has a USB drive on the stereo, several months ago I made her a thumb drive with all the contents of the various-artist CD-Rs I'd made her over the years (about a hundred tracks, everything from Patsy Cline to the Moody Blues).  She likes to listen on random shuffle so she never knows what's up next.

That kind of musical mulligatawny drives me nuts.

So when she suggested Tuesday that I could make her a Beatles thumb drive I jumped at the chance.  I had enough Beatles in my collection to give her 138 unique tracks, and then picked up four early (1963-4) used ($2.99-8.99) CDs at Silver Platters to fill in holes.  Last, there were two albums (Yellow Submarine and Hard Day's Night) which SP did not have (for cheep) and which had a few (3-4) songs not found anywhere else. Picked these up, song-by-song, on iTunes.

Ended up with 172 songs.

Had to fiddle with a few of them -- the Abbey Road side two songs have to be linked as one continuous suite, as do the first two and the last three on Sgt. Pepper's.

And some of the Beatles cover versions from 1963-4 aren't worthy IMO (one reason I didn't have them yet).  I listened to the Beatles Mono Box online -- everyone raves about the mono mixes, and there was a copy in the Bellevue store for $146 -- but nope, I still prefer the stereo.  Even with 100% separation.

So now she has something like 12 hours of Beatles songs on a single thumb drive, woo-hoo!

And there's still 11.5GB free on the drive.

And the breadth and depth (and quality!) of the Beatles catalog is still astonishing.

I had never thought of the Beatles' work as astonishing, but that term certainly fits now that you mention it.

DAMN YOU, YOKO. DAMN YOU TO HELL!

In my continuing pursuit of "Albums That Never Existed," today I've been downloading and burning Rutle albums.

The Rutles -- as you probably know -- were a parody group put together by Neil Innes and Eric Idle, two close associates of Monty Python.  Originally, it was just a skit on Idle's weekly television skit comedy show, Rutland Weekend Television -- which was itself a parody of local TV in Great Britain, "Rutland" being a fictional and very provincial coastal town.  The skit imagined the rise & fall of a "Pre-Fab Four" rock band called The Rutles, who zoomed to stardom and faded just as fast.  This skit was broadcast in 1975 -- nine years before This Is Spinal Tap.

The skit was a hit.  It was rebroadcast by Lorne Michaels on Saturday Night Live in 1976.  Innes & Idle appeared as the live musical guests in 1977, singing a couple songs in the Rutle style.

That led to Michaels suggesting they do a 'mockumentary' about the fictional group, which ended up being All You Need Is Cash (1978), featuring other SNL personnel.  Innes & Idle are pretty great songwriters on their own, for the movie they worked up a whole album's worth of Beatles pastiches.  This was released in 1978 as "The Rutles," with a suitable Beatle-esque cover.  The Beatles all thought the movie and the album were a hoot.

However, as a publicity stunt, Innes claimed that one song "Cheese and Onions" was SO CLOSE to Lennon and McCartney that their publisher demanded a share of the royalties, and that the Beatles songwriters be listed as co-writers.  It was all just a publicity stunt of course... but it garnered a lot of press.

The Rutles went silent for a few years, as Monty Python movies and other projects took up their time.

In 1996 Archaeology was released, in response to the Beatles Anthology (1995), containing a whole raft of new Rutles songs, most parodying specific Beatles songs.  The Rutles toured, did TV shows, and enjoyed a second wave of popularity with the advent of CD reissues.

Now, on the original Rutles album, and in the Rutles movie, images were shown of "Rutles albums" (a trick later copped by Spinal Tap) which bore suspicious resemblances to Beatles albums.  But of course these albums never actually existed, only the 1st and 2nd Rutles collections.

Until fans of the band began assembling Albums That Never Existed -- using tracks from the collections, live appearances, solo tracks featuring members, and other bands that featured one or two Rutles along the way.

I stumbled into a nest of unreleased Rutles albums -- 16 in all -- today.  I had all the Rutles tracks of course but most of the tracks from other sources were new to me.  The compilers (and there have been several) spent a lot of time matching the flow and style of the Beatles albums they're parodying, and creating covers that match.  It's two tons of fun, and some serious work went into them.

Okay.  That's the preface.

One of the last Rutles albums I downloaded is called "Lunch" and it's a parody of the Beatles album "Love" put together in 2006 by George Martin (his last project) and his son Giles Martin.  "Lunch" includes a couple thousand words in a text file of what was included and why, as he took little bits of songs and mixed them together into not just a compilation album, but a heavily-mashed up collage of dozens and dozens of Rutles sources.  It took him over two years to assemble.

In the text file, he claims to have studied Martin's work on "Love" and tried to copy it faithfully.

Now, I never owned a copy of "Love," which was put together as a soundtrack for Cirque Du Soleil.  I'd heard it, and it seemed pretty poorly executed.  Some songs were cross-faded, some drums flown in from other tracks, but by-and-large it wasn't all that remixed.  Just the original Beatles songs with a few beginnings and ends tinkered with.

But, reading the "Lunch" notes, it seemed I gave the Martins short shrift.  Apparently it's a lot more complicated than I remembered.

So I downloaded THAT and burned it too.

There are a couple of tracks that border on genius, but... in general, my original opinion was sustained.  George was too old to understand today's remix culture, and Giles is too young.  It misses a lot more than it hits.

Too bad.  Probably nobody else will ever have the rights to try.

NoCoPilot wrote:

I listened to the Beatles Mono Box online -- everyone raves about the mono mixes -- but nope, I still prefer the stereo.  Even with 100% separation.

The record company really missed the boat on The Beatles mono box. If they had only dubbed in scratchy surface noise the Beatles purists would've been complete.

Listening to "Revolver" this morning, I'm struck again by the genius of the Beatles and George Martin. Their songs are short and memorable, hummable, but their melody lines are unpredictable and the instruments are vastly different track to track.

Every morning at the YMCA I am forced to hear modern pop. It consists solely of fifths, thirds and octaves in 4/4, with occasional melisma.  Sounds are standard GarageBand plug-ins.  Lyrics are one or two vapid phrases ("the hook") repeated endlessly.

How far we've sunk.