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That English Sound!!! Sounding Not At All English!!!! (MP3's)

Here's one of the myriad albums which came out in the wake of the British Invasion, purporting to contain hits by your latest favorite groups, particularly the Beatles. While I found a few sites which shared this marvelous album cover, and several sites trying to sell the album (which I picked up for a quarter), it doesn't look like the material itself has been shared anywhere, with one exception (I'll get to that in a few paragraphs). While most of the other albums that I've seen or owned which tried to glom onto the Beatles magic are from 1964, this one would appear to date from some point after December of 1965, given the presence of both sides of the Beatles 45 release in that month. 

This is, as you might expect, as half-assed as they come. At no point do the performers sound anything like the original artists, OR like they are from anywhere in England. We are treated to one song each by the Rolling Stones and by Herman's Hermits (the latter featuring a truly atrocious attempt at Peter Noone's accent, and no attempt to recreate his vocal tone), and four Beatle songs from 1965. Amazingly, they manage to mangle key lyrical phrases in both "Help!" and "Day Tripper".

Three of the remaining four songs are mysteries, perhaps included to try and fill out what ended up only being a 25 minute album. On "Where Were You", the performers seem to have made the questionable decision to try to emulate the group I'd pick as the worst major group of the era, Jay and the Americans - not only an awful group, but also certainly not English. "You Make the Decisions" seems to want to be a Peter and Gordon song, while "Just Give Me Time" is clearly a Beach Boys pastiche - again, not noted for being British.

That leaves the final track, and the real mystery of this album. Because "Bless You Little Girl" turns out to have actually been released - and this performance of it, too - not once, but twice, under two different artist names. The song was co-written by well known songwriter Bobby Russell, and came out under the name Bobby and Buddy and also by Peter and the Rabits (sic). I've listened to all three releases, and believe they are all the same track. How did that song end up on this album? 

And did any of these labels make their money back. There was clearly talent involved in these releases - bands, string sections, etc. Were enough people fooled to help earn the costs of such a product back? 

1.) We Can Work It Out (MP3)

2.) As Tears Go By (MP3)

3.) Yesterday (MP3)

4.) Where Were You? (MP3)

5.) You Make the Decisions (MP3)

6.) Help! (MP3)

7.) Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter (MP3)

8.) Day Tripper (MP3)

9.)Just Give Me Time (MP3)

10.) Bless You Little Girl (MP3)

Front Cover (JPG)  |  Back Cover (JPG)  |  Record Label (JPG)

Oh, and COMMENTS ARE BACK!!! Have Your Say!!!

Big City Orchestra's 30th Anniversary / part two of two

   'It's gone!' sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. 'So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has aroused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!' he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.
  'Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,' he said presently. 'O, Mole! The beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.'
---Kenneth Grahame / The Wind in the Willows

The origins are mysterious, even to one who was in the band 25 years ago, but it is generally known that Big City Orch., or BCO for convenience, began in southern California in 1979 and moved north with some of its members and noise-music philosophy to its present operational base in the Bay Area. From then to now, a fair number of cassettes, films, records, videos and cds have consistently poured forth from this flexible  aggregation of artists. Many musicians and non-musicians answered the call, and today let's dip into a baker's dozen of rare older documents from their long history.

Big City Orchestra's 30th Anniversary / part one of two

Back in 1979 in crappy little towns south of LA such as Torrance and Hawthorne a cassette-trading, noise-embracing, non-musician-friendly band was formed and the darned thing still exists today under the same name, after going through over 100 members in its 30 years of operation. Indeed, BCO celebrates this milestone in January 2010 in San Francisco, so look into that if you're in town. In the meantime, let's celebrate with two blogs featuring rare and unavailable audio material by the venerated group.
This being part one of two, we present this week a couple of Beatlerape rarities and an unrelated Shatner-centric cut.

There Will Come Soft Rains is an old cassette-only track of theirs which was featured on several unique radio shows as well, it features Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner on main vocals (from two different sources) and of course the Fab Ones on backing.
The cut Beatlerape Stars on 45 is a recently-made rehash of Beatlerape fragments which come from an unreleased 10th Anniversary Beatlerape cd, and it sports some moments which were not on the original cd at all, as well as completely new mixes of the bits featured in it. Merely some throwaway candy. A bit of stocking-stuffing as it were.
And our third chunk this week is the soundtrack music (tastefully re-edited) from an old Christmas BCO show where "William Shatner" appeared and treated the audience to an interpretive dance based on his life story, and also a rendition of Hugo Ball's Karawane, with Bill leading them through the poem. The music later appeared (in VERY limited release) as Post No Bills, on the cd of the same name.
I'll meet you here on January 23rd at this same time for an even bigger and better haul of BCO goodies.

There Will Come Soft Rains             Beatlerape Stars on 45         Post No Bills

Fake Beatles No. 19: Street the Beat's Amazing Journey From Gangbangers to the Nuyorican Fab Four

It's been a little more than a year since your erstwhile Fake Beatleologist has filed a missive, it must be said from the start. After retiring this series, i knew it would take an extraordinary event to get me to create a new entry — and that is exactly what brings me back into the realm of the Mocktops for this one-off post. For i have located, after more than 25 years, a particularly elusive and preposterously rare Fake Beatles tune that has been my musical holy grail for all this time.

The reason i never imagined finding the song in question is that i first heard it performed by street musicians who never committed it to record, to my knowledge. The song is called "Falling in Love," and the group was known, appropriately for buskers armed with a repertoire of Beatles songs, as Street the Beat — and their story is as uncanny as their grasp of the Fab Four's musical vernacular.

For while there are dozens of quartets faking the Fab, i venture to guess that only one contained former gang members of Puerto Rican heritage from the mean streets of the South Bronx. Consisting of brothers Benjy, Robert and Victor Melendez, and supplemented by friend Manny Cortez, Street the Beat's instrumental lineup consisted of three acoustic guitars and a "drum kit" made up of cardboard boxes (shades of Michael Clark in the more blatantly Beatley pre-Columbian Byrds). They sang — and spoke — with Liverpool accents, when, suffice to say, they likely never had even ventured as far as Liverpool Street in Queens!

As founding members of the Ghetto Brothers street gang in the late '60s and early '70s, the Melendezes cut a badass swath through their neighborhood, but they showed a more tender side when they trotted out their sweet Latin soul harmonies on the very same street corners they defended in turf wars just hours earlier. They soon tired of the gang life but not of their love of music, and the reformed street punks took to the sidewalks of New York for more tuneful endeavors.

Another Cherished Rock Myth Shattered: Rory Storm

OK, maybe "cherished" isn't quite the word to describe my long-held belief that Rory Storm was found with his head in the oven, his dear deceased (and complicit) Mum just a few feet away; but death-rock legends are legion, and the circumstances so often so lurid -- backstage Russian Roulette, plane crashes, murder-by-fan, on-stage electrocution, getting hit by a bus, on-stage murder-by-fan, infanticide, mariticide, murder-by-fan-club-president, Joe Meek -- that to learn he merely accidentally O.D.'d on sleeping pills (and Mum not so accidentally, despondent over finding him in such a state) is, by the standards of The Death Rock Tribune, a disappointment of some stature - so yeah, I cherished that story.  I guess I'll just have to take comfort in the fact that Chicago guitarist Terry Kath really did say to his wife "don't worry honey, it's not loaded -- seeee??"  The Internet has yet to shoot that one down, you'll pardon the pun.

In case you're wondering where I got this bad (and kinda sick) information, it was that blowhard Dave Marsh and some guy named Kevin Stein, and their 1981 Book of Rock Lists.  Ahhh, times were different then.  No wikipedia, you could just lie your face off and no one would challenge you until it was too late to make a difference.  Yes, exactly like Mikey, pop rocks and soda.  "Print the legend, not the fact", they said.  But that's another post...

(In case you're wondering who Rory Storm was, he was a prominent figure in the Beatles' pre-history -- his Hurricanes were the ones from whom The Fabs stole Ringo.)

To end this thing on a positive note, there's a new Rory Storm on the block - this one comes from the land to the right of the land down under, and he's got a myspace page and makes very fine and broken acoustic music not too far removed from the scattered psych folk of his countryman Alastair Galbraith.  Look for a great album out now called "The Sun Always Comes Up On Robot Morning".

Fake Beatles No. 18: The Poppees — Beat Boys in the Punk Age

In the mid-'70s, the punk sound sprang forth in the seedy downtown New York dives CBGB and Max's Kansas City, the fetid spawning ground of the cream of the crud, including the Ramones and Suicide and the Voidoids and Wayne (soon to be Jayne) County. Among their leather-jacketed, ripped-T-shirt number in that music scene were four fellows in dark mohair suits and crisp white collared shirts and skinny black ties, shaking their heads whilst crowding around one microphone to emit a high-pitch "woooooo" in unison. After all, what would be more punk at that time than being in the Poppees — a band that emulated the early Beatles, from their moptops to their Cuban heels?

The Poppees cropped up in the early '70s, begun by rhythm guitarist Bob (Bobby Dee) Waxman and bass player Pat Lorenzo. The Fab Four of the Bowery were rounded out by lead guitarist Arthur Alexander (not the singer/songwriter who recorded the originals of Beatles standards "Anna," "Soldier of Love" and "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues") and, later, drummer Jett Harris (not the original bassist for pre-Beatles British rock combo the Shadows). In 1975, Greg Shaw's Bomp label released the first of two Poppees singles. The A-side was a version of the Lennon-McCartney retread "Love of the Loved," which Scouse warbler Cilla Black brought to the U.K. hit parade in a brassy, adult version in 1963 and which the Poppees dragged back to its beat-group roots a dozen years later. However, the fake is more fully realized on the B-side, "If She Cries," a Waxman-Lorenzo original fittingly produced by label head Shaw in appropriate retrophonic sound. Lyrically, the song is a "swallow your pride or you'll lose that girl" advice song to a third party a la "She Loves You." Vocally, it nimbly employs all the Beatles' tricks from their harmony kit bag.

Three years later, the group's second single forced its way out: The topside, "Jealousy" (a favorite John Lennon topic) is a great single to play "spot-the-reference" to. Cleverly quoting several songs in the Beatles oeuvre, most notably their version of Smokey Robinson's "You Really Got a Hold on Me," this springy tune from the Waxman-Lorenzo songbook (as well as the flip, a Macca-esque "Long Tall Sally" take on Little Richard's "She's Got It") was produced by Cyril Jordan of the Flamin' Groovies, a band that could teach a master's seminar on faking Beatles.

Right after "Jealousy," the Poppees split into two: Songwriters Waxman and Lorenzo succumbed to their punky peers, figuring, "If you can't Beatle 'em, join, em!" They kept the Fake but ditched the Beatles with their new group, the Johnny Thunders/Heartbreakers-inspired Boyfriends, which released a couple of swell singles in '78 and '81, respectively. Meanwhile, Alexander and Harris kept their false Fab Four flag flying with their new quartet, the Sorrows. They put out two top-drawer LPs of skinny-tie power pop on a CBS Records imprint during the early '80s that went not so much Gold as Pewter on the charts. (This author recalls seeing the Sorrows in concert around 1980 and can attest that their encore rendition of "A Hard Day's Night" was note-perfect.)

A CD of released and unreleased Boyfriends sides issued by a Japanese label also include slightly different mixes of the two Poppees originals, along with a previously unissued song titled "I Love Her." While this lovely beat ballad is not identified as a Poppees track per se, its Fake Beatle-tude clearly marks it as F-A-B rather than "L.A.M.F."

Note: A special thanks to Bobby Dee of the Poppees/Boyfriends for checking in. Here you'll find a MySpace page for the two groups, with a full bio and several tunes.

A Bouquet of Poppees [all songs mp3]

If She Cries
Jealousy
I Love Her

Fake Beatles No. 17: Yellow Submarine Sandwich (or Meat the Beatles!)

Owing to the circumstances by which neither Paul McCartney nor the estate of John Lennon owns the publishing rights to most of their Beatles catalog, you can hear select stanzas from the illustrious Lennon-McCartney songbook touting products and services ranging from Target department stores to Luvs disposable diapers. Perhaps this willingness of the legal owners of the songs' publishing to shop them to every Tom, Dick and Harry Incorporated is the reason there's scant need for anyone to compose "original" Fake Beatles advertising jingles. Yet that has not deterred the fine purveyors of luncheon meat at the Mid-Atlantic-based convenience store chain Wawa (evidently not named after the George Harrison song from All Things Must Pass) one bit.

For its "Hoagiefest" promotion, which ran beginning June 9 through August 3rd (sorry, folks, if you were thinking of making the trip to Pennsylvania to partake in the celebration), Wawa opted to serve up its line of $2.99 Shorti sandwiches with a dash of Pepperisms. A trio of full-length songs extolling these half-length deli offerings, composed by Parry Gripp of SoCal pop-punk combo Nerf Herder, have all been rendered in convincing psychedelic Beatles style.

"At the Hoagiefest" bounces along gaily in its "With a Little Help From My Friends" manner. "Come On Down" evokes a singalong taking place in the galley of the Yellow Submarine. And, best of all, "Turkey So Fine," with its sitar seasonings, would be the envy of any Fake Beatles group currently plying its wares, and is guaranteed to stay in your head just as long as a Wawa hoagie does in your stomach. The high level of pastiche applied for this musical ad campaign makes you wonder if it was inspired by the song "Cheese and Onions," by Fake Beatles nonpareil the Rutles.

But don't just take this Fake Beatleologist's word for it. Sink your teeth into these (cold) cuts and digest them for a while. We won't even call you a sucker when you end up falling madly in love with an advertisement. [All songs MP3]

At the Hoagiefest
Come On Down
Turkey So Fine

Fake Beatles No. 16: Plunder From Down Under

In June 1964, the Beatles flew into Australia for a tour that turned the island continent Down Under upside down (which means they managed to flip it right side up, i suppose — oh, never mind). If, during the preceding February, the Fab Four hit America like a hurricane, now, in the Antipodes, they struck like a monsoon. Not long after John, Paul, George and Jimmy (Jimmy?! Yes, that's right, Jimmy — but that's another story) touched down at a rainy Sydney airport, they were greeted by hundreds of thousands of Australian fans — many of whom were recent emigres from the U.K. Several of these newly patriated Beatles-smitten folk, being equipped with a fair amount of musical ability and, more important, a bona fide British accent, fashioned Fake Beatles groups of their very own. Here are some of the Aussies and Kiwis who kept the flame burning once the Beatles high-tailed it back to Old Blighty. [All songs MP3]

The Twilights: "If She Finds Out" Fake Beatling would come naturally to this Adelaide combo, which had as its two lead singers the English-born Glenn Shorrock and an Irishman fortuitously named Paddy McCartney. When not faking the Fab, as in this 1965 single, they also performed Beatled-up soul songs and versions of Hollies album tracks. Shorrock later made a mint as the frontman for late-'70s soft rock sensations the Little River Band.

The Allusions: "The Dancer" Released in 1966, this Sydney quintet's tune sounded as if it came straight from 1964. Specifically, it could have come right off A Hard Day's Night. More specifically, it kinda did, as the song is a dead ringer for "I'm Happy Just to Dance With You," except with Michael Morris' Macca-ish vocals standing in for George's adenoidal lead.

The Easybeats: "What About Our Love" and "Then I'll Tell You Goodbye" Most famous for their international smash "Friday on My Mind," these expats from Britain and the Netherlands often displayed a more rough-hewn sound, as heard on "Women (Make You Feel Alright)," which bears a keen resemblance to "I Wanna Be Your Man." There was even an actual Liverpudlian in the band, Snowy Fleet, who had previously played drums with Merseybeat combo the Mojos ("Everything's Alright"). This brace of bogus Beatleosity came from the Easybeats' second LP, It's 2 Easy, from 1966.

Fake Beatles No. 15: The Mystery of 'Peace of Mind/The Candle Burns'

Most Fake Beatles songs are properly attributed to non-Beatle sources. However, there are a few that belong to one particular subset of the genre at hand but with a murkier provenance — namely, Beatles outfakes. These are tracks that, for one reason or another, are either mistaken for rare or missing actual Fab Four songs or else are presented as such, mostly by bootleggers, either carelessly or deliberately. In the first post of our series, we presented one such outfake, "Have You Heard the Word," by the Fut, which the Beatleggers would have you believe is the genuine article.

The list of Beatles outfakes range from the plausibly Beatlesque "Have You Heard the Word" to tunes that fooled only the most Beatles-starved or most credulous listeners ("L.S. Bumble Bee," by Peter Cook & Dudley Moore, for example). There is, however, one song that has been circulating among collectors for more than 30 years that still stirs up "is it or isn't it" debates — "Peace of Mind" (aka "The Candle Burns").

The most common origin myth for "Peace of Mind" posits that it was a demo recorded by John Lennon ca. 1967-68, whose lead vocals are supported on harmonies by Paul and George and instrumentally by some guitar picking, perhaps a bass, and a backward tape-loop vocal intro. As the story goes, the song was then discovered in the trash at Apple Records in 1970 — and then fell into the hands of hardy bootleggers, where it has since appeared on a number of Beatle boots in the '70s and '80s, including 20x4 and Strawberry Fields Forever (the bootlegging part is verifiable, at least).

Though a number of Beatleologists accept this version of events, welcoming "Peace/Candle" as a lost Beatles artifact of their psychedelic era, many more say its poor musical quality and meandering lyrics instead negate its veracity. In fact, others have claimed it as a lost Syd Barrett track, which has afforded it placement on Pink Floyd bootlegs as well! A third theory offers that it was the handiwork of the Apple-signed band Trash. If none of these parties is actually responsible, no one else has indeed spoken up to take credit for the song.

Listen and decide yourself: Bogus Beatles or the Real Deal? (As for where your esteemed columnist stands on the issue, cf. the title of this series.)

The Beatles(?): Peace of Mind/The Candle Burns [MP3]

 

Fake Beatles No. 14: From St. Louis to Liverpool With the Aerovons

St. Louis teenager Tom Hartman really, really worshiped the Beatles. Why, he loved them so much that when his own band, the goofily named Aerovons, desired to secure a recording deal, he boldly insisted that no record company was good enough for his band but his idols' own U.K. label, Parlophone (he even spurned an offer by the Fabs' American label, Capitol, his Anglophilia being that intense).

Befitting a teenage boy's outsize pluck, not only did Hartman get his way, securing a contract with the EMI imprint, in 1969 the Aerovons also were ensconced in London for sessions at EMI's Abbey Road Studios, with the 17-year-old singer-songwriter-guitarist-keyboardist himself installed as producer. Suffice to say, the Aerovons had several encounters with the Beatles themselves in the hallowed halls, as the older group was in the midst of recording its swan song, Abbey Road.

The results of their eavesdropping on the Beatles' sessions are abundantly clear in the songs the Aerovons recorded at the time, a couple of which bear uncanny similarities to their role models. The feel of "Resurrection," and especially its chorus hook, are straight from "Across the Universe," and if you place the Aerovons' "Say Georgia" facing "Oh! Darling" like a couple of mirrors, they would refract into infinity.

Strangely and anachronistically, the Aerovons' 1969 sessions plumbed all eras of Beatledom: Ballads such as "With Her" and "The Years" could have appeared on A Hard Day's Night and Help! respectively, abetted by Hartman's McCartneyesque pipes. Mid-period Beatles pop-sike such as "She's Not Dead" and especially the resplendent "World of You" (one of the group's few tunes to be issued in its lifetime, as a Parlophone single in 1969) cover the Fake Beatles gamut. The only other 45 issued, also in '69, was a bit of bogus Bee Gees called "The Train."

An entire album of 12 songs, to be called Resurrection, was prepared and even sequenced by Parlophone but was canned when the group fell apart upon return to the States, with only the two singles as evidence of their command of the idiom. Fortunately for Fake Beatles hunters such as this writer, the entire LP was issued (with singles and a couple of bonus tracks) in 2003, with the name Resurrection taking on even more import upon its release almost 35 years late.

Please go to the Aerovons' official site at www.aerovons.com to stream several of their songs, including many discussed in this post.

Fake Beatles No. 13: ¡Rompan Todo Con Los Shakers!

In the six months i've been presenting this Fake Beatles series, i've made passing reference to Los Shakers, a group from Montevideo, Uruguay, that deserves so much more. It would help if you would indulge this writer and consider all the various and sundry mop-wigged subjects of the past 12 volumes, as worthy as they are, a mere prelude to this, the main attraction. For Hugo, Osvaldo, Pelin and Caio are the Realest Fake Beatles to ever record — and, like their role models (but unlike practically every other Moptops manqué), they were as uncannily accomplished at bringing forth the psychedelic Pepperisms as the Merseybeat.

My WFMU colleague Jeffrey Cobb once said that if Beatles were a language, Los Shakers would be exceedingly fluent in said tongue. That, however, is in pronounced contrast to the language they actually sang in, which was a charmingly imperfect English. Yet the magical spell Los Shakers cast is so potent that the odd idiomatically suspect phrase or mangled pronunciation or clunky grammar is sloughed off like dandruff from a mangy moptop.

The group, led by brothers Hugo and Osvaldo Fattoruso, like so many of their North and South American counterparts, were playing music in a different style, in their case, jazz, when they contracted Beatlemania after a screening of ¡Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Paul, John, George y Ringo! (or A Hard Day's Night, as it's known to the gringos). Signed to EMI's Odeon label in Argentina, Los Shakers issued three spectacular LPs in their 1965-68 recording lifespan (actually, four, if you count their U.S. only re-recordings of their early songs, issued as Break It All on the Audio Fidelity label, an imprint known mainly for sound-effects discs — and this fan most certainly does count it). What follows is a Shakers sampler (despite all the Spanish-language titles, every word is sung in English) [all songs MP3]:

Fake Beatles No. 12: The Three R's (Readin', Writin' and Replicatin')

As WFMU was founded a half century ago as the propaganda arm of an institution of somewhat higher learning, it's fitting that this post also acts as a teaching tool. Two weeks ago, this author was commandeered to deliver a presentation on a favorite topic for Adult Education, which bills itself as "a useless lecture series." I took little affront with that characterization as i endeavored to expound on my acknowledged area of expertise in a lecture titled "Yeah Yeah ... Uh, No: Exploring the Audiovisual Phenomenon of Beatles-Lookalike Long Playing Albums."

Adult Ed is a monthly series hosted by Stay Free!, the former print and now online magazine of consumer culture and mass media founded by Carrie McLaren, at Union Hall in Brooklyn's Park Slope. Among the other visiting professors who delivered lectures on the shared theme of "Copycats" were Julie Klausner, who revealed her fascination with fan fiction about Cats (the musical, of course), Elna Baker, who blew the lid off a doll "adoption" ring at FAO Schwarz, and the series host, standup comic and lawyer Charles Star.

My presentation codified and encapsulated many of the theories and postulates covered in several of the Fake Beatles posts to be found on this Web log, recontextualized as a PowerPoint presentation replete with sound files and accompanying narration by yours truly. Those of you who did not have an opportunity to matriculate that evening now have a second chance to gain illumination by viewing the video below.

Now that the ivy halls of academia have embraced the fruits of my painstaking research, out of fairness to self i may no longer deem myself merely your humble DJ and blogger. I hereby wish to be known as Gaylord Fields, Ph.B. (Phony Beatleologist).

[Video length 21:37; edited by Church H. Tucker. Thanks to Carrie McLaren and Charles Star.]

Fake Beatles No. 11: Beaglemania Doesn't Quite Sweep the Cartoon Nation

From 1965 to 1969, the Beatles were the animated stars of their very own Saturday morning cartoon series, which aired on ABC. Well, not exactly the Beatles themselves, as the Fab Four had no involvement in the production, other than having their songs shoehorned into each episode. Had they laid down a heavier hand, perhaps we would have been spared the post-Pepper-era anachronism of the ink-on-celluloid clean-shaven, bowl-tonsured quartet clad in the collarless suits that never made it out of 1963. Or the zany cookie-cutter plots involving slapstick misadventures in exotic locales, such as enlisting in the French Foreign Legion. Or the crummy voice work, in which John sounds more like David Niven than any Liverpudlian. But actually, when we were kids these Moptops for moppets were the public image of the Beatles to us, dated as they may have been by 1968.

But this blog post is about truly fake Beatles, not true but faked Beatles, and that's where an entity cheekily known as the Beagles enter the picture. They were the stars of their very own Saturday morning cartoon series, which debuted in 1966, created by Total Television, whose most successful programs were Underdog and Tennessee Tuxedo. (You may be able to suss by its name that this was an animation studio set up expressly to sell General Mills cereals by the bushel to impressionable tykes.) Each week, music-loving little nippers would gather around the set to follow the comic misadventures of the titular singing and playing pair of canines, one tall and the other short and bespectacled — their names were, no, not Peter and Gordon but Stringer and Tubby. Managed by a scheme-a-minute terrier named Scotty, this literal Mutt-and-Jeff duo would find themselves all bollixed up in zany cookie-cutter plots involving slapstick misadventures in exotic locales, such as enlisting in the French Foreign Legion. Then they would do an original song related to the plot. The Beagles didn't have the staying power of the concurrently running almost namesake series, lasting one year on CBS with a repeat on ABC in the 1967-68 season.

Today, due to an odd circumstance (evidently someone who worked on the series died with the masters in his possession, and his wife discarded them), it's consider a lost show, with almost no episodes currently in existence. (The precious few moments that have survived can be viewed on YouTube here and here.) Fortunately for posterity, around 1967 Columbia Records released the Here Come the Beagles soundtrack album on its Harmony subsidiary, compiling the songs featured in the series — and it's a pretty decent set. Produced with the involvement of soundtrack composer Charles Fox (Barbarella, Love American Style, Happy Days), the anonymous studio singers and players standing in for the Doggy Duo laid down the Beatles-style rockers and ballads with panache, while also showing strong leanings toward garage rock and what would soon be termed bubblegum pop on other tunes.

Most important, without the Beagles, "Sharing Wishes," the greatest love song about dishwashing ever recorded, would not exist (see below).

Meet the Beagles! (All songs MP3)
Looking for the Beagles (not only the Monkees had a theme song, y'know)
Thanks to the Man in the Moon (a tenderly harmonized ballad in the Peter & Gordon — or is it Chad & Jeremy — mold)
Sharing Wishes (the best cartoon song this side of "Sugar Sugar"?)
Indian Love Dance (if only we could see the episode this song accompanied)

Fake Beatles No. 10: Tomorrow Never Knows, Do One?

I recall back in the 1980s having a conversation with a young woman who was in a '60s-style garage band who told me that she didn't care for the Beatles. Pushing aside for a minute that to my ears that's like being a baker who doesn't like bread, i do recollect that she did cop to enjoying one Fab Four song: "Tomorrow Never Knows." A revolutionary recording in so many ways, this number, basically the Tibetan Book of the Dead marinated in LSD, is still the go-to Beatles tune for those music types normally too cool for that "yeah-yeah-yeah!" teenybopper candy. And if we've learned anything in these Fake Beatles posts, it's that distinctive means easily copied. (All songs MP3)

Los Shakers: "Espero Que Les Guste 042" The title of this track from 1966's Shakers for You LP translates to "I hope you like it 042" (and no, they probably don't know what the 042 refers to, either). As for the Fabuloso Cuatro de Uruguay, i've been gathering Fake Beatles for about 30 years, and Los Shakers are, hands down, the greatest synthesizers of both the early Fabs and the later psychedelic era. Surely done with a tenth of the time and budget expended on the original, "Espero," thanks to Los Shakers' Spanish-accented English lyrics, comes off as just as lyrically obtuse as those mystical insights John Lennon cribbed from a book whilst tripping.

Matthew Sweet: Lost My Mind From 1995's 100% Fun album, this bit of neo-psych musing from this pop prince has all the requisite trippy trappings. That includes lyrics such as "We follow the same sound / Standing on the ground," which would mean less than nothing if you've never had a Love Special Delivery from Alice Dee and didn't spend your £sd to acquire a London Social Degree.

Squire: No Time Tomorrow This '80s mod revival band, as befitting the resurrected '60s genre, worshiped all things Who and Small Faces. Yet leader Anthony Meynell also displayed a serious Beatles hankering, with songs veering from the "Please Please Me" rewrite of "The Face of Youth Today" to 1982's "No Time Tomorrow," on which his phased vocals and droning guitars and McCartneyesque bass line justifies the tipoff word "tomorrow" in the title of this tune that doles out about 25 percent to the "Taxman" as well. Extra points for the Beethoven's Ninth intro; points deducted for introducing too much melody (and a bridge) into the track.

The Rutles: Joe Public Of course, Neil Innes had to introduce a little Ron Nasty-ness into the mix. "Joe Public" is an Innes solo composition that he Rutle-ized for 1996's Archaeology comeback album. A lovely and lovingly rendered addition to the Pre-Fab Four canon, the song's lyrics are of a soicopolitical instead of metaphysical bent. More funny-peculiar than funny-ha-ha, "Joe Public" carries on the Rutles' winning streak and marks Innes' completion of every Beatles archetype.

The Chemical Brothers: Setting Sun and The Chemical Brothers: Let Forever Be If you held a Revolver to their temples, this electronic music duo would be forced to admit to owing their entire existence to "Tomorrow Never Knows." Therefore, it's unsurprising that they have turned off their minds, relaxed and floated downstream on two separate musical occasions. It also surprises no one that they employed the vocal assistance of one Noel Gallagher, a man who surely knows a thing or two about faking the Fab. "Setting Sun," from 1996, got them sued by Apple, who mistakenly accused the Chem Bros. of sampling the original. How did they celebrate their victory? By going at it again with 1999's "Let Forever Be," once again using the Oasis leader to season their song.

Fake Beatles No. 9: The Kaisers vs. Wilhelm Wimbledom

Of all the Fake Beatles to come down the pike in recent years, one of the most remarkable was the Kaisers. From 1993 to 2002, this Edinburgh quartet released five studio and one live LP of the purest beat-group sounds this side of Hamburg's Star-Club. Clad in skintight trousers and sporting mile-high quiffs, they were essentially the Fab Four before that group started combing their hair over their foreheads in emulation of German art students.

The band applied its verisimilitude to the 1962-63 aesthetic not just to appearance but to song selection -- a mixture of note-perfect originals and the prevailing R&B cover tunes (recorded in glorious mono) that were in the repertoire of every beat combo of the era, from the Big Three to the Swingin' Blue Jeans. The Kaisers' exactitude also extended to the painstakingly created artwork: from the type style to the period-evoking black-and-white photos -- and especially to the liner notes, the main focus of this post.

Those of you who are fans of rock 'n' roll of the British early-to-mid-'60s variety may be familiar with the condescending sleeve notes on the back of those LPs. Seemingly written under duress by some put-upon NME or Melody Maker scribe who makes no bones about the fact that he would much rather be listening to George Shearing than the caterwauling claptrap before him, the term "faint praise" would be too generous. There's something very stiff-upper-lip about carrying a negative review on your band's own album that is utterly charming in this hagiographic age.

As stated earlier, the Kaisers were sticklers, and that's where the esteemed critic Wilhelm Wimbledon enters the picture, for he is the personage trusted to explain the group to the record-buying public. Take the concluding passage from the boys' debut long-player, Squarehead Stomp: "What more can I say about this disc? If unintelligible shouting over a cretinous off-key back beat apparently recorded in five minutes with the minimum of rehearsal is your 'scene,' I dare say this record will be a treasured addition to your popular music collection."

Here are some choice lines from the back of the Kaisers' second album, In Step With the Kaisers: "[I]t was back to work for the tight trousered quartet as they threw themselves blindly into another melody free rhythm and blues workout." Wimbledon's notes reach a particularly frustrated tone on the third LP, Beat It Up!: "I suppose you'd like to read some teen rave type comment on the 'music' lurking within this typically garish sleeve, but it seems that space is at a premium due to the somewhat overlarge photographc study of your favorite foursome below."

The poor fellow clearly must have been driven beat-mad by the time of the Kaisers' fourth album, Wishing Street, as a new, more sympathetic liner-note writer, one Joseph Budge, offers up an almost positive statement: "[It] features a clutch of brand new numbers...recorded with an unprecedented clarity of sound that facilitates almost complete audibility of both words and music." Not standing for such mollycoddling of rich, pampered pop stars like the Kaisers, Wimbledon gives that softie Budge the sack and reclaims his position behind the Underwood for the band's fifth release, Shake Me! After expending a paragraph or four comparing them unfavorably to Elvis and Cliff, he terms the group lazy and spoiled by success, finally getting around to summing up the entire 14-song album with these words: "They call this the 'new sound.' I thought someone had stepped on the cat's tail for a moment." Reminder: All these words appear on the Kaisers various albums and singles.

You can keep your Lester Bangs and his so-called iconoclastic ilk. True gonzo rock journalism begins and ends with Wilhelm Wimbledon!

Mach Schau: A Kaisers Bouquet (all songs MP3)

Hipshake Shimmy Kitten (an uptempo shaker from Squarehead Stomp)

Like I Do (a tender ballad from Beat It Up!)

Time to Go (a harmonica-propelled rocker from Wishing Street)

No Other Guy (any title similarity between this Shake Me! song and the beat-group standard "Some Other Guy" is surely happenstance)

What You Gonna Say (the lower-fi 45 version)

Shake and Scream (this live version of the Kenny Lynch tune is Fake Beatles twice removed)

Cry for a Shadow (this B-side is technically not Fake Beatles, as this is originally a Real Beatles song, but it qualifies, being Real Beatles doing Fake Shadows)

Fake Beatles No. 8: Jerseybeat

It took the eighth installment of Fake Beatles to finally get to one of the most heralded (and most successful) Beatles soundalike discs, namely "Lies," by the Knickerbockers, of Bergenfield, N.J. Before fronting this combo, Knickerbockers lead singer Buddy Randell (under real name Bill Crandall) was the sax player on the Royal Teens' 1958 novelty smash "Short Shorts" alongside Bob Gaudio, who later became a founding member of the ultimate Jersey boy band, the Four Seasons.

The band, which took its name from Knickerbocker Avenue, Bergenfield's main drag, initially based its sound on an R&B/dance formula, as found on the group's first LP, Jerk & Twine. However, it was their one Top 20 hit, "Lies," written by Randell with bandmate Beau Charles and released at the end of 1965, that earned the band's placement in the Beatles Hall of Fake. With its Merseybeat on overdrive sound coupled with Randell's uncannily Lennonesque vocals (including falsetto octave leaps), the song fooled many a Fabs fan, who, to a person, were gladly hoodwinked. "Lies" was more than just a Beatles-sounding disc, it was a truly great rock 'n' roll record that also sounded like the Moptops.

The Knicks subsequently issued a catalog of songs of varying fake Beatletude, including the more than credible "One Track Mind" and "Just One Girl," but alchemy was fleeting for the boys from Bergen County.

The Knickerbockers: "Lies"
The Knickerbockers: "One Track Mind"
The Knickerbockers: "Just One Girl"
The Knickerbockers: "Stick With Me"
The Knickerbockers: "I Love"

While the Knickerbockers were the toast of North Jersey, they had a doppelganger of sorts patrolling the southern tip of the Garden State. As cited in Fake Beatles No. 7, the Redcoats, from the Wildwood/Cape May area, were blazing up and down the lower Jersey Shore with their own brand of bogus Beatling. The parallels between the Redcoats and the Knickerbockers are plentiful: Both had colonial-evoking band monikers, both had a member who had a pre-Beatles novelty hit single (Redcoats leader John Spirt was in the Ran-Dells of "Martian Hop" infamy, a fact that also illuminates the "Randell"/"Ran-Dells" name coincidence), and both had singers who could almost out-Lennon John Winston himself.

Like many of their Fake Beatles brethren, the Redcoats delivered songs that hearkened to specific Beatles songs and styles, as heard on "You Had No Right," "Love Unreturned," "Another Took Her Place" and "Back to His Door," all strangely unreleased until the 2001 compilation Meet the Redcoats! Finally. This 12-song disc also shows the Redcoats delving into a variety of mid-period and later-Beatles pastiches, such as "Man," which is half of "Taxman" in both title and tune, as well as their foray into the Herman's Hermits-isms of "The Dum Dum Song," which did find release in 1965 on Laurie.

Perhaps feeling less than patriotic about their Tory-refencing band name, the members of the Redcoats issued a 45 on the teensy Providence label under the name the Statesiders. "Patterned the Same," backed with "She Belonged to Another," re-create their Beatles love, with lower fi than to be found in the group's next incarnation, as the better-produced Sidekicks, who released an LP on RCA in 1967.

The Redcoats: "You Have No Right"
The Redcoats: "Another Took Her Place"
The Redcoats: "Love Unreturned"
The Redcoats: "Back to His Door"
The Statesiders: "She Belonged to Another"

Fake Beatles No. 7: Fake Other Bands of the British Invasion

So far in the Fake Beatles series, we've explored combos who have siphoned off enough of the Fab Four high-octane formula that they have been able to synthesize the Beatles sound passably enough to fool Ringo's granny. But let it be told that the Mersey Moptops were not the only British beat group given the copycat treatment. Many bands of the time, when not adding a little Beatles bop to their songs, instead gave them a Searchers jangle, that Dave Clark Five stomp or some Hollies harmonies. Here are a fab four examples of groups that have created uncanny simulations of several non-Beatles bands of the British Invasion. [All songs MP3]

Mr. Lucky and the Gamblers: "I Told You Once Before" In the mid-'60s, a surprising number of American bands went in for the moody, organ-drenched minor key musings and whispery Colin Blunstone vocals as found on The Zombies' singles "She's Not There" and "Leave Me Be," including Phoenix's Phil and the Frantics, Wilmington, Del. quintet The Enfields, and The Live Five, out of Salem, Ore. One of the best ersatz Zombies cuts is also a product of the Pacific Northwest, courtesy of Mr. Lucky and the Gamblers, from outside Portland. Just one listen to 1966's "I Told You Once Before," the B-side of the garage raver "Take a Look at Me," and it's clear that Mr. Lucky and the Gamblers came up with a winning hand on this song that bears a not-quite-litigious similarity to "Tell Her No."

The Redcoats: "The Dum Dum Song" One more entry in the longstanding tradition of Yank combos with Brit-evoking names, these bogus blokes, from Wildwood, N.J., were led by John Spirt, who had a 1963 novelty hit with the Ran-Dells' "Martian Hop." Around 1965, Spirt recruited brothers Zach and Randy Bocelle into his new Beatles-inspired group, to which they contributed an uncanny simulation of the John-and-Paul vocal style. This went hand-in-hand with a plethora of Fabs-formula songs written by their leader with bandmate Mike Burke, most of which went unreleased until 2001's Meet the Redcoats! Finally collection. One track that actually did see the light of day in '65 was a release on Laurie Records of "The Dum Dum Song." And unlike most of the Redcoats' musical output, this one is a Herman's Hermits meets Herman Munster frankensong that manages to out-Herman Peter Noone himself, for what that's worth.

Randy and the Radiants: "A Love of the Past" It's a shame these Memphis boys with a mean British fetish never made it big. They may have been hampered by being signed to their hometown Sun Records label in its waning days, which was more suited to promoting the likes of pompadoured '50s rockabilly cats than this group's inspired Anglophilia. "A Love of the Past," like all but four of the tracks on the collection Memphis Beat: The Sun Recordings 1964-66, never saw the light of day till 2007. It's a crying shame, as this tender beat ballad takes the listener on a Gerry and the Pacemakers ferry cross the, well, Mississippi, in this case.

Peter Berry and the Shake Set: "In Lonelier Days" This perfect re-creation of a Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas record, even down to the "Bad to Me" spoken introduction and George Martin-esque piano solo, also only saw release in 2007. But at least this Norwegian beat group has an excuse: Despite every little thing indicating that they're from 1964, Berry and the boys are actually a modern-day combo. This particular tune, as well as the rest of the tracks on these Norsemen's second LP, ...For Goodness Shake!, was recorded in glorious monophonic sound on the vintage equipment at Liam Watson's Toe Rag Studios in London.

Fake Beatles No. 6: Roots of the Rutles

Almost exactly 30 years ago, on March 22, 1978, long before TiVo — heck, even predating the VCR — i held my cassette recorder up to the single speaker on my television set to capture in perpetuity (at least aurally) the Rutles mockumentary All You Need Is Cash. For a teenage fan of both the Beatles and Monty Python/Saturday Night Live such as myself, this was some sort of convergence of the gods, who until then had never put aside their petty differences to create a paradise on Earth.

The fact that there were numerous Beatles connections between the Rutles and their object of parody was soon made evident — George Harrison makes a wry cameo in the film; former Fabs publicist Derek Taylor worked the soundtrack album. Most important is that Python cohort Neil Innes, who portrayed the John Lennonesque Ron Nasty and wrote all the splendid spoofs of every style in Beatledom, was a key member of the Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah) Band. Not only did this 1960s Dada-jazz-rock-psych-pop combo appear in the Beatles' weirdie Magical Mystery Tour film, Paul McCartney, calling himself Apollo C. Vermouth, produced the Bonzos' "I'm the Urban Spaceman," an Innes composition.

Suffice to say that Innes' skills at Beatle mimickry both in song and in voice showed up long before he was pressed into service as the chief Rutle. On the final Bonzo Dog Band LP, 1972's Let's Make Up and Be Friendly, the song "Fresh Wound" shows his gift for parroting the Lennon style before going slightly overlong. "Give Booze a Chance," another Lennon-referencing Bonzos track, was in this instance written and sung by the group's other main creative force, the appropriately perpetually soused Vivian Stanshall, and is found in this BBC Radio session take.

A post-Bonzos Innes collaborated with a post-Python Eric Idle on the BBC Television series Rutland Weekend Television, where the Rutles proper made their debut in a sketch that was also shown on a Saturday Night Live episode, shaking their mocktops to an early version of "I Must Be in Love." (Interestingly, Innes also performs "Cheese and Onions" on SNL a year before All You Need Is Cash's creation.) An abbreviated version of the Rutles' "Good Times Roll," then named "The Children of Rock and Roll," also has its origin in an RWT sketch.

This past couple of weeks, the Rutles have been going meta, with Beatles tribute band the Fab Four portraying Nasty, Dirk, Stig and Barry in an official 30th anniversary celebration in Los Angeles and New York. But the concept of Rutlemania-mania predates this dubious milestone. In 1990, Shimmy-Disc issued a tribute album titled Rutles Highway Revisited, and, currently plying their trade in Austin, Texas, is Ouch! — yes, a Rutles tribute band. Below find some Rutles-related curiosities and rarities, and be thankful you don't have to hold up your cassette player to this computer in order to possess them for posterity.

Bonzo Dog Band: Fresh Wound (MP3)
Bonzo Dog Band: Give Booze a Chance [BBC session] (MP3)
The Rutles: I Must Be in Love [Rutland Weekend Television version] (MP3)
Ron Lennon: The Children of Rock and Roll [Rutland Weekend Television version] (MP3)
The Pussywillows: Hold My Hand (MP3)

Fake Beatles No. 5: Czerwone Gitary, the Fab Five From Gdańsk

In the mid-1980s, thanks to an Argentinian contact, i was able to acquire most of the collected works of Uruguay's musically brilliant answer to the Fab Four — Los Shakers. That coup subsequently put me on a bit of a global quest: Whenever i would visit a foreign land, my goal was to purchase recordings by that nation's equivalent of the Beatles.

That meant every trip to Montreal secured me armloads of Les Sultans records, excursions to Spain landed me several Los Brincos discs, i helped myself to a smorgasbord of Tages music in Sweden, even my visit to Istanbul entailed smuggling back, Midnight Express style, recordings by Mavi Işıklar (OK, it wasn't quite like that, but let me have my fantasies). Yet it was in the faraway and exotic locale of Greenpoint, a Polish enclave in Brooklyn, that i first came face to face with Czerwone Gitary — Gdańsk's finest purveyors of beat, as exemplified by the band's slogan: "We play and sing the loudest in Poland."

Czerwone Gitary — their name translates as "The Red Guitars" — formed in that seaport city in 1965. Like their Liverpool musical counterparts receiving American R&B from seamen during their formative years, for Czerwone Gitary being located dockside meant exposure to music otherwise unavailable to other Soviet Bloc musicians. One listen to the five-piece combo's debut LP, 1966's To właśnie my, makes it evident whose records the Polish sailors were slipping to the band members. Recording exclusively original numbers that ranged from bouncy rockers to keenly harmonized ballads, every Moptop move is represented in spades. But unlike most foreign Fabs, they seemed to be only one year behind their role models' sonic innovations. And though the band's name alludes to their status as a rock group based behind the Iron Curtain, Czerwone Gitary's lyrics aren't exactly the Communist Manifesto. In fact, judging by the titles, their songs don't seem to be about much at all.

Imagine Jerzy, Krzysztof, Bernard, Seweryn and the other Jerzy shaking their mopheads while serenading us with "Pięciu nas jest" ("There are five of us") or the title track ("Here we are"), and you realize that not having anything to sing about is no reason to clam up. And when the words do mean something, it's still a head-scratcher. While by 1966, the Beatles themselves were learning how to spell THC and LSD, the Czerwone crew evidently broke into the local vodka distillery to achieve the same effects. The recorded proof is their song "Bo ty się boisz myszy" ("Because you are afraid of mice"), a silly romp that they giggle their way through.

Suffice to say they became Beatles big in Poland, touring all the spots the Beatles couldn't, such as Czechoslovakia, East Germany and the Soviet Union. Czerwone Gitary have carried on for 43 years and more than 80 albums, later adopting a folk-pop direction in the '70s. They still perform today, with three original members: guitarist Jerzy Kossela, drummer Jerzy Skrzypczyk and founding member Henryk Zomerski on bass.

Czerwone Gitary: To właśnie my (MP3)
Czerwone Gitary: Nie zadzieraj nosa (MP3)
Czerwone Gitary: Kto winien jest (MP3)
Czerwone Gitary: Pięciu nas jest (MP3)
Czerwone Gitary: Dlaczego pada deszcz (MP3)
Czerwone Gitary: Bo ty się boisz myszy (MP3)

Money (videos)

It is that time of year again, WFMU needs your money. Here are two takes on the subject of money, as seen through the eyes of last millennium new wave bands from Europe.

On the left are the Flying Lizards appearing "live" on some TV show, the video on the right is by Malaria, taken from the Berlin Underground 1979-1983 DVD. Both songs are called "Money". Youtube links: Flying Lizards | Malaria.