Last year, my brother asked my band to play at his wedding reception. We gladly accepted, for we'd been on hiatus for a year or so, and we had only recently started practicing again, hoping to play somewhere. He gave us a list of about fifty songs that he'd like for us to play, none of which we already knew, but that didn't bother us, for we decided to tell him that we'd try to play them all, but really only learn about four or five, and we'd later tell him we just didn't have time to get to the rest ('cause I mean, really, who wants to hear "Tom Sawyer" at a wedding reception?). Perusing over the list, I realized that he hadn't included a slow song to which he and his bride could dance. The rest of the band didn't see that as a problem; heck, who needs to slow dance with a woman when you can rock?!! My buddies eventually acquiesced to my superior sense of judgment, and I asked my brother for a ballad. He responded: "Who needs to slow dance with a woman when you can rock?!!
At the next band rehearsal, I told my bandmates that my brother said that he thought his wife-to-be* would want us to play the song named after her: Barry Manilow's "Mandy." Since they didn't respond, I asked them if they had heard the song. They just shook their heads. "I know, I know," I said, "but listen to this." I played them "Mandy" as recorded by Me First and Gimme Gimmes** (a band that plays punk-rock covers of pop songs from various genres). They looked around at each other and started to smile. The guitar player and bass player started asking each other about chords, and, within an hour, we had mastered the song.
The band loved the punk version of "Mandy," but this wasn't surprising; I knew they'd love it. Before any of us had ever heard of the band, we'd performed similar transformative surgery to songs, adding a punk-rock edge to records as un-punk (in sound) as, for example, Eric Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight" and Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried." We weren't the first band to do this, either, as cover songs have existed almost as long as songs have existed.
What Beatallica do, though, is a bit different. They don't cover just a song; they cover a catalog of songs by just one artist (the Beatles), and they change the lyrics (ala Weird Al Yankovic's song spoofs), vocals, and sound to mimic that of just one band (Metallica)--and they perform their magic not only over the course of one album, but also over the course of their career (seven years and running). It's an ingenius concept (though I believe Dread Zeppelin used it first, and they still record, but I believe they made their best records in the early '90s), and Beatallica executes it brilliantly. The band mimics Metallica's sound so well, that if one wasn't familiar with the Beatles' songs being, uh, covered, that one might mistake the band for Metallica itself. James Lennfield's words are sublimely witty, not only parodying Metallica's lyrical tropes and song titles, but also subtly skewering Metallica's fans, taking a few well-meaning (as Beatallica are huge Metallica fans) potshots at headbanger slang and culture.
All those aspects are exemplified in "A Garage Dayz Nite," the hard-driving, rocking title track from Beatallica's 2001 debut EP, which the band made available as a free download. The band released their next EP (also available for free download ) Beatallica (also called The Grey Album because of the color of the sleeve, itself a mash of the Beatles' White Album--whose actual title was The Beatles--and Metallica's Black Album--whose actual title was Metallica), in 2004. The next year, Sony sent them a cease-and-desist letter, and the band was in danger of even further legal wrangling, when no other than Lars Ulrich, Metallica's drummer, stepped in to help, using Metallica's own lawyer to lessen Sony's worries. Sony eventually reached an agreement with Beatallica, and the group has since recorded two full-length records (the first of which includes re-recorded and/or re-mastered versions of the songs on the two EPs), both now available on iTunes (which means neither of which are free--I wonder who receives the majority of the money...).
NOTES
*Alas, my brother's bride-to-be became the bride-that-never-was, breaking up with my brother over the phone the week of the wedding. Oh, Mandy--she came and she left his heart breaking. Oh, she sent him away. Oh, Mandy.
** I'm not including any of the numerous fantastic Me First and the Gimme Gimmes records on this list, and it's not because I don't think they're great--I do. I've got three reasons for their omission. One, I wouldn't know what not to include, as I could easily include a dozen--and that's just overkill; two, although I admire the concept behind the records of Me First and the Gimme Gimmes (put a punk spin on a pop song and include a famous punk guitar solo somewhere in each song), I think Beatallica's concept tramples it completely; and three, I think too many great original (though that's a relative term) songs and inspired covers were created in the past eight years to knock them out of this list with multiple same-style spoof songs. So, I belive I'm going to have to give Me First and the Gimme Gimmes an Honorable Mention for their entire oeuvre.
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