Make horrid scars and gashes.

2.09.2006

The Liverpool Kids "Beattle Mash" (Palance, PST-777, 1964)

I've got a number of these "Beatle rip off albums" which emerged as the first wave of Beatlemania was hitting the US. Basically Beatle sound-alike (or in some cases, not so sound-alike) cash-ins that were designed to fool the less attentive members of the public (read: little kids or their hapless parents), they were released on budget labels with ambiguous and/ or misleading cover design that tossed in exotic buzz words like "Liverpool", "Mersey Beat" or just "England". Then when the consumer got home and dropped the needle down, they'd be confusingly greeted by a made-up group ineptly covering a song or two by the "fabs" and 20 more minutes of throwaway filler that ranged from "pretty close" to "guh?".

For my money, "Beattle Mash" has the best cover of the whole slew (I don't know if you can tell how out of focus it is, or how little this helps disguise the age of these guys), while the group themselves (referred to on the front as "The Liverpool Kids", in the liners as "The Liverpool Moptops" and on the label as "The Schoolboys") mostly stick to churning out lame recycled frat rock and twist riffs, pausing now and then to slip in a not-very-rewritten rewrite of an actual Beatle song. Or as the back cover puts it:

...these four men, who with a group of excellent musicians, have adopted the style of BEATLING, the hottest craze in show business on either side of the Atlantic. [snip] Our interpretation of the style by our own talented group will give you the great pleasure you are looking for.

So I hope the great pleasure you are looking for finds you today, because I have little doubt that it eluded the original purchaser of this record.




Links Removed

8 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey kids! Listen to your Dad's friends sing like the Beatles! Its HIP, its FAR OUT, and it only costs 99 CENTS! So buy it already!

Terrific stuff. All your stuff is terrific. I think I love you.

2/09/2006 8:52 AM

 
Blogger Chardman said...

I like to think that oblivious parents bought these after their kids asked for the new Beatles record.
It's like every dream I have where I am either going to a concert, or buying an album and it turns into some horrible imitation of the thing/event I'd intended to go to/get.

2/10/2006 9:49 AM

 
Blogger Meester Music said...

Great blog site!!

Love these "rip-off" look-alike Beatle records.

Exactly the type of shit my parents would have bought and thought they were doing a 7 year-old a favour.

Bad enought they thought they were hip with their James Last stuff...hell, I thought "Light My Fire" was a James Last original...imagine my surprise the first time I heard "THE DOORS"!!

Keep up the good work.

- MEESTER MUSIC

2/19/2006 9:00 PM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I saw these records for years in thrift store bins and never picked them...my loss. Great stuff though the majority of of this album sounds like it was recorded long before 1964 (and proably was)! "Take a Chance" rips off Chubby Checker's "Huckabuck" right down to the sax solos.

BTW I have been looking for the Monkees rip-off LP "Monkee Business" (Wyncote 1966) for years. If anyone has it please share it..

4/06/2006 1:16 AM

 
Blogger Bob Bourne said...

I have a copy of Beattle Mash too and it's odd that they would put these old guys on the cover, especially when it's so obvious these dudes are not even the musicians on the album. Every track is some low budget public domain (black) Rhytm and Blues that the label had previously released as a twist LP. Ah, what these budget labels won't stoop to! I have a 45 called "Beatle Yeah Yeah Yeah" which is just a surf instrumental that had been re-released with a new name to cash in on the Beatle crazy, and they just dubbed in someone yelling "Loves you YEAH YEAH YEAH" over the surf guitar.

7/16/2006 4:10 AM

 
Blogger Bob Bourne said...

I have a copy of Beattle Mash too and it's odd that they would put these old guys on the cover, especially when it's so obvious these dudes are not even the musicians on the album. Every track is some low budget public domain (black) Rhytm and Blues that the label had previously released as a twist LP. Ah, what these budget labels won't stoop to! I have a 45 called "Beatle Yeah Yeah Yeah" which is just a surf instrumental that had been re-released with a new name to cash in on the Beatle crazy, and they just dubbed in someone yelling "Loves you YEAH YEAH YEAH" over the surf guitar.

7/16/2006 4:12 AM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There are moments when these guys sound black - like an r&b group that got persuaded into doing a couple of Beatle numbers along with their own. You wish these guys would come forward - the three stooges on the cover included!

10/21/2010 6:57 PM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Surprised that so many commenters haven't figured out just how slapdash this thing is. You're thinking of this as an actual album by an actual group. Well, welcome to the happy world of budget labels. Check the matrix numbers and you'll find that Side 2 has a much lower number - indicating that it was originally half of a completely different album!

As for side 1, most tracks are obviously just hastily-written vocal lines sung over existing backing tracks, one of which was intended for a sound-alike of Chubby Checker's "The Hucklebuck". Why go to the expense of recording new backing tracks when you already have some?

The label, BTW, is Palace (not Palance), one of the bottom-feeder-ist of the budget labels, noted for, among other things, literally printing their labels on newsprint. The copy in this download has another typical Palace oops - Side 1 is mono, side 2 is stereo. I wouldn't be surprised if Palace never mastered side 1 in stereo, figuring that no one would notice anyway.

9/14/2013 8:45 PM

 

Post a Comment

<< Home