The Johnny Bacardi Show

Hey! A music post! The occasion? the impending release of the "new" Beatles album, Love, which is, as I'm sure you all know, a mash-up creative effort perpetrated by Sir George Martin and his son Giles for the Cirque De Soliel show of the same name. And while the very idea might send many of the hardcore faithful scurrying back to Pepperland, whimpering and cursing, actually, based on a listen or two to these streaming audio samples posted on the official Beatles.com website...they're not bad at all. Go listen for yourself. You'll have to register, but it's OK. I did it a long time ago, and nothing foul has befallen me yet.

If it had been anybody else besides George Martin & Son at the mixing board, working with the Tabula Rasas themselves (the original Abbey Road masters, of course) I might have been less charitably inclined- but the results are very clever and interesting. Sure, they're snips and snaps of songs by the Band You've Known For All These Years, all blended in and out of the basic tracks, but they're often juxtaposed in unexpected and amusing ways...kinda like Harry Nilsson did in his so-long-ago version of "You Can't Do That", Ringo himself with Harry's help on his "Back Off Boogaloo" from 1981, or to get all obscuro on your asses, Danielle Dax with her version of "Tomorrow Never Knows"- anyone who received my last mix CD will know whereof I speak- and I'm sure others which elude me. So not exactly an unknown occurrence, this mix and match type stuff, but never done on this scale before. And if the effect comes across a bit like taking the scriptures of Matthew, Luke and Mark and cutting and pasting snippets of Proverbs, Leviticus and Habakkuk in every verse, well, you take your Fabs WAY too seriously. I found it hard to resist a version of "Lady Madonna" which opens up with the ba-ba-baaa BVs from the middle juxtaposed with the drums from "Why Don't We Do It in the Road" and later with the guitar riff from "Hey Bulldog" and the organ crescendos from "I Want You (She's So Heavy)"...and those are the ones I could identify quickly!

Aaah, it may get real old real fast, but I think I'll have to get a copy one of these days.