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Real Life Rock Top 10 | page 1, 2
On his recent Hamburg-days album, "Run Devil Run" (Capitol), Paul McCartney acts as if he never did change the world. The lack of anguish and authority in his bash-and-split renditions of such old Beatles favorites as Carl Perkins' "Movie Magg" or Larry Williams' "She Said Yeah" is as weird as the 1999 picture inside the box, where he looks more like his own child than himself. The music is alive -- but nothing close to the anarchy of the music the Beatles actually made in Hamburg. You can find it on various official and legally-contested Live-from-the-Star-Club albums; it was never more raw than on a tape bootlegged as "The International Battle of the Century: The Beatles vs. The Third Reich." This was a takeoff on a real album, in which Vee-Jay Records of Chicago recycled the early EMI Beatles recordings to which they briefly held rights: "The International Battle of the Century: The Beatles vs. the Four Seasons." On the back was a checklist, where you could award between 10 and zero points to, say, "Baby It's You" vs. "Big Girls Don't Cry." The "Third Reich" version was far more inspired: the likes of "Matchbox" and "Little Queenie" vs. audience noise titled "Arbeit Mach Frei," "Schweinehund," "Your Papers, Please" and "Vhere Ist Pete Best?" Starting tepidly with "A Taste of Honey" and "Till There Was You," the band, with Paul doing most of the singing and John taunting the crowd, soon goes absolutely elsewhere, into sounds so rough the songs barely retain a shred of recognizability. On "Talkin' 'Bout You" 1977 London punk is discovered, not as style but strictly as form, with a disorientingly atonal one-note guitar solo -- here, as on "Where Have You Been All My Life" and "Roll Over Beethoven," impossible to credit as the work of sober, worried George. A tame Carl Perkins ditty like "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" goes over the edge into a kind of war -- or right into the secret society into which Kirchherr and Voormann had already initiated the Beatles, and vice versa. 10) Ringo Starr TV commercial for Charles Schwab As drummer for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Ringo often sat in with the Beatles in Hamburg; now he sits up straight in an office delivering investment-counsel gobbledygook to up-and-comers as the menacing piano line of "Money (That's What I Want)" bangs in the background. Of all the Beatles' official recordings, their 1963 cover of Barrett Strong's 1960 original (the first real Motown record; there's a blood-and-guts account of the making of the Detroit template in Raynoma Gordy Singleton's "Berry, Me and Motown," often translated as "Bury Me in Motown") was perhaps the only one to capture the spirit of the Hamburg cauldron -- capture it, and heave it at the world. Whenever I hear the Beatles' version, aiming, it seems for its whole length, at John's scream "I WANT TO BE FREE!" I know that nothing could ever be better. I hope Ringo made a good deal: The commercial is a reminder, or, for those who haven't heard the record, a clue.
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