VARIOUS ARTISTS
Stax Does The Beatles
(Stax/Concord)
(NO DEPRESSION.NET) -- Of course it makes sense. The Beatles, and most of their fellow British Invaders, swiped liberally from American blues and R&B figures, some of whom remain better known today in the U.K. than ever they were here in the States.
And, of course, there was a long tradition of covering popular songs.
The problem is that the early Beatles source material swung, and if the Beatles themselves didn't always manage to swing, they made up for it with a kind of feral intensity. When they became songwriters, they became pop songwriters (and then psychedelic songwriters, and then Wings), and most of those songs don't swing at all unless one beats them into shape.
Despite its simple and clever cover art, Stax Does The Beatles does not revive an old and clever cover album; it is a modern repackaging of stray tracks, and does listeners few favors. Unless you own a skating rink.
If everything here were as muscular as Otis Redding's alternate take of "Day Tripper," this would be a spectacular assemblage. But it's not. Most of this is instrumental music from Booker T & The MGs, or the Mar-Kays, or Isaac Hayes ("Something"), and mostly it serves to remind how banal the Beatles could be. Steve Cropper's "With A Little Help From My Friends" is, at least, vigorous enough to sound like the backing track for a singer who didn't make the session.
But with all due respect to the venerated Booker T and friends, their instrumentals sound far too much like an exercise in demonstrating how many easy songs could be recorded in a three-hour session to fill out an album. Too many.
The vocals tracks are scarcely better. Young Carla Thomas' "Yesterday" (taken from Live At The Bohemian Caverns, a sketchy 1967 live in LA album reissued last year) serves principally to remind us how much a singer must bring to a simple pop song to make it sing. And how vapid that particular piece of the canon is, a precursor to Willie Nelson's "On The Road Again." (Ray Price, at least, managed to wring something out of the song, but he was in his 70s when he cut it.) That "Yesterday" is repeated as a Bar-Kays' instrumental only amplifies the insult.
The obscure John Gary Williams' take on "My Sweet Lord" is, at least, curious up until he skips the "hari kari" interlude for a sermon. It's almost something.
But mostly these Memphis legends treat the Beatles' music as so much white bread, and forget to place a heavy layer of barbeque atop it so it can soak up that greasy goodness.
-- GRANT ALDEN
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Grant Alden