The Moments - Rocky Racoon (sic)
Beatles covers come in several varieties, not unlike the many flavors of 'Celestial Seasonings', a popular brand of tea (both herbal and non-herbal). Below, I have attempted to uncoil the varied viscera of Beatles Cover Songs for your consideration, which I did all by myself by the way, due to a recent shake up at Deadly/Death Headquarters, related to cross-cultural friction and/or serrano ham, carbonated beverages and 2 (frankly, overpriced) camisoles. It's a long story, but the good news is that it's the long story you just read in this paragraph, so we're about up to speed as it happens. How have you been? That's great.
'Know Your Beatles Covers' - An Irrefutable, Definitive, Maybe Partial List
The On-The-Nose, Reverent Tribute
The ‘Maybe People Will Think We Wrote This’ Approach
The Stripped-down & Spartan Singer/Songwriter/Turtlenecker
The “Major to Minor” Dirgification Approach
The Sweeping, Wordless Orchestral
The ‘What If The Beatles Were Black’
As you read the above, the dilemma becomes clear – you’re dealing with source material that’s already quite good, and hard to improve upon – but further exacerbating the issue (that’s when your ex gives you a handjob, fyi) is the fact that many of the approaches to revisting the material are fundamentally flawed. For example, the ‘Fat Dude With A Moog’ approach to covering the Beatles. It isn’t the corpulence of the synthesizer operator that’s the flaw in this approach of course. Fat people are a vital part of the music ecosystem in that they are very easy to outrun which is helpful as, with the exception of a small group of outliers, musicians are invariably destitute, amoral thieves. The role of the obese in the music industry is to be robbed and then outrun by lanky and poor musicians, as you’d already know if you’d paid any attention to the symbolism playing at a subplot of anarchy and the rejection of free-market ideals in The Beatles’ animated classic ‘Yellow Submarine’.
With respect to our readers, however, lists aren’t the only way to present data. Some folks are visual thinkers, which is why the following was prepared, in an attempt to explain the complicated atlas making up the vast world of attempts to reimagine or just plain ruin the work of the Beatles.
As for the song at hand - well, this - along with Stevie Wonder's cover of 'We Can Work It Out', Al Green's 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand', and assuredly countless others, fall firmly into the magical holy fuck quadrant of Beatles song-covering. Now, I wasn't invited to join 'The Moments', but come with me, if you will, on a magical journey of imagination to a land where the first 2 bars of this song got played at least 8 more times before kicking into the verse. Because, Jesus H. Criss Angel Mindfreak on a bamboo spire (bamboo is renewable, we’re trying to make our exclamations a bit more environmentally friendly around here), is that first 2 bars ever wonderful. Perhaps this humble barfer of internet opinions is a bit overzealous when it comes to snares, but if my face made the sound that snare makes in The Moments’ cover of ‘Rocky Racoon’, I'd pay people to slap me just like your deviant uncle Jacob. Anyhow, there’s a great story behind Rocky Racoon too, but what the fuck dude, just read about it on Wikipedia. I spent forever on this Venn diagram and I’m tired.
