Bad Vibrations

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.

I read the news today, oh boy, about a lucky man who (thought he) made the grade. DJ-producer Clayton Counts has been hit with a multi-million-dollar lawsuit by lawyers representing the Beatles’ publisher, EMI, for his unauthorized mash-up of two of the most revered pop albums of the 1960s: the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

EMI’s lawyers have issued a cease-and-desist order, demanding that Counts, a Texas-born DJ, reveal the IP addresses of anyone who has downloaded The Beachles, as he dubbed the mix. Counts has refused, contending that he is not making money off the online release. In a defiant statement that sounds like a mash-up of taunts from old Jimmy Cagney crime movies, he says, “Come and get me. You cannot take my life, Capitol Recordings.” (Capitol is owned by EMI.)

Here we go again. In 2004, DJ Danger Mouse remixed Jay-Z’s Black Album with the Beatles’ White Album to produce an acclaimed hybrid: The Grey Album. That same year, dj BC produced a giddy, eccentric mash of Beatles and Beastie Boys songs called The Beastles. Despite a great deal of legal wrangling, The Grey Album and The Beastles remain available online. So does The Beachles, although listening to Counts’ remix, it should be music fans, as opposed to industry lawyers, that take umbrage. Counts’s 14-song collection is a series of head-on collisions of Beatles and Beach Boys tunes that defy continued listening.

The Beach Boys-Beatles mish-mash comes as a disappointment, for a concept like The Beachles would have seemed natural. The two groups were, after all, the reigning pop deities of the ’60s. After the Beatles released the gloriously seductive song cycle Rubber Soul in 1965, Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson understood that pop music had matured, evolving from the happy assault of jukebox hits to the contemplative album format. Having recently suffered a nervous breakdown, Wilson retired to the studio, vowing to create a masterpiece.

The Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds. (EMI Music Canada)

While the rest of his band was on tour, singing surfing hits to screaming fans in Japan, Brian hired L.A.’s best studio pros and a violin section to perform a series of intricate and innovative pop symphonies that would become Pet Sounds. For the song I Know I Wasn’t Made for These Times, Wilson employed an electro-theremin — a precursor to the Moog synthesizer that emulated the spooky theramin sounds heard in 1950s sci-fi movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still.

With the music in place, 24-year-old Wilson invited a jingle writer named Tony Asher to his Beverly Hills home, where Wilson dictated adolescent memories through a haze of marijuana smoke. Asher — whose first assignments after Pet Sounds included composing jingles for Barbie and Chatty Cathy TV commercials — went home to construct plausible song scenarios. Given Wilson’s state, there were fumbled hand-offs: Asher turned Wilson’s teenage crush on a high-school cheerleader named Caroline Mountain into an achingly tender ballad called Caroline, I Know. Wilson misheard the lyric as Caroline No. (The latter version prevailed.)

Beach Boys lead singer Mike Love hated Pet Sounds, refusing to participate in some of the recordings. The album was a commercial disappointment, never rising above number 10 on the U.S. charts. Paul McCartney, however, pronounced Wilson’s ambitious work “the album of all time.” In the late autumn of that year, the Beatles embarked on a recording that would also be autobiographical in theme and boldly experimental in form. The first two new songs that McCartney and John Lennon wrote were Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane; they were schoolboy reveries decorated with bits of musical colour (mellotrons, hand bells, cellos) inspired by Pet Sounds.

While recording the songs, Lennon and McCartney imagined creating an album that might function as a memoir of their early days in Liverpool. Alas, contractual agreements required the band put out a single in early 1967. That became the two-sided hit Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever. With such prime material gone, the group reluctantly abandoned plans for their childhood opus. Soon after that, McCartney happened upon the idea of the Beatles posing as vaudeville entertainers: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Music critic Ian MacDonald called the resulting album — which contained the famous, five-day studio construct A Day in the Life — “a shrewd fusion of Edwardian variety orchestra and contemporary heavy rock.”

Unlike Pet Sounds, which took a decade to earn its reputation, Sgt. Pepper’s was immediately proclaimed a masterpiece upon its release in June 1967. Pop culture critic Kenneth Tynan went so far as to call Sgt. Pepper’s “a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization.”

The Beatles pose with the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album in 1967. (John Pratt/Keystone/Getty Images)

The ambition and daring that distinguishes Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s makes listening to The Beachles impossible; Counts’s remix contains none of the delicacy of Pet Sounds or any of the wit and bounce of Sgt. Pepper’s. The first tracks from both albums (Wouldn’t It Be Nice and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, respectively) are sped up and then randomly mixed into Wouldn’t Sgt. Petsound Be Nice, with little feel for logic or flow.

When a mash succeeds, as in dj BC’s remix of the Beastie Boys’ Triple Trouble and The Beatles’ Day Tripper, the result (Tripper Trouble) is an invigorating hybrid that succeeds as a unique, evolved work. The Beastles and The Grey Album represent the work of inspired DJ interpreters, whereas The Beachles is a series of musical mishaps as mad and incoherent as their titles suggest (God Only Knows What I’d Be Within You or I’m Fixing It, Dayhole).

Hopefully, the punishing failure that is The Beachles won’t curb other musical border raids. No Beastie Boys enthusiast should be without The Beastles, and one of best music videos of all time has to be Walk This Way, Run-DMC’s 1986 rap-versus-rock tussle with Aerosmith. Similarly, Miles Davis’s most rewarding album from the ’70s might have been the one he put out posthumously in 1998: Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis 1969-1974 is a collage of familiar Davis material remixed by musician-producer Bill Laswell.

The Davis remix was authorized by CBS Music. In a similar fashion, this fall, EMI is releasing Love, an authorized Beatles remix album. Created by famed Beatles producer Sir George Martin and his son Giles, Love mashes up Beatles tunes with other Beatles tunes. (The Martins have used 130 Beatles tracks in all.)

It’s quite likely that in the near future, online releases like The Beastles, The Grey Album and The Beachles will also be available in music stores with the full blessing of the music industry. On Sept. 19, Warner Music Group signed a deal with YouTube Inc., the online video-sharing site, giving YouTube users access to Warner music videos for use in creating their own video clips. In return, Warner Music will share in online advertising revenue generated by YouTube.

Gerd Leonhard, chief executive of Sonific, a U.S. digital licensing company, recently told the New York Times that the Warner-YouTube agreement demonstrates that “the record companies are realizing their game is completely lost in terms of controlling the market. … If they don’t play ball now, they’re going to sit by themselves while everyone else is using their content for nothing.”

Of course, even if DJs receive the music industry’s permission to mix and match artists and genres, the resulting music will only be as good as the DJs themselves. I once asked Steely Dan co-founders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker whether they felt guilty that the bass line for their 1973 hit Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number had been appropriated from Song for My Father, a standard written by jazz pianist Horace Silver. Fagen and Becker roared with laughter.

“You mean steal?” Fagen grinned. “Everyone borrows and steals. We took from Dylan and Duke Ellington, just like Dylan and Ellington took from people they liked. Everyone does it. The only trick is making what you steal work for you.”

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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