My Life as a Series of Demos - Part 8: Mutation

Part Eight: Mutation

I’ve talked about WBCN a few times, and mentioned the team of Tom Couch and Eddie Gorodetsky. One of Tom’s contributions, in the early 70’s, was a re-edit of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” done in such a way that the song sounded the same but the lyrics were completely mixed up. I believe he called it “Woodwegian Nor”.

Being a Beatles-obsessive myself, I was really impressed with that piece and tried a number of times to re-create it when I was first learning to edit tape at WMUA, and many years later when I had access to better technology, with varying degrees of success. It wasn’t until the studio acquired ProTools that I was able to give it the amount of fine-tuning and polish that it needed.

Tom’s original was brilliant, but of course limited by having to physically splice the different pieces together. So the result, at least as I remember it, was quite funny but not really smooth. My goal had always been to make a version so seamless that listeners wouldn’t notice anything had been done unless they were paying attention to the lyrics, and I finally succeeded.

In the process I learned that there’s a lot more going on musically in “Norwegian Wood” than I’d originally noticed: the instrumentation does change slightly from verse to verse and bridge to bridge. So when bits from different sections are edited together there is some discontinuity here and there. But it’s fairly subtle and again not really noticeable unless the listener is paying attention.

I called my finished version “Norwogian Weed”.

Another piece of Tom’s involved messing around with “The End” from The Beatles’ Abbey Road album. All I really remember is that he looped that short piano bit just before “...And in the end...” so that it went on for quite some time, and re-edited the drum solo in some strange way.

Anyway, I swiped that basic idea as well and did a number of ‘extended’ versions of “The End” over the years, finally using ProTools to come up with a real extravaganza called “Love from Abbey Road,” which includes virtually every “I love you” from The Beatles’ discography, two different count-downs (10, 9, 8, etc.) culled from Beatles songs and edited together , and lots of fun studio trickery.

Over the years I created a few other re-edits/mash-ups of Beatles material and decided to put them all together as an album. This became Mutation.

You can listen to and/or download the album here:

MUTATION

and here are some bonus tracks that came later:

“Please Please Speed,” layers the Beatles’ vocals from “Please Please Me” onto an instrumental version by Link Wray, giving the song a very hyper, New Wave kind of feel:

Please Please Speed

“Hey Jude-athon” was created in August 2008 in honor of the 40th anniversary of the release of “Hey Jude”. It consists of the original recording, but with the “Na, na, na...” ending looped so that the entire track runs for over 22 minutes. Not something you (or anyone else) would want to hear more than once, if that, but here it is:

Hey Jude-athon
(The file is too big for the free version of box.net so you'll have to download it.)

I sent copies of Mutation to various college radio stations around the country, as well as uploading it to the net. The response was really quite amazing. Stations were playing it (It actually reached #2 on the Princeton College station playlist for about fifteen minutes), people were emailing requests for it and others were re-posting the download info on other websites. I’ve seen it posted on sites based in Japan, Brazil and Russia, among other places.

Mutation even received a passing mention in the New York Times in 2006, which completely floored me. The article was about the then-forthcoming Cirque du Soleil-Beatles show, Love, and the author was comparing the remixes of Beatles songs Giles and George Martin had created for the show with the work of some of the ‘underground’ remixers such as myself. The article is still available online here (fifth paragraph down, if you please - sixth if you count the opening line as a separate paragraph):

NYTIMES

I contacted the author to thank him for the mention, and he wrote back to tell me he’d given a CD compilation of various Beatles remixes, including some of mine, to Giles Martin. So who knows, maybe George Martin and even Paul McCartney have heard some of my work?

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And as long as we're talking about mash-ups and remixes, here's one more, featuring Michael Jackson and The Drifters (okay, a karaoke version of The Drifters):

The Way Broadway Makes Me Feel (Driftin' with Michael J.)