This year marks the 25th anniversary of the release of the Beatles`
landmark album ”Sgt. Pepper`s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
More Top Picks Best Radon Detectors
One could mark the occasion with serious discussion of the record`s impact on popular culture, music-making and production techniques. Or one could doo-wop.
That`s what Big Daddy did. Best known for setting contemporary hits to
`50s arrangements-from Vanilla Ice`s ”Ice, Ice Baby” to Chuck Berry`s
”Johnny B. Goode,” for instance-the eight-person Los Angeles band set out on an ambitious task.
It recast the entire album in `50s style, tracking ”Sgt. Pepper`s” from its opening title song-done as an a cappella doo-wop piece-to the Buddy Holly takeoffs on ”A Day in the Life.”
”One of the guys in the band came up with the idea a few years ago,”
says Tom Lee, a Detroit native who moved to California in 1980 and co-founded Big Daddy in 1983. ”We decided to do it all in the same order, the same sequence, even the same space between songs as the Beatles.”
The result is a scream. The song treatments are ingenious, among them the schmoozy Johnny Mathis treatment of ”With a Little Help from My Friends”; a Jerry Lee Lewis sendup of ”Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”; ”Fixing a Hole” a la Dion`s ”The Wanderer”; a beat poem reading of ”Within You, Without You,” and ”For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” done to the melody of James Darren`s ”Goodbye Cruel World.”