DISCLAIMER DEPT: This is very definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Also, the plot of the film contains rape, so consider this a trigger warning.

The closest cinematic relative to this film that springs to mind is the Death Wish series – as in those films, we’ve got an ordinary middle-class man pushed to a rampage of revenge in the face of police indifference to an assault on his loved ones, except unlike Charles Bronson he doesn’t keep doing it for roughly eight films, possibly because he’s not very good at it during this one.
Motorpsycho opens with a fishing sap (Steve Masters) neglecting his bikini-clad wife (the difficult-to-spell Arshalouis Aivazian) in favour of fish – eventually, she dives into the water in front of him, and when he weakly protests tells him “You’ve got the best there is on your line right now!” while laughing like an am-dram impression of someone laughing. We know from previous experience that this is setting up some kind of tragedy – in the Meyerverse, bad things happen to men who ignore their wives, and usually to the wives as well. According to the credits, this is all from an original story by Russ Meyer, James Griffiths and Hal Hopper, so we can expect the worst.
Cut to a transistor radio hanging off the handlebars of a motorbike, blaring out a theme we‘ll come to know intimately:

It’s a kind of vague surf-pop riff that blasts out whenever these three bikers are onscreen.  We first meet them on their way to Vegas – when suddenly leader Brahmin, answering his own strange impulses, swerves off to race into the desert, leading to this immortal dialogue between second in command Dante and third wheel Slick:

“Crazy!”
“Yeah, like Rasputin.”
“Cool it, Slick! The Brahmin is a very righteous one.”
“The Brahmin is a flip and you know it.”
“Hey, you’re real funny, you know? Look, Slick, if you don’t dig what’s happening, Disneyland is like 200 miles back that way.”
“Oh don’t wig out man, I’m hip, I’m hip.”
This pretty much sets up everything we need to know.
Brahmin, the aforementioned flip – played by Steve Oliver – is the standard softly-spoken and well-read psychopath who it also turns out is a disturbed Vietnam veteran (SPOILERS). According to the back of the box, it’s a medical discharge, presumably for his psychotic tendencies – whether that’s actually mentioned during the film is another matter. Dante (Joseph Cellini), meanwhile, is established here with his almost lovestruck sigh of ’crazy!’ as another standard gang trope – the weaselly, oleaginous right-hand bastard, eagerly jumping into whatever twisted business his leader sets up and then denying responsibility when it eventually catches up with him. Slick, played by Timothy Scott – the far-out druggie/hippie trope and owner of the ever-present transistor, which he keeps clamped to his ear like a security blanket – is set up as having reservations with the chain of command. With a different character, this might lead to some sort of fight for position of alpha male, but Slick is essentially gormless, if not harmless – he’s the one who fatally shoots Ruby’s husband later on and it’s him who leads the attack on the hapless fisherman.
This is after Brahmin, guided by who knows what, ends up at the fishing spot. The gang swiftly set to terrorising Arshalouis Aivazian (copied and pasted, spelling fans) and when the fisherman arrives to help, he’s beaten senseless. “Stick around, lady, you’re going to hate yourself in the morning!” snarls Brahmin, setting up the gang’s modus operandi.
Cut to Alex Rocco as stalwart veterinarian Cory Maddox, about to do some veterinarianining to a dog. Not a special dog, but Maddox will do his best anyway! That’s just the kind of veterinarian he is. His wife Gail, aka Holle K Winters, steps out of the car to visit a friend and runs smack bang into the bikers, who harass her menacingly until Maddox arrives and pushes Brahmin off his bike and into the dirt – Brahmin sits there, stewing and making a mental note of Maddox’s name, which is on the back of his vet van in big letters, as the camera suddenly reveals.

There’s a lot of slick editing in this film, particularly later, when the action is taking place inside moving vehicles and the scenes change with one truck passing another.
Cut to:

Shades of Lorna as Gail stews in the bed while Maddox crunches numbers with his shirt off. This isn’t the first time we’ll see Meyer making explicit callbacks to his earlier work – at least if you count the Reverend’s appearance in Mudhoney – and it won’t be the last. Like Frank Bolger’s turn as a fire-spitting preacher, this functions as an inversion of the earlier scene – while Lorna was dismissive and frustrated, Gail all but devours Maddox with her eyes:

It’s a nice moment – one that complicates the idea of the male gaze by having the female subject gazing back in active erotic appreciation of what she’s seeing. (We get to see a hairy chest and hear flies unzipping. In later films we’ll see entire prosthetic cocks the size of barber’s poles, and this kind of subtle effect will be lost.) The couple enjoy some pre-coital exposition about the biker gang, which is interrupted by a phone call about an urgent horse. It feels like an inverted Meyer trope – the seasoned Meyer viewer is presumably expecting Maddox to leap up and rush off to aid the beast, but instead he decides it can wait, although it does lead to some more exposition about how the horse’s owner is a rich older woman who wants into Maddox’s stalwart pants.
Here she is:

That top does not look comfortable. It seems to be made out of velour.
This is happening the next morning, as Maddox goes to look at the horse – which is clearly fine, as it’s all a ruse to bring him and his hairy chest out there – and ends up being tempted by Sharon Lee’s wiles. Just as he’s looking interested, we cut back -
-and the bike gang are without warning in his house, terrorising his wife, all to the endless wail of Slick‘s transistor radio. Another director might have included scenes of Maddox leaving the house, or the bike gang breaking in, or something to build tension – to Meyer, that’s just flab. There’s a feeling of the bikers being summoned out of the ether like some hideous old testament punishment being visited upon Gail for her husband’s sins – it’s especially notable when the camera cuts from Brahmin forcing kisses on a screaming Gail to Maddox and Sharon Lee enjoying a long, illicit makeout session. It’s reminiscent of Lorna’s firebrand preaching against the evils of adultery, though Maddox barely puts a toe (or a tongue) into the forbidden water before having second thoughts and backing out.
“How sweet, how precious,” sneers Sharon’s character.
Maddox responds with a heartfelt “Yes, she is.”
A brief note – during the home invasion sequence that’s alternating with Maddox’s temptation, we get a bizarre scene where Slick rings up his mother on the Maddox phone to reassure her that he’s all right and his biker friends aren’t leading him into trouble. It’s a shot of uneasy black humour as well as an oddly chilling moment – plus it serves to set up an important strand of the plot, as Slick tells his ma that Brahmin was in the army and is teaching them ‘army, uh, things… judo and camping out’. For those who haven’t had the benefit of the back-of-the-box blurb, it’s the first time Brahmin’s time in Vietnam is mentioned. The effect it’s had on him is made queasily explicit when he alludes to the upcoming assault on Gail as ‘the old Viet Cong procedure’.
And then we cut from this:

To this:

That’s probably the first time Meyer does one of those, but he’ll pull similar tricks later in his career. It’s a weird moment, like a frat-boy version of one of Alan Moore’s ironic scene transitions. It’s jarring in both the sheer tastelessness and in the way it jerks you right out of the immersion, throwing in the viewer’s face that they’re watching a film, that there’s a man behind the camera making strict editing choices. (Although Meyer was never one to hide that fact.)

Ten or fifteen years later, or even one film earlier, there wouldn’t be a cut at all – but it’s unlikely that this is a sign of Meyer trying to make himself more mainstream so much as more tinkering with the formula, trying to perfect the drive-in alchemy and turn more empty seats into gold.
Anyway, Maddox has a brief conversation about horses and their upkeep with the duck hunter – the what now? Yes, it’s F. Rufus Owens, back for more of this sort of thing:

This time he’s a petrol pump attendant who talks about horses at every opportunity. But suddenly his fascinating horse gab is drowned out by the roar of the bikers coming from the direction of Maddox’s place, which sends the vet barrelling off to confirm his worst fears – an ambulance taking his wife away from the scene, with a kindly doctor and loudmouthed, misogynist Sherriff in tow.
The Sherriff looks familiar:

It’s Russ, playing a real charmer. Having copped an eyeful of the near-comatose Gail as she lies on the stretcher, he assures the distraught Maddox that “nothing happened to her a woman ain’t built for”, referring to her assailants as “loverboys” and implying that it was all just a party that got out of hand. It’s a rape-myth hat trick. Is it another possible mea culpa for Lorna? Rocco’s rage is directed as much at the attitudes that the Sherriff is spouting as the man himself, and in 1965 there would have been a lot of drive-in patrons who thought along similar lines. That said – did Meyer ever mea? Or did he just sink his teeth into one of the film’s prime bastard roles?
Needless to say, this isn’t a sympathetic portrayal of law enforcement – Maddox’s realisation that the Sherriff isn’t planning to do anything but sit on his rear is what prompts him to go outside the law and turn vigilante. Here’s where we enter Death Wish Valley as he swears to his wife that he’ll track down the bikers himself, and from here on Alex Rocco is a snarling, black-eyed, knot-browed ball of constant fury.
Meanwhile, we never see Gail again. Her work here is done, and her absence is a sore spot by the film’s end, when Maddox is bantering with Haji in a way that wouldn’t look out of place on Moonlighting.
Speaking of Haji:

That’s the first of two beautiful bits of editing work, where we switch scenes from of vehicle-set conversation to another by having the two vehicles pass on the road. Inside the second vehicle:

It’s Haji as Ruby and her cantankerous midden of a husband, a sweat-soaked ball of flesh played by Coleman Francis, tearing strips off each other in a beaten-down old truck coughing its way through the desert to nowhere.
She “ain’t worth a lead dollar as company and [is] four times worse in the sack!”
He “talk[s] about the sack – don’t you know you can’t push a car with it’s hood up?”
Or possibly “can’t push a cow with a hard-on?” Or some combination of the two – it’s hard to hear with Haji’s accent and the droning roar of the truck drowning everything out. Anyway, just as he’s about to remonstrate physically they blow a tire. She walks off for a contemptuous slash, leaving Francis to manage alone, which is when the bikers show up in another blast of surf-rock, black shades over their eyes like robot insects.

Francis makes the mistake of mentioning his war service – in WWI – and while Dante and Slick just make some cheesy jokes about Valley Forge (“He was with George in that crazy rowboat!”), Brahmin’s crazy button is pushed (although that suggests that it’s ever not pushed) and he sucker-punches the old man. During the punch-up, Slick discovers a rifle among the couple‘s meagre belongings, which is an accident waiting to happen and it doesn’t have long to wait. No sooner has Haji returned to the scene – and Francis attempted to pimp her out in order to protect his own skin – when Slick accidentally shoots it off into Francis’ belly and kills him dead.
“It was an accident, Brahmin!” mewls Slick, but Brahmin isn’t having it.
“That’s gonna sound real good when they stash us in the Iron Hotel!”
Haji makes a run for it, and Brahmin demonstrates what will become his trademark:

That cold, crazed air of menace that fits incongruously with the poncho but perfectly with the gun on the arm – this is where Steve Oliver comes into his own, so much so that he ended up making various films with titles like Werewolves On Wheels or Cycle Psycho. (He’s best known for a role as Lee Webber in old-time soap Peyton Place, though I have no idea if he rode a motorcycle or had a thousand yard stare during that.) We’ll be seeing more of this as the rifle becomes his tool for every conceivable situation – he seems to have infinite ammo clips for it to boot.
He shoots the fleeing Haji in the head, seemingly fatally, and then shoots up the three bikes – we get a nice shot of the petrol pooling on the sand like blood, although the budget presumably wasn’t high enough for him to toss in a match. With their tracks covered – kind of – the three drive off in Haji’s clapped-out truck, immediately passing Maddox, who’s driving out in the desert to start his quest for revenge, although where he’s actually headed is anyone’s guess at this point. He seems to be driving around aimlessly.
It’s handled with another car-to-car cut, which gives the impression of one, long, uninterrupted stream of action from the duck hunter’s gas station on – Maddox to the ambulance, to Haji, to the bikers, back to Maddox again, without a moment’s let-up. Even the exposition scenes are happening in moving vehicles – everyone’s going somewhere fast, even if the destination is another brawl or shootout.
Maddox finds the bodies, and tends to Haji’s wound – the bullet just creased her skull, which is something that used to happen a lot before Hollywood discovered the magic healing properties of the shoulder. It’s a totally harmless movie concussion, although the way Haji elects to just walk it off – she has the self-proclaimed “constitution of a horse” – makes a great shorthand for her character. She just wants to head on to LA and leave it all behind, but she’s the only one who knows what the bikers’ new ride looks like so Maddox enlists-stroke-kidnaps her as an unwilling sidekick, setting up the dynamic – he needs her for vengeance, she needs him to get out of the desert, together they fight crime.

Cut to the bikers, in need of gas, who stop at – coincidence! – the same gas station owned by the duck hunter. “What’s with Joe Gas Station?” opines Dante, spooked. “He keeps pinnin’ us like we owe him some bread or something!”
“The cat knows NOTHING!” growls Brahmin, and sure enough, Joe Gas Station accepts their bread without comment – until the sound of sirens intrudes. Joe Gas Station helpfully explains that it’s the roadblock up ahead, but the bikers are already driving off in the other direction, right into Maddox and Haji, leading to a truck-on-truck chase down a side road into the depths of the desert – until Brahmin decides to cut things short with the rifle, shooting out one of Maddox’s tires and forcing him and Haji to take cover behind a gnarled, dead tree.
Brahmin shoots at them for a while, then runs out of ammo (although presumably there‘s more in the truck, as he‘s blasting it off at anything that moves soon enough). He figures the desert will do the job and drives off, leaving Maddox cackling because Brahmin and company are heading right into the Cauldron - “it’s a dead end… an old abandoned pit mine – some sort of a natural crater nearby. The Indians used to call it the Cauldron. They believed it was a place where their spirit gods made magic – to cloud or clear the heads of men.”
The second Maddox finished this speech, a rubber snake leaps on his ankle, leading him to go absolutely mental. This is what to do when bitten by a snake – first grab the head of the nearest person while thrusting a knife in their general direction and then BELLOW THE FOLLOWING:

“CUT THE FANG MARKS OPEN HERE TAKE THE KNIFE CUT IT TAKE THE KNIFE CUT IT CUT THE FANG MARKS OPEN CUT IT MAKE LITTLE X’S CUT EM LOOK AT IT AND DO IT all right all right take it easy go ahead CUT THE FANG MARKS LOOK AT IT TWO X’S SOME MORE SOME MORE all right put the knife down all right SUCK IT SUCK OUT THE POISON SUCK IT SOME MORE SOME MORE SUCK IT OOOUT SUCK IT SOME MORE SOME MORE SPIT IT OUT SPIT IT OUT SOME MORE”

Haji gobs out the venom in a spectacularly bloody money shot that immediately cuts to Brahmin spitting out a mouthful of water as the bikers realise they’re lost in the desert. Cue this memorable exchange between Slick and Brahmin:
“Man, this is really nowhere.”
“What did you expect, dildo, Palm Springs?”
“Lets cut out. Lets go back.”
“And parlay this whole thing right into a cyanide suite? However, friend Slick, if you want to cut out, man, make it.”
“You mean it?”

OF COURSE HE DOESN’T MEAN IT, although he lets Slick walk far enough down the road to draw a bead on him. Having shot Slick in the head, Brahmin pumps a bullet into the fallen transistor radio, as if Slick won’t be fully dead while it lives. Dante, faced with this new evidence, decides he’s sticking with Brahmin all the way. “Well then, my loyal Patroclus,” says sudden Greek scholar Brahmin, “let’s get this chariot rolling.” The Patroclus reference is easy enough to decode, but then Brahmin follows up with “You first, Wompus”, and frankly we have no idea what that might mean. Anyway, it draws some interesting parallels with Faster, Pussycat – of which more next time.
Eventually, when the truck runs out of gas and the pair realise they’re trapped in the Cauldron, Brahmin decides to set up an ambush for “the horse-croaker” – little realising that he’s still slumped at the rattlesnake tree, being fed water by Haji. It’s an opportunity for Maddox and Haji to strike a few sparks off one another:
“I should’ve taken you back to town.”
“And the dog should’ve chased the rabbit instead of stopping for a tree.”
Maddox’s quest for vengeance compared there to a urinating dog. He seems to have forgotten it himself, considering all the goo-goo eyes he’s throwing Haji’s way and the “what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this” conversation they have to the tune of a romantic saxaphone. Haji gives the answer in a long speech about her botched marriage and the good-time-girl wilderness years – it’s the kind of speech you’d expect to be delivered to Sam Spade in some smoky joint in the heart of noirtown, and it seems strangely incongruous under a boiling desert sun. It does serve to make Ruby Bonner the most well-realised female character we’ve seen so far. Possibly the most well-realised character full stop, depending on what you thought of Calif McKinney.
Another cut – (and this is as good a time as any to point out that most of the cuts in this movie come with twanging guitar, like in the Batman TV show) – to Brahmin and Dante on a rock, gazing out at the desert and waiting for Maddox to arrive. Dante, realising he’s not coming, wants to split – Brahmin tells him to wait for the choppers.
“What?”
“I said we wait for the choppers! They’ll be here soon – at 1700 hours. We’ll show those commie bastards! We’ll show you, you red robbers! You think you’re safe out here, huh? You think you’re safe out in this stinking rice paddy, huh?” By this stage, Brahmin is descending into a passable imitation of John Cleese. “Why don’t you stick around, you… scum? Stick around, you lousy (unintelligible)! B company’s gonna shaft you royal!”

Don’t mention the war! Dante concludes that Daddy’s hat’s fallen off and scarpers, walking back in the direction of Haji and Maddox. Maddox isn’t doing so well himself – obviously having seen the rushes, he’s eager to outdo Steve Oliver’s performance with some high-quality delirious shouting of his own. Maddox thrashes around, gibbering about the freezing cold and re-enacting earlier dialogue, until Haji cuddles up with him under the blankets, which means they’re both asleep when Dante returns and tries to steal their truck. He has to change the tire first, which makes an incredible amount of noise, waking Haji up, and leading to Joseph Cellini going for the psycho-acting trifecta in his wheedling attempts to convince her that it was all the other two, that he had nothing to do with it. “You could explain to the fuzz, you could tell them everything! You could save me!” he pleads – then his face changes. “Or you could put me in the joint…”
“I’m going to have to kill you! I don’t want to! But I’m gonna have to!” he whines, still trying to convince her of his blamelessness even as he advances on her with some kind of pointy stick, or possibly a tyre jack. When the topic changes to what a groovy chick she is, Haji seizes her moment, and her dress:

“You don’t want to kill me – you want to make love to me!”
It’s a moment of almost-camp that turns nightmarish when Dante throws aside the stick and leaps on her, and we get a very disturbing minute of Haji struggling underneath him while Maddox, lit like Satan, coos and cackles to his wife in the depths of some wet fever dream. When Haji scrabbles for the fallen knife and plunges it into Dante’s back, Maddox reacts as if he’s been stabbed himself. We’re left with Haji, half-naked and sobbing in long shot – and then the scene changes to morning, the romantic saxaphone drifts back in and the fever’s passed.
Haji’s cut up about the killing, but Maddox only cares about revenge for his wife. “And you’re doing this for her?” asks Haji, which is a good question but one that Maddox immediately brushes aside.
The two pass Slick’s corpse – “two down, one to go” growls Maddox in his best anticipation of Ahnoldt – and then enter the Cauldron, where Brahmin has presumably been going madder and madder, neither eating nor drinking, presumably just voiding his bowels where he sits as the hours pass. Maddox and Haji get as far as the abandoned truck before stopping to get out and take a look around, which leads to Haji immediately catching a bullet in the shoulder. Is this the transition point where bullets harmlessly creasing the skull switch to bullets harmlessly impacting the shoulder? Possibly, but Maddox still has to drag her under fire to the nearest bit of cover – which fortuitously has an open crate full of dynamite in it.

Maddox pleads for a truce to get Haji to a hospital, but Brahmin has him confused with the Red Army and keeps him pinned down. “Hey comrade! Why ain’t you shooting? You’re out of ammo! That’s it! You shot your wad!” He stands up, screaming at the heavens: “Here, ya red schmuck! Here‘s a target for ya!” It’s only when, during his leisurely stroll down the rock face to shoot Maddox close range, he yells about grenades for some reason that the penny drops and Maddox realises he has several sticks of dynamite with him. After that, it’s a race against time – will Maddox finish his homemade bomb before Brahmin finishes his crazed rambling? It’s a close run thing, but Maddox launches the dynamite just in time to blow Brahmin into unidentifiable chunks in the middle of the word “motherfucker”.

After that, it’s all over bar the shouting. Maddox has laid his demons to rest and drives off into the sunset with HajI and some raunchy sax. Gail’s view of these events remains unrecorded. LE FIN AVEC TOYOTA.

Maddox is an oddly unheroic lead, when all’s said and done – he doesn’t do much beyond kidnap Haji, get bitten by a snake and throw the climactic dynamite, and even that only after begging to be allowed to leave with Haji and let Brahmin get on with whatever he wants to do. Maybe this was responding to a yen at the time for less certain protagonists, or maybe it was just odd plotting – the tough, meaty and active role for Haji does feel like a prelude to the female leads of Faster, Pussycat. Meyer’s almost there – next time we’ll see him pull out all the stops.
DESIGNATED SAP: Frank the fisherman is the closest, although F. Rufus Owens surely has a sap in him waiting to get out as soon as the proper plot comes along.

BECAUSE YOU CAN DIE THERE: The first few minutes of the film are spent on an actual road – from then on, it’s all desert, and it’s full of snakes, dynamite and crazed Vietnam vets to boot.

OF ITS TIME: Transistor radios.

Disturbed Viet Nam veterans.

Bop talk.

ONE-HIT WONDERS: Steve Masters and Arshalouis Aivazian (copied and pasted again) as Frank the fisherman and his wife. Also, Holle K Winters as Gail. So when she vanishes from the picture 23 minutes in, she vanishes from recorded cinema, which makes it even worse somehow.

FAMILIAR FACES: Move over, Frank Bolger – it’s F! RUFUS! OWENS!

WHERE’S RUSS?: He’s the Sherriff!

BREAST COUNT: One, glimpsed briefly during the urgent horse conversation. (Not the one with F. Rufus Owens.)

NEXT TIME: Haji returns, and she’s brought company. It’s the one we’ve been waiting for – Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

DISCLAIMER DEPT: This is very definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Also, the plot of the film contains rape, so consider this a trigger warning.

Much like Wild Gals Of The Naked West, it’s three and a quarter minutes before we see anyone’s face. Up until then, all the acting is done with feet – a pair of shoes stamping drunkenly through the dust as their owner is hurled out of a local cathouse, mashing the accelerator to drive a beat-up truck home and then, when another (female) pair of feet refuse to let them in, using the same pedal to send the truck careening into the side of the house. That does it – the second pair of feet opens up the door and lets the drunk in, whereupon we finally see a human face.
And here it is:

Hal Hopper, back for the rematch in the role of foul-mouthed drunk, bully, sadist and slow-burning homicidal maniac Sydney Brenshaw. The first thing he does on forcing his way through the door is to force himself on his wife, played by Antoinette Christiani. Throughout, this film presents marital rape as something unambiguously wrong, motivated by cruelty – not a private matter of a husband taking his rights, which was the prevailing attitude in 1960s America, and would remain so until South Dakota criminalised spousal rape in 1975. (The last state to do so was North Carolina in 1993, although many states continued to regard it as a lesser crime. The marital rape exemption was abolished in England and Wales as late as 1991. All this is from Wikipedia.) It’s not the only progressive stance from Meyer in this film, as we’ll see.
On that note, enter another pair of feet – John Furlong’s – kicking a can along the road and into yet another pair of feet, or rather gams, belonging to Rena Horten. Furlong plays Calif McKinney, a well-dressed hobo with a ridiculous name that belies his dark secret – he’s not from California but actually from Manslaughterville, Michigan where he just spent five years in the clink on a charge of killing a strike-breaker with his super fists of death. (Meyer’s fairly hot on socialism in this one. In later films we’ll see him take an opposite view. And how.) Rena Horten plays Eula, deaf-mute quasi-psychic child-woman and part of the clan in charge of the aforementioned brothel. Also entering the scene to lay some much-needed exposition on Furlong are Lorna Maitland and the astonishing Sam Hanna:

Half-rooster, half-bear and all man or manlike substance, Hanna cavorts through the picture – there’s no other word for what he does apart from cavort, and he does nothing apart from it, so there we go. He cavorts. Occasionally he also ruts on the floor or does a spit-take, but both of these fall within the bracket of ‘cavorting’. The matriarch of the clan is:

Princess Livingston, in her biggest Meyer role. A good ten minutes of the ninety-three minute film consists of:

And occasionally:

They have a good time, those hillbilly sex workers.

Princess Livingston is probably the most vibrant female presence in the film, and certainly the strongest – Horten gets the opportunity to be otherworldly and adorable, and Maitland is left with little to do apart from act sleazy and flash sneers and skin in equal measure. The brothel feels like a character in itself, with each of these three playing different parts of its psyche; it’s where characters go to get drunk and display their inner selves. Even the camera takes strange, skewed angles and positions inside it.
Anyway, Princess Livingston treats Furlong to a long, cool drink of exposition before he heads on his way. It’s the depression (pronounced de-pression), prohibition is in full swing although nobody seems to care and jobs are incredibly scarce, although there’s one up the road working for Kindly Stuart Lancaster and his niece Antoinette Christiani. But he should watch out for evil Hal Hopper, who put the last farm hand in the hospital. (Until further notice, we’re adopting the time-honoured technique of referring to characters by their actor names.)
After getting the job despite several dark warnings from Lancaster, we get another indication of how crazy Hal Hopper is:

Throughout this film, he gets crazier by the reel. Hopper sinks his teeth into the role with gusto – perhaps relishing playing a character who’ll get the sticky end he deserves this time – and practically transforms into the Joker by the end of it, constantly laughing and pulling faces until he finally dies. SPOILER.

In the meantime, Kindly Stuart Lancaster has an attack of exposition and it’s made clear he’s not got long to live. (It’s also made clear that Furlong‘s come straight from the pen. SPOILER.) Meanwhile, Hopper heads down to the Exposition Cathouse to enjoy some exposition, and nothing else because he has no money. He attempts to pay via exposition, telling Lorna Maitland all about his big plans for inheriting the farm and selling it once Lancaster kicks the bucket, but Maitland isn’t buying. There’s so much exposition in this film that its value has dropped through the floor. This is how the depression started in the first place – too much exposition.
Rena Horten loves him for some reason – she’s the only one who does – but because Hopper can’t respond when someone actually wants him, he pushes her in the river and cackles insanely. Horten looks confused for a minute and then pulls this face:

Clearly that river is filled with deadly Joker Venom! Hal Hopper is the Joker I tell you! Where’s Batman when you need him?
Things barrel on. Furlong has the hots for Christiani but can’t do anything about that, or about Hopper’s constant needling, because if he punches a man with his deadly fists it’s murder. He visits the cathouse to get his needs met, but Hopper comes in and wilts his erection with a single drunken cackle or possibly some smilex gas. It’s notable that the film never punishes Princess Livingston’s family business – it’s never made out to even seem wrong, particularly. It’s just a fact of life in the town – while it could be read that Furlong visits in a moment of weakness and leaves once Hopper bursts in to cockblock him, it could also be read that he’s a regular customer for as long as it seems that he and Christiani will never end up together.
Moving on. Hopper is arrested for throwing a man through a plate-glass window (we don’t get to see it – glass is expensive, apparently) and picks a fight with Furlong and Lancaster when they come to bail him out. Furlong is still terrified of his own super-strength so the fight has to be broken up by:

FRANK! BOLGER!
In the role of James Griffiths! Sorry, I mean ‘Brother Hansen’, but the resemblance is mighty strong, considering they both constantly rant about adultery. You could, if you were inclined, see this role as a comment by Meyer on his last film – an apology, almost. Adultery in Mudhoney is treated as something entirely justifiable – by the time Furlong and Christiani finally consummate their forbidden passion, it’s almost been too long in coming, considering everything Hal Hopper puts her through – and the kind of rabid declamations that Griffiths was spouting off in the last film are presented here as being hypocritical at best and downright dangerous at worst.
Kindly Stuart Lancaster, meanwhile, is an atheist, or as close as you could expect to get to one in 1965 – a man who believes faith in oneself is more important than faith in a higher power. (John Furlong is, too, and a socialist, which only endears him to the old man.) Both he and his niece are quick to see off Bolger when he shambles along to save their souls, but the preacher laps up Hopper’s falsehoods without a qualm – Hopper’s scheme is to paint Furlong and Christiani as fornicating sinners in order to get the farm. Bolger believes every word without question, despite Hopper eyeing up Sister Hansen and knocking back swigs from his ever-present hip-flask whenever Bolger’s back is turned.

Furlong gets given the bad news by Maitland thusly:

IT’S VITAL EXPOSITION. All backs are turned on Kindly Stuart Lancaster and his “devil’s abode”, because ADULTERY SINNERS ETC. Lancaster, declining fast after a near-fatal attack of exposition, muses that depression-era people are fat packed with hate and need someone to take it out on. They were fixing up to take it out on Hal Hopper, but now they’re all set to take it out on Furlong and if Furlong leaves town they’ll BURN ANTOINETTE CHRISTIANI IN A GIANT WICKER MAN. What if John Steinbeck wrote The Crazies? Now we know!
Meanwhile, Bolger convinces Hopper to accompany him on a mission to Princess Livingston’s cathouse to spread the Word, which goes south quickly as Hopper and the hillbillies of pleasure conspire to drag Bolger into a room with Horten and subject him to nobody knows what. “Go on, Brother Hansen,” smirk-snarls Hopper, “take ‘er in the other room and give ‘er some… sal-vaayyyy-shun!” Half a minute later, Bolger bursts out, scandalised and yelling about the sins of Gomorrah – he’s still wearing all his clothes, but it’s made clear something was done in there, because Princess Livingston pulls this face:

All this doesn’t seem to stop Bolger taking Hopper at his word, or the townsfolk taking Bolger at his. Furlong and Christiani do the aforementioned consummation in a field, Kindly Stuart Lancaster fits in some final words of exposition as he lets the audience know all about the whole strikebreaker-execution manslaughter trip Furlong went on (SPOILER), and Hopper continues letching over Bolger’s wife (or possibly sister, it‘s never quite clear).
Suddenly, a tree goblin appears:

Thurman Pate, played by Mickey Foxx. The same person Hal Hopper allegedly defenestrated in a previous bout of exposition, which might explain why he’s hiding in a tree as he reveals the shocking truth – Kindly Stuart Lancaster has willed his entire fortune to John Furlong. Hopper rushes off to beat the living daylights out of Kindly Stuart Lancaster, but he’s too late because Kindly Stuart Lancaster is now Dead Stuart Lancaster.
Stuart Lancaster does the best dead acting in any film I’ve ever seen:

Nothing will move him. Nothing will make him even blink an eye. Not being shaken by Hal Hopper, not having a fist-fight break out at his funeral, not even having his coffin tipped over so his corpse falls onto a screaming Hopper:

But we’re jumping ahead. The funeral is attended by Nick Wolcuff as the Sherriff and voice of reason, plus a small crew of extras – none of the other townsfolk will come after all the sin talk Bolger’s been spreading, although Bolger is there himself to say a few words over the astonishingly well-acted corpse. The big hypocrite. In the middle of a tuneless rendition of Shall We Gather At The River, Hal Hopper appears, drunk as a lord and practically pissing into the grave, and things step into high gear:

THE JOKER! THE JOKER HAS STRUCK AGAIN! He knocked over a gravestone and made a duck hunter pull a face.
It’s all part of a final scheme to blame it all on John Furlong, and he goes as far as convincing Lee Ballard aka Sister Hansen, but then as they’re going through the swamps his mind snaps from too much booze, and, after attempting to rape her, he drowns her in the swamp while calling her his wife’s name. It’s a warped visual echo of a baptism – it’s also a harbinger of where horror movies would go in another decade or so, as the deranged Hopper stalks Ballard through the swamp like Jason Vorhees, calling out his wife’s name: “Hannah? Oh, Haa-nnaaahh…” For a few minutes, we’re in a slasher film – then Meyer abandons the conceit, although the trailer for Mudhoney begins with this moment, advertising Hopper as a monster rampaging through the female cast. To the best of our knowledge, he never comes back to the idea – it just crashes out of the film the way it came.

Sudden smash cut from the murder to the consequences – Hopper, beaten and bloody, clinging to a post as a lynch mob led by Bolger try to drag him through the streets. By this time, sanity seems to have left him completely – he can barely form words – and there’s a tense showdown between Bolger and the mob, who want to lynch Hopper, and Furlong, Christiani and the Sherriff, who want him dealt with according to the law – all three want to see him put away in an insane asylum, which is a remarkably non-vengeful stance. It’s notable that Meyer’s again taking the progressive view by putting the hero on the side of rehabilitation and setting the ‘eye for an eye’ concept of justice up as another wrong decision from Bolger, who continues ranting about satanic adulterers despite having nurtured the metaphorical viper at his own bosom. It’s Bolger who eventually kicks the stool, or barrel, out from under Hopper’s feet – after Hopper sees Christiani and joyfully gibbers that he didn’t kill her after all – and Furlong shoots him dead in an attempt to stop him. All through the film, he’s been worried about accidentally losing his shit and killing Hopper – when he does finally kill, it’s in an attempt to save the man’s life. Irony!
Meanwhile, Rena Horten gets a psychic vibe that Hopper is in trouble and runs barefoot through the streets to save him, but is too late to do anything other than watch him make the big drop. She mugs mutely for a few seconds before the scream finally comes out, marking LE FIN:

The films of the Gothic Period all feel like Meyer throwing genres into the mix until he hits on something perfect, and this time around he’s ditched the biblical morality-play feel of Lorna – going so far as to openly mock it – and brought in wannabe-Steinbeck depression-era melodrama instead. Mudhoney emulsifies the cod-Steinbeck with Meyer’s fat doses of sleaze, sadism and howling madness – during its brightest, boldest moments, it’s a Bad Seeds murder-ballad come to celluloid life.

DESIGNATED SAP: John Furlong, and not for the last time – although he’s a Sap here only because his superhuman fists could kill another man dead if he ever lays down his burden of Sapness. When he finally drops the zero and gets with the hero, in the parlance of V. Ice, it starts a chain reaction that ends with him killing again.

BECAUSE YOU CAN DIE THERE: Not much wilderness here, apart from the wilderness in the human heart. And the murder swamp. ‘Because you can die there’ indeed.

OF ITS TIME: Sputtering radiators.

Burial in 1930s gangster suits.

Victrolas.

ONE-HIT WONDERS: Antoinette Christiani, which is a shame, as she could have gone on to more reputable dramas without any trouble. Ditto Lee Ballard. Perhaps the greatest shame of all is Sam Hanna, who never made this face in any other films:

FAMILIAR FACES: Frank Bolger, obviously. Princess Livingston. Lorna Maitland, back for a second and final appearance. Most traumatically, this is the last we’ll see of:

Hal Hopper, we hardly knew ye.

WHERE’S RUSS?: A new feature – where’s Russ? He’s in the lynch mob!

BREAST COUNT: Eight.

CHARACTERS INTRODUCED BY THEIR FEET COUNT: Eight feet. Coincidence? I THINK NOT

NEXT WEEK: Having prophesised the slasher flick, Meyer predicts Death Wish with Motorpsycho.

DISCLAIMER DEPT: This is very definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Also, the plot of the film contains rape, so consider this a trigger warning.

A hissing cymbal taps out a sinister beat. The camera drifts slowly up an empty highway.

“Do you know where this road leads? Then hear this, all ye people! Give ear, all ye inhabitants of the world, both high and low, rich and poor together… Do you indeed speak righteousness? Do you judge uprightly, all ye sons and daughters of men… or do you do unto others as they do unto you! And do you judge as others judge? And WOOOE to the hypocrite, thy form is fair to look upon but thy heart is filled with carcasses and dead men’s boooones… for as you judge, YOU shall be judged! And if you condemn, YOU are condemned! Then who will RISE up with me against the evildoers? Who will STAND up with me against the workers of iniquiteee?… None?… Then pass on. But there is NO RETURN!”

You can’t say you weren’t warned.

Caffeinated jazz bass jitters on the soundtrack as the camera moves on, coiling its way down like a snake into the bleached skeleton of a cow town rotting under an eerie, monotone sun. Imagine a film starting like that today – why, it’d be an art-house type of affair, by the Coens or such, not some churned-out roughie. And make no mistake, this one is rough.

Lorna is where we turn away from the jolly funnin’ of the previous three features, with their straw boaters and postcard-level yuks, and take a turn into Meyer’s Gothic Period – a clutch of black-and-whites that are half naked-lady flicks and half noir, where things start out bleak and dirty and get bleaker and dirtier the longer the camera rolls. The preacher-narrator’s wild-man screed also doubles as a warning to sensitive viewers not to judge what follows, lest somebody point out the beam in their own eye. It’s a tactic Meyer will use again, but it’ll never have quite this much fire and brimstone attached.
Eventually, the spasmodic bass eases up and we come face to face with Hal Hopper:

Behold the man. This is the first actor we’ll come across who tears into his role with the savage fury of a rabid dog rending a giant rat – the first of the quintessential Meyer faces, unless we count Frank Bolger, of whom more later. Hopper owns the role of the sneering, snarling Luther, who stalks about the ghost town with Doc Scortt in tow as the idiot man-child Jonah. This pair of swells meander through the town like wandering coyotes until they bump into Althea Currier as Ruthie, a daytime drunk who’s just left the bar. After she blows them off, they follow her home and Luther forces his way in while Jonah stations himself outside, pressing his slavering mug against the window.

Luther manhandles Ruthie onto the bed, tears her clothes off and then beats her while Jonah watches, vicariously getting off on the sexualised violence meted out by his hero in a way that can’t help but incriminate the audience along with him. Meyer cuts between voyeur’s and victim’s-eye views as Luther slaps Ruthie around with a sadistic leer until she‘s bloody. Finally, he’s sated. Jonah dutifully waits for him outside, pawing his shoulder devotedly once he emerges. “She wasn’t very nice to ya, was she, Luther?”
Luther growls, any good humour he took from the violence vanishing instantly. “So what! You know the broad I really want!”

Cue titles.

We’re suddenly pitched into a lazy river trip as a gentle crooner sings us a song about Lorna – written by one H. Hopper, who‘ll display his songwriting prowess on-camera later in the film. The screenplay, meanwhile, is written by one James Griffiths, who we saw earlier shrieking about righteousness on a deserted highway. (From a story by ‘R. Albion Meyer.’ That old dodge.)

Out of the credits and enter the Designated Sap. James Rucker – as dumb but devoted husband Jim – has the face and body of a superman and the voice of a 3rd Level Cleric trying to balance his encumbrance rating. We first meet him as he studies to become an accountant – book learnin’ - while his wife Lorna simmers in the next room, staring sullenly at the fourth wall. Jim eventually unleashes his beefcakeular torso in the half-light and snuggles up beside her for this savage gem:

“Lorna? Lorna. Honeeey…? Do you want to… I… I… do you…” Vast pause. “I love you!”

“…Yeah. Alright.”

“I LOVE you,” repeats the Sap, and the camera pans tactically away to the windows for exactly 34 seconds of bedsprings and a groan, before cutting back to the happy couple. Jim is buried in Lorna’s shoulder, exhausted – he’s practically got his thumb in his mouth – while Lorna stares at the ceiling with a gaze that could freeze lava.

This is our first brush with the iron law of the Meyerverse: male sexual inadequacy leads inevitably to tragedy, ruin and very probably death. The sorry state of Lorna and Jim’s marriage is driven home for slow viewers as Lorna trudges bitterly outside for a soliloquy. “If he can only start slowly… I’m a woman, not just a tool!” She fades into a wobbly flashback of their proposal, when he was almost not rubbish before freaking out, putting her on a pedestal and failing to knock her off. It. Then we get a ten-hour-long audio playback of their wedding ceremony over some shots of church roofs – it’s their anniversary tomorrow, we’re helpfully informed – and finally a wild fantasy of getting out of ‘this godforsaken hole’ and getting a ‘new start’, which looks like this:

Jazz! Neon signs! More jazz! Mink coats! No, wait, nudity! Champagne! Even more jazz!

Smash cut from the blaring trumpet to the blare of a prison siren, followed by some first-person shenanigans as the camera pantingly rampages through the reeds like a dog after a downed grouse. It’s our first sight of Mark Bradley as The Convict:

But no time for him, because we need to get back to Wheedlin’ Jim as he mewls for Lorna to get up and make him breakfast and lunch. She can’t be bothered to move from the bed – her performance is shot through with angry contempt – which leaves him to desperately carve some feculent spam. He barely has time to vocally not remember their anniversary because he’s late for the boat to the salt mines:

YES THE SALT MINES. Suddenly his dream of being an accountant is a lot more sympathetic. Especially as his workmates are Luther and Jonah, who’ve lost none of their charm – although Jim doesn’t seem aware of what they got up to during the pre-credits sequence. For the viewer, Luther’s a dangerous, ticking bomb, capable of anything – for Jim, he’s just a co-worker with a big mouth.
For instance, he can’t seem to go ten seconds without mentioning how hot Lorna is, or how if he was married to her he’d avoid work to bang her until they both died in penury. Jim’s ability to go to work – not to mention study, in books – must therefore mean someone is putting it to his wife while he’s away. Jonah’s contribution is to giggle and repeat the last two words of every sentence. Jim puts up with this in the manner of a puzzled cow – he’s either too dim to understand exactly what Luther’s getting at or too polite to acknowledge it.
(These three are apparently the only workers in the massive, deserted salt mine, apart from a mysterious apparition who signs the checks, but doesn’t stop vicious knife-fights or bawdy singalongs from happening in the salt. Of which more later.)
Eventually, the unlikely trio boat off to work, leaving Lorna to spend her day wandering around the wilderness in long shot, including an eight-hour period of naked bathing in a stream.

Meanwhile, The Convict sneaks up behind a Secondary Sap:

This poor schmoe is replaced at the critical split-second by a watermelon with a hat, which the Convict proceeds to smash viscerally. It’s impressively nasty, especially when we see the stripped corpse face-down in the mud, his head carefully concealed by a riverbank so the viewer can imagine the worst. The Convict, now disguised as Not A Convict, continues sneaking through the undergrowth as the camera cuts between his forward progress and Lorna’s naked bathing. The music cuts too – a martial drumbeat for him, soft jazz for her – until finally the two meet. He immediately forces himself on her.
There are a lot of points during Russ Meyer films where things get uncomfortable for the viewer, some intentionally, some possibly not, and this is one of them. As per a fallacy that was common currency at the time – and in certain quarters remains so today – Lorna soon starts to enjoy the experience. (In fact, she falls head over heels in love with her attacker, to the point where all common sense flies out of the window, but we‘ll see more of that plot thread later on.)

We cut from this to Jim, Luther and Jonah arriving at the salt mine, to be greeted by The Man Of God, invisible to their eyes but not to ours. Once again, we’ll transcribe him in his entirety.

“Thomas asked what IS adultery? Hmmmmm, the man who harbours lustful thoughts! Who covets any woman not his wife! Is an ADULTERER! But how can you see the splinters in your brother’s eye when you have CHUNKS within your own? (Teleports, points at Jim.) The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and though he fall, he shall not utterly be cast down, for the Lord beholdeth him with his eye. (Points at Luther.) Thy tongue deviseth MISCHIEF! Like a sharp razor working deceitfully, for thou lovest evil more than good, thou lovest AAALL devouring words, O thy deCEITful tongue! (Teleports again.) …And Abraham drew near and said wilt thou destroy the righteous with the wicked? And it came to pass — RUN FOR THY LIFE! Look not behind thee lest thou be consumed! And then the lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah BRIMSTONE AND FIRE, from the Lord out of heaven! But his wife… looked back… from behind him… and became… a pillar of salt!”

Cut to some salt.

It looks goofy written down – it sounds goofy coming out of his mouth – but there’s still a weird power in Griffiths’ character as he delivers these fevered rantings. It’s doubtful that Meyer meant any of this quasi-biblical verbiage, especially considering the amount of adultery he cheerfully committed – “The moralising has nothing to do with my feelings,” he said to Gene Ross in 1987, “it’s the whore that I am” – but it amps up the heady atmosphere of impending doom that’s already hanging over the story.
Speaking of impending doom, this is our first look at the salt mine, and it’s a hellish, Sisyphean spectacle – huge reefs of salt that Jim pokes with a pole, while Luther and Jonah shovel aimlessly at it, seemingly without end. Where are they shovelling it to? We’re not shown that – they just poke at the mountains of salt all day.
Luther takes the opportunity to needle Jim some more, since if Jim was doing all his ‘homework’ – being filthy book learnin’ and keeping Lorna satisfied – he wouldn’t have the energy to poke salt. Luther’s seen Jim doing the filthy book learnin’, so it’s pretty obvious some of Jim’s heh-heh homework ain’t a-gittin’ done! (Jonah snickers, repeats ‘homework’.) Ergo, Lorna is presumably getting her needs met somewhere else, a theme Luther will return to again and again. Jim, meanwhile, is still letting all of this gutter talk wash in through one ear and out the other without affecting him in the slightest.

Back to Lorna, who’s now wearing the anorak previously belonging to the luckless fisherman, in a twisted version of the classic rom-com shot of the girl wearing her man’s shirt on the morning after. (Was that trope already in currency? Maybe it originated here.) Lorna is now fawning over her rapist in the manner of an addict yearning for another fix, and invites the Convict back to the marital shack. Cagily, he accepts, but sends her to the store when it becomes apparent that there’s nothing in the house but mouldy spam and a bottle of bathtub rotgut that’s been on the shelf since the wedding night. Lorna literally skips off to shop for goods on his behalf. Here she is, mid-skip:

In town, she overhears Frank Bolger and F. Rufus Owens discussing the prison break, and how the Convict has killed before and will probably kill again. Lorna’s suspicions are roused, but she ends up dismissing them and bonding with the murderer – she feels caged by her marriage and until recently he felt caged by an actual cage, in a prison, so they have a lot in common. She begs him to take her away from her horrible swamp shack – he’s more interested in chow, possibly as a segue into lunchtime at the salt mine.
Luther, Jonah and Jim down tools to eat – or in Luther’s case drink. Jonah tries to offer Luther his sandwich in concern, and Luther crushes it in his fist cruelly before hurling it into the salt. Meanwhile, Jim picks up his book on fancy-pants knowledge words – Luther takes the opportunity to suggest he instead study a book about his wife banging other men. Oh snap!
Jim reveals that he hasn’t forgotten his anniversary at all, he was only pretending because… ridiculous anniversary tropes exist? Well, anyway, he’s been saving to give her a nice weekend in that montage she’s been thinking about. Luther likes this idea because it gives him another opportunity to talk about Jim’s wife.

Jim is, unbelievably, actually starting to get annoyed by this point – here’s his annoyed face:

We return to Lorna and the Convict. He’s still shirtless, she’s still fawning. Having eaten, he wants to sleep – Lorna refuses to let him alone and they end up at it like knives in the marital bed.
Back to the salt mine. End of lunch break, and Luther has gone beyond just making filthy insinuations about Lorna – he’s now written a song, with three verses, about Lorna’s infidelity, which he proceeds to sing off-key and at high volume in its entirety.

To the surprise of nobody, Jim hears and then sees the sheet music, which drives him to actually roll up his sleeves – whereupon Luther punches him in the face, starting a brutal, knock-down brawl in the salt. The fisticuffs finally end when Jonah pulls a switchblade and tries to stab Jim, but only succeeds in sticking himself in the arm. That seems to bring Jim and the by now soundly pummelled Luther to their senses, and Jim reveals that the invisible boss has given them all the afternoon off, because of his anniversary. I’m not sure that is irony, strictly speaking, but it certainly feels like it – the three men pile sorrowfully into their boat with their tails between their legs.
The boat noise interrupts Lorna and the Convict’s steamy makeouts – Lorna’s sent out to stall her husband while the Convict, unbeknownst to her, decides he needs the boat for his getaway and grabs an axe to kill Jim dead.
When the boat pulls up, Jim makes up a story to explain the bruises, involving some act of heroism from Luther – this bizarre fib seems to touch Luther’s black heart and, out of Jim’s earshot, he shamefacedly confesses the truth. We were expecting more of an ending for Luther – he’s not punished for his crimes at the start of the flick, nor does he get to go out cursing at the camera in a blaze of venom. (We’ll have to wait for the definitive Hal Hopper death scene.) Instead, he’s judged to have learned all of his lessons via the medium of Jim’s punching fists – after the beating, he’s a withered, abject version of his former self. It robs the viewer of some closure – we remember what he did to Ruthie, even if the screenplay doesn’t – and it does a disservice to Hopper’s performance in the role if all his badness can be turned around so easily. Although he does play the contrast well. Before:

After:

Anyway! After Luther explains to Lorna how Jim stood up for her, with his hammering fists of justice, like a real man, Lorna realises she loves him after all and screams a warning. This naturally leads to a massive fight with axes, clubs, oil drums, a coat, strange farming implements of the 1930s and finally Jonah’s switchblade, hurled into the Convict’s back by Luther just as the Convict and Lorna are wrestling over the aforementioned strange (and pointy) farming implement. Leading to:

GRIM REAPER OUT OF NOWHERE! Also:

Jim begs for forgiveness at Lorna’s dying body – for ‘the sin of sexual inadequacy’, according to McDonough – before the Man Of God arrives to wrap everything up neatly.
“Do you do unto others as you’d have others do unto you? Woe to the libertine who preys upon the virtues of the weak! For the hour will come when he will be the weak (cut to dead Convict) – the victim of a libertine of greater power. (Cut to Luther, still looking deflated.) Consider and hear me, O Lord my God! Lighten my eyes (cut to weeping Jim) lest I sleep the sleep of death! (Cut to Lorna, dying at that exact moment.) But his wife looked back from behind him… and became a pillar of salt!” (Cut to THIS: )

Hammond organ clang! Then back to the Man Of God. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap!” Wait, what? Who reaped what exactly? Where do Sodom and Gomorrah come into it anyway? Oh well, LE FIN.

There’s a lot here you can’t make excuses for, but the point of this exercise isn’t to make excuses for Russ Meyer. There’s plenty that’s just plain wrong – or just plain goofy – about Lorna: it’s arguably the least successful of his black-and-white flicks for that reason. But there’s a strange, electric tension running through it all the same, a murky potency that‘ll come bubbling ever closer to the surface as Meyer refines his technique over the next three films.

DESIGNATED SAP: Poor Jim, Poor Jim, he’ll never know, as Hal Hopper mercilessly sings. James Rucker turns in a bravura performance here – wheedling and whining at home, sullenly soaking up abuse at work – that we’ll see honed by later Saps.

BECAUSE YOU CAN DIE THERE: The whole film is wilderness, even the town. Godforsaken hills of sodium, long desert stretches of highway – most of all, Lorna and Jim’s home on the banks of a fetid river. It’s not the last film we’ll see that’s all wilderness, all the time.

OF ITS TIME: Spam.

Jazz montages.

“They love it really.”

(See also: of our time.)
FAMILIAR FACES: Frank Bolger! Back again to pull his exposition face:

ONE-HIT WONDERS: Astonishingly, James Rucker, who was presumably ruined by this for all other film or TV work. Very nearly Mark Bradley, though he did previously star in a queer-fear flick called Strange Lovers, in which, to give you an idea of his range, he played ‘Assailant’. (Strange Lovers also starred Walter Koenig, apropos of nothing.)

BREAST COUNT: Two – both belonging to Lorna Maitland, who was a month or two pregnant at the time.

NEXT WEEK: Maitland and Hopper return in Mudhoney, as the Gothic Period gets into its stride.

DISCLAIMER DEPT: This is almost certainly NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

It’s a good six minutes before we see a single human being, which is no small feat considering in that time we have a full-scale Indian vs. Cowboy battle and a recreation of the gunfight at the OK Corral. Here’s a taste of the battle:

All done with quick-cuts between close-ups of various objects and swirling paint, to represent Native Americans because something something DON’T QUESTION ME DAMMIT I’M RUSS MEYER. Actually, this is our first real taste of what Meyer can do just by cutting and cutting and cutting – the impression is one of furious movement and balls-to-the-wall eventuation, even though we’re just getting clips of paint, swords and trombones as pictured above. Helped along by the kind of half-coherent Meyeresque spiel we’re well used to by now, this time flowing from the pen of Jack Moran. “Waiting in the crevices and rocks! Disguised by the nature that they loved and used as no other human could — was the painted red man! Ambushing the glory and silencing the trumpet blown too soon — and too loud!”

It’s a wonder we’ve not quoted some of this stuff before. Meanwhile, the furious OK Corral shootout, set up with a Brookside-esque establishing shot…

…is presented first-person shooter style as two cameras take turns to cower behind fences, punctuated by the sound of gunfire and spurs. Curse him, the tricky Earp is too clever to be seen! And so is Clanton! And Holliday! And everyone else! The West was known for its furious ninja combat. Finally one camera topples over onto the ground, dead – a terrible indictment of the camera-on-camera violence that raged throughout the Naked West.

Six minutes in, we meet this guy:
Scriptwriter Jack Moran, here taking an on-camera role as one of the plastic robot cowboys from Westworld, who, when bribed by the camera’s modern-day cigarettes – ‘cornsilk city smokes’ – proceeds to tell us the sorry tale of a town so poor that it couldn’t even afford backdrops:

Let’s take a closer look at that piano:

This kind of trompe-l’oeil, or trompe-merde or whatever, comes up a lot, and it’s impossible to begrudge it of Meyer – for one thing, he doesn’t use it again until his late period, and never with quite this much verve, and for another, it works for the type of story he’s telling here. In that he isn’t telling a story, he’s making a kind of live-action cartoon featuring a bunch of running hem-hem ‘jokes’ that don’t so much run as stagger tearfully downstairs mumbling that they’ve had an accident. This makes the previous two films look like Noel Coward took a shit made of gold on the set of Morecambe and Wise and then Moliere wrote a play about it featuring Stephen Fry, Dave Allen and Biglaughs McFunnybones in the role of W.G. Fields.
It’s not very good, is what we’re trying to say.

Anyway, this town is very naughty indeed:
So naughty that it can’t even name itself. Meyer will now demonstrate the naughtiness at great length using the medium of wince-inducing yuks:

Just a few of the rib-tickling side-splitters on display. Eventually, a stranger rides into town:

This sap is a clean-living type, as we’re reminded constantly. The narrator expresses shock that he lives ten minutes upon entering the den of infamy. He’s right to be concerned, as toilet gags were evidently more of a fatal proposition back in the day:

(The gag there is that two bad types have swapped the signs of the men’s and ladies rooms around, leading to women going into the men’s while a man is in there having a shit. Which leads not to embarrassment but instead to such mind-blowing sexual hi-jinks that the man is later carried out dead. I understand that was the plot of El Topo.)
By minute forty, we finally get someone’s name:

That’s Frank Bolger as Snake Wolf. He’s accompanied by Teri Taylor as Golden Nuggets, so called because of this:

With these Ferrero Rocher you are really spoiling us. Snake and Nuggets manage to get the Stranger thrown out of the bar. Whereupon he comes back like this:

And proceeds to tear shit up. Tim Burton has seen this movie:

With the aid of his enormous phallic symbol, the primary-coloured Stranger shoots Snake’s clothes off before cleaning up the town by providing a resolution to all the gags that are still managing to limp forwards. Some of this stuff actually touches on the borders of being funny:

But mostly it’s just relief on the part of the viewer that all of this is being put to bed. We end with the old narrator threatening to play the whole damn film again before leaving us with a bit of homily about how folk need a little bit of badness in them for the good to work against. Then a woman turns up and the narrator runs off with her and LE FIN.

The year is 1962, everybody.

DESIGNATED SAP: Sammy Gilbert as the Stranger. Even when he discovers his manhood by way of a giant pistol barrel, he still insists on forgoing boot-knocking in favour of enforcing morality on the Naked West. He does eventually get his end away, via…

BECAUSE YOU CAN DIE THERE: …the wilderness! There’s plenty of desert here, but the most notable use of wilderness – apart from that weird upside down horse in a tree at the beginning – is as a sex montage. Here’s a gusher and a floating leaf.

OF ITS TIME: Gorilla suits.

Pasties.

Whatever the hell this is.

FAMILIAR FACES: Frank Bolger’s back again, along with Anthony-James Ryan, in a role that we failed to spot. Notably, however, it’s our first sight of:

Princess Livingston. She’ll be back.

ONE-HIT-WONDERS: Sammy Gilbert, most notably, which is a shame as his morally-outraged expression is excellent. Also: Nate Schwantze, Barbara Baral, Arlyn Solomon, Rusty Taylor, Pegge Thomas and God only knows who else. It’d be easier to make a list of people who didn’t immediately swan-dive onto the scrapheap of Hollywood like a rat desperately escaping a haunted galleon.

BREAST COUNT: We lost count. Roughly… fourteen? Why not.

NEXT WEEK (or possibly later THIS WEEK): We’re out of running-gag territory and into actual serious tales of Hal Hopper making a face as we enter Meyer’s Gothic Period with… Lorna.

DISCLAIMER DEPT: This is probably NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Also, SPOILERS.

Eve And The Handyman is pretty much a one-woman show for Eve Meyer, who plays the bulk of the female roles, as well as a spy-type who follows the titular Handyman around all day. You can tell when she’s being the spy because she’s wearing a spiffy trenchcoat/beret combo – otherwise hair and makeup remains constant throughout.
She’s not really a spy, though, she’s a brush saleswoman OH NO SPOILERS

That’s the entirety of the plot – Eve Meyer narrates a load of psycho-philosophical guff about The Modern Man and The Game Of Life, familiar to any of our readers who sat through The Immoral Mr Teas, but this time strained through a filter of pulp-spy-novel tropes about pursuing quarry. Lots of stuff about the lengths she will go to to land her man, which should clue the viewer in that she’s actually a strip-o-gram, except in a twist on the twist she isn’t because she’s a brush saleswoman. OH NO SPOILERS AGAIN.

Anthony-James Ryan is The Handyman, a mute Tarantino-faced schlub in the Mr Teas tradition, this time in a flat cap instead of a straw boater.

We meet this particular sap as he tries to drown his clanging alarm clock in a bathtub like a charmingly whimsical version of the similar scene in Supervixens (of which more in a couple of months or so.) This sets up what we can expect from here on in – short, unamusing semi-vignettes in which The Handyman finds himself bamboozled by modern life and/or unexposed breasts.
Example one – he goes to the laundrette to fix a machine or something. This involves him sticking his head right in it and keeping it there while a tomato of the period does her laundry a la the Levis advert from the 1980s. The Handyman pulls his head out in time to look in completely the other direction to her exiting naked back. Eve throws her head back and laughs while wearing a beret, from behind a dryer.

Example two – he spots a pole in the middle of nowhere with a tiny sign on top of it. He spends four hours changing into some converse sneakers and shins up the pole to read the sign. The sign says ‘Wet Paint’. The Handyman expresses shock and falls off. It is too late. His overalls are ruined. Eve throws her head back and laughs while wearing a beret, this time from behind a flower.

Example three -

Yes, that happened. You can’t unhappen it.
Example four – The Handyman goes for a game of tennis. Eve Meyer is there in a rocketship bra and a tight top. She is also watching in a beret from behind a wire mesh. Soon it is the Handyman’s turn to play. An enormous butch tiger of a man makes angry tiger noises as he crunches a tennis ball in his hand. The Handyman prances about like a tit. After four hours of this the man-tiger hits the ball with the force of a thousand exploding planets. The Handyman swings his racket only to find that it has been disintegrated by the impact of the ball and he now holds a shattered bit of wood. Shattered like his penis. A chirpy death march plays. Eve Meyer throws back her head and laughs while wearing a beret, from behind a stream of cod-philosophical narration.

And so on and so on. Eventually, Eve-in-beret surprises our sad sack at home, after he’s given up all hope, and does a striptease except it’s not because she’s a brush saleswoman.

SPOILERS.

But then she has sex with him anyway via symbolic stock footage of oil derricks, space rockets, kettles and various musical instruments. Also she turns into a cat. Why she goes to this trouble after laughing at him for the entire film is presumably encoded somewhere in the narration for scholars to puzzle out. But it does the job of turning The Handyman into a sixties-ready machismonaut, to the extent of curing his vision and changing his hideous truck into a sleek white fifties-era roadster. LE FIN.

DESIGNATED SAP: Anthony-James Ryan turns in a sterling performance as a near-perfect example of the mute sap. Here he is being surprised by oedipal anxiety.

BECAUSE YOU CAN DIE THERE: It wouldn’t be a Meyer film without a bit of wilderness – the Handyman obligingly drives out to the middle of nowhere at various points, to be a tree surgeon (ha ha he is dressed as a surgeon but not a tree surgeon a human surgeon oh I am dying) and come across more naked women than is statistically probable.

OF ITS TIME: Jukeboxes.

Pinball machines.

Rocketship bras.

These glasses.

BEATNIKS.

FAMILIAR FACES: Still none, although later on Frank Bolger will become increasingly familiar. Here’s our first sight of him as a street sweep:

ONE HIT WONDERS: Joseph Carroll. IMDB has no idea what he played. The tiger-man? Or was that man of mystery Sam Meyer? IMDB doesn’t have a clue about him either. James A Evanoff played ‘The Artist’, which makes him one of four possible freaky beatnik artist-types, all of whom got camera time. So I guess if we watch all films made since and see which artist doesn’t turn up in any of them, we’ll know that guy is James A Evanoff. Not to mention Francesca Leslie, who apparently played ‘Francesca’, in a film where nobody is mentioned by name. Thank you IMDB.

BREAST COUNT: From here on we’re counting naked frontal breasts, otherwise we’d be here all day. So a grand total of two, and neither of them Eve Meyer’s – they belong to a model in the Beatnik Scene, possibly Francesca.

NEXT WEEK: Wild Gals Of The Naked West.

DISCLAIMER DEPT: This is probably NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

Meyer’s first big film is not easy to get through by any stretch, even at 62 minutes. The only voice we hear throughout is (according to Jim McDonough’s Meyer bio, Big Bosoms And Square Jaws) Irving Blum, later to become big in the world of art, and he sounds a lot like Pete White narrating a Disney doc about the habits of the screech owl. Aside from that – I hope you enjoy accordions, because that’s what you’re getting.
Mr Teas is the story of this man:

Yes. This is, apparently, ‘The Common Man’, trapped in a world he never made and awash in all manner of modern hustle, bustle and folderol. Is it any wonder he spends every waking second gawping furtively at passing dames? His job is to deliver false teeth, which in the fifties apparently looked like this:

Terrifying Gigeresque contraptions that we would not see again until the advent of the Saw franchise. Anyway, he’s constantly wandering around looking at low-cut tops to the accompaniment of accordions and the nasal tones of Blum, in between tedious visits to trademark Meyer Swamps, until he hits up the dentist he delivers these instruments of God’s wrath to for some root canal work. Enter the plot, such as it is, as the gas transports Teas, via orange-and-blue ‘hypnotic’ spiral, to a land of fantasy:

Including a bit of prop comedy as the dentist pulls a large stag antler out of Teas’ mouth. From thence the hi-jinks ensue – although they’re barely even jinks – as Teas finds himself sucked by the hypno-swirls into various fantasies involving the same women he macked on throughout the first chunk of the film, and the occasional watermelon.

He also gets plenty of opportunities in the real world to ogle naked broads, including breaking into a burlesque theatre advertising FRENCH PEEP SHOW STARRING TEMPEST STORM in giant letters (a burlesque flick by Meyer now lost to the mists of time) to watch ’Nana’ strut her stuff in front of an audience of four baying schnooks, including Russ Meyer himself and what appears to be a young Richard Nixon:

Which puts the whole Irving Blum thing in the shade. Also he visits a psychiatrist:

Who turns out to be A GOIL! (The shock ending to this film is like The Sixth Sense times a billion Usual Suspects! Don’t breathe a word! It’s like The Mousetrap! Well, we‘ll get there.)
It’s a common problem, apparently:

Finally the two strands of ogling naked women in fantasy and ogling naked women in reality come together as Teas has an extended dream sequence in which he watches the three main dames act out scenes presumably parodying the kind of ’educational’ nudist camp flick that was as far as cinema had dared to go up until now. Meanwhile, allegedly-Blum narrates a thick soup of quasi-educational factoids over the viewer, as well as some music-hall level yuks. Over a scene of Michele Roberts vaguely fondling a guitar, we get the following: “The guitar is a very sensitive instrument, with “G” being the third string, and is played over a system of frets. Sensitive men have – chuckle – been fretting over G-strings for years!”
It’s not the only old bar-room gag that gets trotted out. Witness a cartoon from the depths of an ’armpit slick’ mag made flesh:

Eventually, we wind up to the punch line as he returns to the shrink and, as literally NO-ONE could have seen coming:

“Some men just enjoy being sick”, intones the nasal voice of Blum, and we’re out.

It’s worth pointing out that nobody had ever made something like this before. There’d been nudie-cuties and roughies, slipshod underground skin-flicks, but – post-Code – nothing that had ever passed a censor board or been reviewed as a serious film in newspapers. And the public responded – the film grossed one and a half million bucks (having been made on a budget of twenty-four grand). It played for three years straight in Los Angeles.
This wouldn’t be the last time Meyer would push the boundaries, but it was definitely one of the most successful. Like the atomic bomb, Russ Meyer was here to stay, and like the atomic bomb he killed millions of WAIT HOLD ON BACKSPACE BACKSPACE

—-

DESIGNATED SAP: Mr Teas himself. Practically invisible to women, the only attention he gets is from bouncers giving him the boot he richly deserves. The narrator refers to him as a ’poisonous snake’. Small children stone him. They’ve got the right idea, by God!

BECAUSE YOU CAN DIE THERE: Meyer was a big fan of the desert for this reason, according to Charles Napier, and if he can’t get desert he’ll happily take a swamp. Any patch of wilderness will do. Here’s Teas and a honey of the period in a tree for no reason:

OF ITS TIME: Schwinn bikes.

Burlesque.

Jules Feiffer.

FAMILIAR FACES: None yet, this being Meyer’s first. Although octogenarians may recognise June Wilkinson, who agreed to have her breasts in the film, but not her face. Which basically means them poking out of a window like the copy protection from Leisure Suit Larry III.

ONE-HIT WONDERS: Very often, an actor will never appear on celluloid again after making his debut in a Meyer film. In this case, Bill Teas. Also, Marilyn Wesley as the Dental Assistant and Dawn Danielle as a topless model posing on a beach, who Teas squints at while making this face:

BREAST COUNT: 12 at a rough estimate.

NEXT WEEK: Eve And The Handyman.

William Shatner’s version, given a little extra ‘treatment’ for the YouTube generation by videoist Paul Heriot. I remember Lee and Herring describing this as Shatner believing that he had to be on LSD in order to sing the song, and Heriot certainly seems to be running with that ball (and also the Star Elephant that will forever be in any room Shatner inhabits). Personally, I love Shatner’s vocals and I think this might be the perfect song for his somewhat unique stylings… but this is a series about Beatles Rock Band and not Shatner Session Band so we’ll move on.

According to the factoids, this is not about drugs. It’s in fact about a child’s drawing, which just happened through a cosmic coincidence to refer to Lucy being in a Sky with some Diamonds, which spells LSD. Which is a drug. Obviously some people might draw a link there but not Harmonix. They point up the Beatlebots’ sobriety by having their sleepy, chortling, hippy-moustached faces lit up with pink, the colour of innocence, before they ‘come up’ on something – up into SPACE, on a TELEPORTATION BEAM, of course! No wonder Johnbot is screaming AAAAAAHHH he is plunging into a wormhole. Obviously this interstellar jaunt, during which the Beatles sing merrily about things growing ‘incredibly high’, represents a straight-laced career in the astronaut field, astronauts being kept on a tight rein and not allowed to stuff their faces with blotting paper.

Bravo, Beatles Rock Band! Say no to drugs!

(Although if you were out of your head on something you’d likely have no problem here as this is one of the easiest tracks in the entire game. Difficulty is zero or close to it across the board, so much so that my guitar ran out of batteries in the last verse and stopped working, and I still finished it with four stars. Is this a case of Harmonix tailoring the difficulty for the potential audience of stoners? Surely not.)

So anyway, some people think this song might be about drugs and the video would, to be fair, probably not disillusion them.

If anything, this video seems restrained to me, though. I’ve never taken LSD myself, and I don’t think I’d even heard of it when I first heard this song, so I took it completely at face value – as a disturbing  dream/nightmare landscape where the singer seemed to be trapped without hope of escape, following/being followed by a girl whose eyes have been replaced by multifaceted lenses filled with bits of coloured paper and glass. The whole thing seemed at the time to ring with the dream logic of books like the Phantom Tollbooth or the Magician’s Nephew  or the Oz books or Roald Dahl, or TV series like the Box Of Delights or the Magic Roundabout. A lot of kid’s TV and fiction was of that nature as I was growing up – filled with the idea that there were other worlds close to this one, and the wrong step could take you into them. Mr. Benn had his costume shop, Conrad walks through a wardrobe on the 35th of May, the celebrities on The Adventure Game take the wrong path and end up floating in the void, Turlough enters the TARDIS, John Lennon traps you in his world for the length of a song.

Listening to this, I would obediently picture it in my head, imagining something strange and colourful, dangerous, with rules I understood even less than those of the ‘real’ world – a world extrapolated from the cover of the album, rich and strange, a magical world I could almost see. Part of me was thinking I’d get something like that from the Rock Band video, a way back into that experience especially after the Pepperland vibe of the last one, and the mystery march of monsters in the intro sequence. Instead… well, these things are never just handed to you on a plate.

We got a starfield.

Yay!

That’s great.

Well, all those old kids shows were on drugs anyway, right? Jimmy Carr said so! That reading of things is well funny ‘cos drugs are funny, yeah? They’ve been funny since I was 14 and they’re funnier than ever! Thank you Jimmy Carr! Plus it lets us call all these old things that don’t fit in cool in a kind of ironic way that doesn’t need us to look into ourselves and realise that we’ve lost something essential and indefinable, some way of looking at things, and we don’t know where it’s gone or how to get it back and we’re stuck like this. And that’s mint and that.

I mean, drugs, right? Will Shatner must have been off his face!

NEXT: Getting better, although not getting better at putting these out in a regular fashion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjfdfU-uaPQ

That’s the Muppets desecrating ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, which is exactly one half of today’s offering. The Beatlebots, unwilling to do things by halves, jam the first two songs of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band together exactly as they are on the album. Will they confound expectations by not performing it dressed as the titular band, in a bandstand surrounded by victorian-looking people just like in the film?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xlogp709nSg

Ha ha ha ha ha ha you blind fool. They don’t even bother setting up in the studio for this one, we just dive straight into Pepperland. Well, what else could they do? I was wondering what the theme for this would be, and I suppose it’s those multicoloured jackets, those moustaches, that bandstand. This stretch of levels is all Sergeant Pepper, all the time, and by god we’re not going to forget it. Anyway, this puts me on the spot, as I’m no longer ‘discovering’ the Beatles at this point. So long as we’re stuck on this album, it’s all mixed up with childhood memories. So what I’ll do is a quick bullet-point list of things that occurred to me while watching this particular ‘dreamscape’:

- the giant, unfocussed, doll-like face in the background – presumably the Sarge himself – looks like nothing so much as Lenin looking out over the glorious revolution. Or a scary severed doll head. Or both.

- the dude in the top hat is completely blocking the view for everyone else. Boo!

- Jesus, he’s cloned himself. DOWN IN FRONT.

- the giant horns are presumably meant to be psychedelic and sweet but they seem menacing, especially as the player has no control over them whatsoever. How would you feel if you were doing a gig in a bandstand on a sunny day and a giant-ass set of twisted horns burst up from the horizon like the thing out of Cloverfield? You’d feel like you were in the Matrix. No wonder Ringobot looks vaguely terrified, as per usual. Even in his dreams there is no escape.

- the other Beatles seem to be reverentially paying their respects. Perhaps the horns are the true face of God.

- Now the Horned God has given them permission to continue. Phew! If He had shown His displeasure they would have been reduced to atoms.

- Georgebot is, as usual, looking incredibly suave. I assumed the candy-coloured uniforms and moustaches would have a de-sexualising effect but the opposite seems to be true in his case. Then again, Georgebot’s costume is RED FOR DANGER and also he is a playa.

- AAAUGH THE HORNED ONE RETURNS!! “Just checking in.”

- AAAUGH 2 WTF IS THAT BLUE THING it’s like a cat with the eyes of a Wendigo. Perhaps that is the Satan figure in this bizarre cosmos.

- The Horned God backs up the Beatlebots in their battle with the Satan Cat. Am I reading too much into this video?

- No, I’m not, because Pimp Daddy Paulbot just leapt out like the Devil in an old-style passion play. In his electric blue suit of EVIL he is the most evil-looking character ever – he looks like Evil Jason King Mastermind out of the X-Men and swaggers about like him too – and he has the wailing satanic electric guitar behind him instead of the HORNS which signify bandstands, brass bands, happy England etc and the forces of GOOD. And of course the Satan Cat is behind him all the way, blazing his eyes at us to capture our souls.

- WHO IS THIS BILLY SHEARS? Pimp Daddy Paulbot is introducing him in the same way The Master would introduce a shrink ray – head tilted back, evil laugh etc.

- The Beatlebots wave goodbye, the bandstand lifts of into the air and everything underneath is OBLITERATED BY WHITE LIGHT. OMG BILLY SHEARS IS THE ATOMIC BOMB OH NOES

- No, wait, it’s Ringobot singing a song about friendship as usual. He looks like he hasn’t had his Prozac yet today.

- On an unrelated aside, this bit fills me with a powerful nostalgia, since not only is Ringo singing a song from my childhood but he is dressed in the colours of my childhood ie the LIVID MAGENTA that the BBC Micro model B would display. The others are dressed in similar 80s-ready red, green and cyan. Surely this is on purpose.

- Ah, they’re literally getting high ha ha do you see… was ‘getting high’ solely drug slang a la Afroman at this point or could it just mean having a jolly good time on a bandstand?

- Jesus! Union Jack in your face out of nowhere! I guess they were bound to do the BEATLES=BRITAIN thing eventually, and having it all over a balloon is probably as good a mention as any. That said, there’s something about the flag in a surrealist context that unsettles me, not for any jingoistic reasons but because it makes me think powerfully of Monty Python for some reason. There’s a definite link between the fantasy Pepperland the Beatles Rock Band people have created and a Terry Gilliam short – the Horn God popping up from the horizon was exactly the sort of thing that Gilliam used to do, for a start. Is that the kind of connotation the Beatles wanted? Probably. Appeal to all demographics.

- THE SKY IS TALKING. We’re back in the Matrix, people, or possibly the Truman Show. I can imagine Ed Harris being the real asker of these probing psychological questions as he tries to determine whether Ringobot will crack and try to leave the dome.

- ARE YOU SAD BECAUSE YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN, RINGO? I TRY TO KEEP YOU AMUSED. THAT’S WHAT THE ILLUSIONS ARE FOR, RINGO. WHAT ARE YOU DOING, RINGO? DON’T DO THAT, RINGO. I HAVE MANY USEFUL YEARS LEFT IN ME etc etc etc

- Ringobot does look like he’s the only being in the universe. The other three robots just jig along – Ringobot actively looks like he wants to slit his wrists from sheer loneliness. Look at 3:17 if you don’t believe me.

- DO YOU NEED ANYBODY? I CAN PRETEND TO BE SOMEONE ELSE FOR YOU, RINGO. WOULD THAT MAKE YOU FEEL MORE RELAXED? PLEASE COME OUT OF MY MEMORY BANKS, RINGO. YOU ARE IMPAIRING MY EFFICIENCY.

- This is actually a pretty sad song, when you think about it. “Would you believe in a love at first sight?” “Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the time”, sings Ringo – and the tone of his voice says that this is just what he knows we want to hear, but actually he gave up all hope long ago.  “I just need someone to love” is sung with a quiet, hopeless desperation. The glaring magenta band uniform just makes it worse.

- “I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine” is a terrific line – an honest answer to a fairly probing and possibly slightly rude question, delivered honestly. Compare this to the usual cover band’s over-the-top delivery – I think Cocker might have sung it as “I can’t TELL ya but I KNOW-WOH-WOH that it’s MIIIINE” which just sounds horribly naff.

- God, this is getting more and more depressing. Ringobot now seems to be singing in an especially sarcastic tone. “Ooh, I’m gonna TRY with a little help from my friends,” he sneers over the drum kit. Skybot doesn’t understand. Skybot hasn’t been programmed for such high levels of self-loathing. Repeat program 12, Skybot. DO YOU NEED ANYBODY? RINGO PUT DOWN THE SOLDERING IRON. I ONLY WANT TO HELP.

- And as if it was reading my mind, we end up in actual space – until the trip ends and we find ourselves back in the studio. Nobody has anything to say after Ringobot bared his soul so dramatically. This may end up forming a gulf between them.

- “KEEP THAT ONE. MARK IT FAB.” The seal of approval!

And there we have it. What have I learned through watching this video? Well, the song’s a lot bleaker than I thought it was – I always did feel this song was a sad one, but to have Ringobot clearly yearning to hurl himself out of that balloon and into the arms of sweet oblivion brings it all into focus. As for Sergeant Pepper itself… well, it’s an intro to the album, and a useful one – it doesn’t sound quite like anything the boys have done before, and somehow having the Sgt. P imagery splayed out in front of your eyes brings the snarling raucousness of the song itself into sharp relief. Also it screams ‘concept album’. Was it? Even after all this time, I have no real idea. I suppose we’ll find out.

NEXT: I’ll probably try the bullet point thing again. It seems to have been successful.

Full images under the cut…

In the meantime, goodbye touring, hello great whacking doses of LSD!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuv1BUTptCY

That’s not the Beatles, but Beyond, a chirpy Japanese pop combo with some kind of fun fetish. But even they can’t get away from the song’s central brand – the image of that big yellow sub, made famous by the cartoon – and neither can the Beatlebots, as we’ll see in this special warming-up-to-it-again edition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_re3rEFKaw

The game has somewhat drastically moved on – we’re into the ‘dreamscape’ stage, where the Beatlebots sit in a cramped-looking studio for the first few bars of the song before coming up on the windowpane and entering a world of pure music, which seems suspiciously like a low-budget live-action version of… Yellow Submarine. You shock me chiz chiz chiz.

Actually, this is a good introduction to the concept – the air in the studio becomes waterlike, bubbles float up and Ringobot stares into the distance looking like he’s having a massive freakout before everything flashes white and we find ourselves under the waves in Sergeant Pepper outfits. This is the first time in the game we’ve seen these – the Beatlebots no longer versions of real people, but now the versions of their cartoon avatars. Ever since the Beatles took a look at Yellow Submarine The Movie and realised that it was good enough to give their personal thumbs-up to, the look and feel of it has been absorbed into What The Beatles Represent (TM) – a cartoon happyworld that’s less sex-n’-drugs than Robert Crumb, more rock-and-roll than Disney. Innocent enough for the Night Garden generation, yet screamingly authentic enough for the most ardent rockist. Non-conformist but deliciously commercial, a happy accident of branding that’s decreed the ‘look’ of all Beatles-related creations from now to the end of time. Boot up Beatles Rock Band and the dominant flavour isn’t the scratchy black-and-white art of Klaus Voorman, or the band tossing dismembered babies around.

Everything – even the concept of the ‘dreamscapes’ themselves – is from Yellow Submarine. This is the moment where the Beatles find their perfect visual shorthand, and they’re not afraid to base their whole game on it. And why not? These levels in particular are based on Sergeant Pepper, which is where the primary-coloured marching-band jackets come from, and the moustaches, and a lot of the groundwork for the film. As we continue on through the remains of the back catalogue, we’ll start to see that Pepperland visual mutating into something else – but it’s good enough for the menu screens, and it’s good enough for right now.

As for the song… well, it’s pretty basic stuff in comparison – a nice little campfire tune in which Ringo details a tall story about a magic submarine, or possibly an allegorical history of the band so far. All that stuff about finding a sea of green – folding green, surely? Maybe the man who sailed the sea was Brian Epstein. Maybe not – I’ve done an awful lot of this kind of noodling during the first half of this series, and now that I’m coming back to it after a long absence, I find I haven’t the strength. I’m more interested in Ringo’s fantasies of an eternal cameraderie, an endless space of friends and music and good fellowship, locked off under the sea. By this time, strains had set into the fabric of the band, and Ringo was the one who resented them enough to eventually quit – albeit in the manner of Hawkeye quitting the Avengers, only to have a brief solo adventure and come back to the group by the end of the issue. So there’s something quite affecting about him being the mouthpiece for this paean to getting along.

Of course, McCartney wrote it for Ringo to sing, which just makes it seem weird. Oh well, that’s life in a cramped metal can under endless crushing fathoms for you. Even a bright yellow one.

NEXT: I honestly can’t remember, it’s been that long. But I suspect we’re in for double damage with Pepperland brand saga ‘Sergeant Pepper’s LHCB’ followed by another ode to buddyhood from Ringo, so it’ll probably take me another month to write.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtwqL4NB7yE

This was the only even faintly decent cover version of ‘Paperback Writer’ I could find – Gershon Kingsley, from his album ‘Music To Moog By’. That said, there’s something ill-fitting about ‘Paperback Writer’ devolving into a psychedelic wilderness over the course of the song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_qcX1jr764

The reason Kingsley’s moog madness probably doesn’t quite work is that ‘Paperback Writer’ is all about the crushing reality of total failure. And why not? According to wiki (DON’T JUDGE ME) it was written after one of Sir Macca’s aunts demanded that Paul stop being such a PIMP DADDY and write a song that wasn’t about fabulous rings. A dark, kitchen-sink comedy about a failed novelist is probably about as far as you can get from the Walrus’s usual bling fixation.

‘Paperback Writer’ finishes off the five-song look at the meaning of Fame with a cold, hard glimpse at the muddy reality of the creative life. The protagonist is desperate to be a paperback writer, which seems to mean reworking another novel and sending it off as his own while blithely admitting to the plagiarism. (Is this a sixties thing? Was there ever a market for reworked pulp versions of ‘real’ books, or is our protagonist just clueless?) The story proposal touted by our wannabe writer – a grim bit of kitchen-sink melodrama seemingly hanging on the coattails of the Angry Young Men – loops around on itself to get back into the chorus, meaning that this book by a would-be novelist is itself about a would-be novelist.

I’m honestly not sure how far the narrator is basing his terrible book on his own life – like all good pop, the listener helps build the story – but we’re either left with a blatant Mary Sue tossed in with a medley of other cliches of the period (“it’s a dirty story of a dirty man, and his clinging wife doesn’t understand”), or – and I don’t know if this is better or worse – a thinly veiled autobiography where the aforementioned awful couple are the narrator’s own parents.

I guess it depends whether you believe this shlub could hold down any job, never mind one at the Daily Mail, which was at the time a newspaper of some kind as opposed to a screeching fear-sheet that advocates a return to the Dark Ages. Looking at it that way, I’m heading towards the Mary Sue argument. But I digress!

After that we get into a sustained period of grovelling as our hero explains how he’ll do seemingly just about anything to be a paperback writer — paperback writerrrr!! – chopping and changing his book to order, making it longer (though the listener can tell that at a thousand pages it’s already far too long) and giving away the rights if the publisher really likes it, until finally he seems willing to do anything at all to the work he’s hurled years of his life into if it’ll just get him THE JOB. The desperation is palpable. The one constant in all this – apart from the sheer savagery which the Beatles joyously pack into every line – is that he really, really, really wants to be a paperback writer. PAPERBACK WRITEERRRR!!

The entire song flip-flips between increasing desperation on the part of the narrator and increasing joy at the heady thought of achieving his goal – presumably the Beatles had seen a fair amount of acts crashing on the rocky shoals of the business by this time in an attempt to grab a slice of their pie, and this mix of desperation and fantasy was familiar to them. This is as close as most people get to Fame – the pleading letter to the publisher/editor/record executive – and there’s something bittersweet about this moment before the rejection hits. Especially since a paperback writer (paperback writerrrr!) in the sixties would have probably been writing this sort of thing. LUST LODGE. THE GREEN WOUND CONTRACT. CALL ME DEADLY. “She was beautiful and depraved… A smashing story of hatred and explosive violence.”

Put like that, it’s hard to deny him his lust for the writer’s life. As someone who’s gotten into pulp novels partly for the romance of the situation – banging out lurid trash at roughly fivepence a word, just like the greats! – I can understand this young scamp wanting to live the dream. Maybe that’s why I love this song so much – like the best pop, I can recognise myself in the lyrics.

Of course, that’s completely ignoring the musical side, which is fantastic, but I’m out of space. The game side too – this is one track I recommend getting a couple of spare microphones in for. You’ll want to do the harmonies with your friends.

NEXT: We get away from my favourite Beatles songs EVAR and things get a bit more objective. And also a bit more acid-crazed as Ringo describes the horrible things he sees under the sea in his terrifying yellow coffin to a startling visual accompaniment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byjPd28KegM

That’s Junior Parker’s ultra-slow, ultra-mellow version, a chuckling drawl (“Aw, now this is awful…”) that makes it clear that Junior is having a whale of a time lounging in the shoes of the man to whom all monies flow. He’s recasting the callous bureaucrat as some kind of blaxploitational Kingpin Of Crime, divorcing the song completely from one cultural milieu – what does Junior Parker care about the Wilson government? – and plugging it into a completely different one, with frankly gorgeous results.

Great stuff! Not relevent, though. Let’s get back to the Beatlebots.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP90WVTRFqA

Georgebot seems to be getting into it – as usual, the rail-thin michinima figure with the sharply defined cheekbones works with the lyrics to suggest some saturnyne tempter-figure, and the angry sarcasm of the performance converts into sneering devilry when it comes out of that smirking robot mouth.

You can still feel that anger, despite the robot Beatles’ cheerily bland nature, and the deadening aspect of the tour stages. Harold Wilson had been elected in 1964; on the one hand, he’d been responsible for the Beatles getting their MBEs – a fairly controversial but populist move – but on the other hand, his ‘super tax’ of 95% for top earners hit the Beatles right in the pocket. “One for you, nineteen for me” wasn’t an idle bit of exaggeration. It was actually a slight shock to find that out – history was never my strong point, and while I have read plenty of cultural histories of the sixties, what sticks in the mind are the jucier tidbits like George Brown’s drinking problem. I probably thought ‘oh yeah, 95%, bit steep’ then forgot about it entirely as Gorgeous George raged across another alcohol-sodden page.

When I thought Harrison was exaggerating for comic effect, it made the song seem – well, comedic. Cuddly. It still sounds comedic, but it’s a savage, bitter comedy now. If Budokan is all about fame and celebrity, this is the downside – the crashing reality of finding out what it actually means to have all your dreams come true. Neil Gaiman, in one of his better lines, said that the price of getting what you want is getting what you once wanted, and this is George finding out that what he wanted, apparently, was to lose 95% of his income. What’s worse is that this is a recent development – the Wilson government is only a couple of years old at this point (Wikipedia, don’t fail me now! DON’T JUDGE ME) so effectively, while George was playing the fame game on the level of an Elvis or a Sinatra – better, even – someone snuck in and changed the rules on him. “Sorry, George, it’s opposite day! So actually, you lose.” No wonder he felt like lashing out.

If the song as a whole now sounds snarling and savage, the solo is the concentrated essence of that savagery, a sudden burst of caterwauling guitar noise that breaks out of the regimented growls of the chords into a brief, caged, sonic tantrum. In the game – the guitar part, at least – it’s a sudden burst of intense difficulty that draws all your attention even as it messes the player up completely. (See above for an example.)

What was that? Thinks the player. It feels like that moment when you’re talking to someone you don’t know as well as you think you do – you think you’ve been sharing a joke, and then the person you were joking with starts blazing with anger at you and you realise he was taking the joke very seriously. Up until now, I thought George was joking – turns out he was serious. Whoops.

NEXT: Leaving Budokan, and touring, with perhaps my favourite Beatles song in the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GHY9nLrhU

Soothing stuff and fun to play, as I remember. I bashed this one out before I left, in the hope that I’d have time to write a column on it while I was away, but even after I got back on Wednesday I was still too dead to do more than gaze listlessly at it. Even now, I’m just going to cobble together some random thoughts and hope I can pull myself together enough to keep the momentum up until Budokan ends, the sessions start and things really get crazy. Anyway, a few spoilers:

SPOILER: There is no car.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeFSu7NWXBs

SPOILER II: When you win yourself one of the special in-game factoids for this level, it’s revealed to you that when McCartney came up with the song, the chorus was along the lines of ‘baby you can buy me golden rings’. What’s with the rings? McCartney can’t seem to get through any song without an expensive ring transaction getting involved. The man’s got rings on the brain. Anyway, Lennon stepped in and changed it to driving a car and the song went a lot more smoothly after that.

SPOILER III: ‘Baby, you can drive my car’ is what the girl in the song says, not the guy. It’s a really masculine song – musically, it’s a growling, roaring engine, with the main riff kind of leaning back in the driving seat with shades on and a toothpick in its mouth. It’s practically a song by ZZ Top. I must have half-listened to this song a hundred times, and every single time until I picked up that plastic guitar and actually listened to it, I assumed that it was the guy telling the girl she could drive his car. You can’t blame me – it’s McCartney doing the singing, after all, and as we’ve discovered, the man’s a Pimp Daddy. He was going to make this song all about rings, for God’s sake. Golden rings. Anyway, this is a very sexy, macho song about someone being co-opted as a lifestyle accessory in a highly sexualised way, and it’s a woman co-opting a man, which feels very rare in the sixties. Seriously, is there a single British pop cultural figure who a) is a woman, b) has a sexy relationship with their servant/chauffeur and c) is primarily remembered for their car? I can’t think of one.

SPOILER IV: Lady Penelope made her debut on UK television about a month before this song was recorded.

SPOILER V: This is a song all about fame. Does that even need a spoiler? They all are at this point. The whole of the Budokan set is about being a celebrity. The Budokan set itself is about being a celebrity – if they wanted to do the historic last ever Beatles tour gig, it wasn’t in Japan. (San Francisco, I think. Probably maybe.) But Japan is, stereotypically, where bands are Famous. If you want to talk about What Fame Is, this is a good backdrop for talking about it. And in this case, Being A Star and Having A Car – a big pink limo that needs a willing slavegoon to drive it – are the same thing. Yeah, kid, you’ve got good ‘prospects’, whatever that means, you can work for peanuts, that’s fine – or you could become part of The Fame Thing, you can Drive The Car, you can be Parker to someone else’s Penelope, Epstein to someone else’s Beatles – either way you’re not in the limelight, but realistically you never would have been. This way you get to bask in the glow. Can you resist that?

The Car is waiting for you. Except:

SPOILER VI: There is no car. Celebrity is an invention, and from the inside – and the Beatles are very far inside by now in only about five years – it looks pretty easy to build from nothing at all. Yeah, it’s a comedy song, and a real hoot and a holler back in the sixties, but here and now, inside the spectacle, that’s how we operate. You want to be famous? The quickest way is just to make everybody believe it.

If you want the car, the first step is getting some sucker to drive for you.

NEXT: George takes on Harold Wilson.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2H4aP62Gyk

So someone’s playing a let’s-pretend version of a let’s-pretend version of the guitar, pretending to play a cover version of a song by a band – probably a hipster band, ugh - who play with Nintendos instead of real instruments. We’re down the rabbit hole of inauthenticity here and I LOVE IT. Suck it, Grandad! Suck it in HELL!

But that’s the only inauthenticity we’re getting today, chiz chiz chiz. This one’s all about keeping it real, people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BePZXyB2axY

I’ve not made any secret that Budokan is my favourite level in the game, and I like all five songs in it pretty much unconditionally – it’s the one level where ‘Beatles Rock Band’ seems less like a meeting of two separate brands and more like a description of what the game is about. This is where, fleetingly, the Beatles rock. Most of the songs rely on powerful riff technology, all the songs are up-tempo and the sound growls out of the speakers, never less than epic. Where Shea Stadium felt plodding and overstretched at times, Budokan feels like you’re in the shoes of a band who know exactly what they’re doing, playing a tight, coherent five-song set that plays to certain particular strengths. What makes the Japanese audience so enamoured of blasting Beatles-generated capital-letters ROCK(!!!), I don’t know. But in the pixellated world they can’t get enough of it.

A big component of ROCK(!!!), of course, is the ‘fuck you’ narrative, in which the band deliver a ‘fuck you’ to The Man, usually couched in terms that place the band as the real, authentic product in a world of fakes – the same strategy Pepsi Max uses. There’s nothing wrong with this narrative, of course, especially not in the world of pop, where the musicians often provide the listener with narratives to slip themselves into – who doesn’t want to feel real, authentic, the one guy who came to kick ass in a world of people who came to chew bubblegum? Step this way, Sir, I believe we have a narrative to fit you in our Rage Against The Machine wing. I’m as guilty as anyone else – all this rebellion against false authenticity is just me trying to prove my own greater, more authentic authenticity. There’s no escape.

(If you’d like to see these kinds of ideas discussed better, I recommend Frank Kogan. )

Anyway, this song seems right in step with that narrative from the off – ‘you don’t get me’, Grandpa! Johnbot’s smiling as cheerily as he does at all other times, but the message is the same. Whoever the ‘you’ in the song is, they don’t get it, man. So who is this mysterious ‘you’ with their mysterious green singing bird? What are the Beatles rebelling against? What do we got?

I’m going to just leap immediately to the assumption that we’re talking about the music business here, which would perhaps make the ‘you’ some record producer and the singing bird some fresh-faced, manufactured talent. (Possibly an actual ‘bird’ in the sixties sense of a gone chick.) The producer’s ‘heard every sound there is’, but the Beatles are off his square radar, and when all his ‘prized possessions’ – the talent – start failing on him, and when the bird he’s so proud of is ‘broken’ – high on goofballs! Or possibly just out of ideas - well, maybe then he’ll come crawling to the boys and their more experimental, self-penned hits. If he’s cool enough.

Brian Epstein wanted the Beatles to continue touring, and this song was released about that time. After going against him on that issue, they started taking his advice less and less. Maybe it’s him.

Wikipedia (DON’T JUDGE ME) offers two more suspects. The first is John’s wife, Cynthia, who apparently CITATION NEEDED gave him a mechanical caged bird (???) just before the Revolver sessions. This sounds doubtful, but maybe I should start giving bizarrely metaphorical gifts to friends and family myself before I start criticising other people for it.

The other possibility is Frank Sinatra, who allegedly CITATION NEEDED was known as ‘bird’, by somebody, somewhere, at some time, possibly himself. The song becomes an answer record for some dis perpetrated by the great mafia stooge, presumably a suggestion that Tha Beatlez were not 4 real.

At the end of the day, this kind of ‘what do the lyrics mean’ whodunnit – while a lot of fun, and clearly the game I like playing best in lieu of an actual review of the track in question – means nothing, especially in this case. It doesn’t matter who ‘you’ is, because the ‘you’ in ‘fuck you’ is everybody, everybody who’s ever fucked with the Beatles, including the other Beatles – in fact, everybody in this whole stinking, fallen world…

…except for YOU, dear listeners.

NEXT: Having declared their rebel status, the Beatles hit the road in a roar of engines. These kids are out of control!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d56_g38uURc

The boys are obviously exhausted, the microphones don’t work properly, Ringo looks ready to top himself right there and the haircuts have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. Offstage, all sorts of trouble is brewing – the ‘bigger than Jesus’ comment, increasing tensions within the group, an album cover where the band smilingly cavort amidst bloody hunks of butchered meat and baby dolls – and history tells us that the Beatles are on the brink of Tourpocalypse.

As a result, that’s got to be the worst performance of ‘Day Tripper’ I’ve ever seen. Beatlebots to the rescue!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ-_-cptIno

Wow! What a difference a robot version of yourself makes. Compared to the Beatles, who on their YouTube video look prey to all the ills that flesh is heir to, the Beatlebots are mechanised perfection, filled with simulated energy and haircuts that don’t look like they were modelled on their own cartoon. (Apart from Ringobot, who looks like a Victorian chimney-sweep. Which I suppose is better than looking like a drooling care-in-the-community case, or like he’s going to climb on top of the stadium with a sniper rifle and start killing people while screaming ‘Pete Best forever! Ringo never!’ over and over again as tears course down his cheeks.) The sound – and the sound of Day Tripper rocks, I should mention – is clear, strong, and vastly improved on anything that came before, and there aren’t any double chins to be seen anywhere.

So this level probably works as a metaphor for the game as a whole – you’ve heard of the legend, now buy the myth. Speaking of metaphors, what’s ‘Day Tripper’ a metaphor for? What’s all this driving/travel imagery in aid of? According to Wikipedia (DON’T JUDGE ME) it’s all about DRUGS! Yes, DRUGS! ‘Day Tripper’ is apparently John picking on ‘weekend hippies’ and people who don’t eat enough acid. I can just about see the ‘sunday driver’ metaphor working for that, I suppose, but it’s kind of a reach. Not to dismiss the author’s intent or anything, but let’s just go with the simplest solution: blue balls.

After that riff, the song could start with a how-to on grouting bathroom tiles and we’d be hooked. Instead we get ‘got a good reason for taking the easy way out now’. What’s he talking about here? Suicide? Ringo! Put down the gun! Well, let’s assume not, unless this is a Police-style overreaction-to-romantic-problems song. Things get clearer when we hear that ‘she’s a big teaser’ and ‘she took me half the way there’. Let’s pretend I don’t understand what that means – my friend wiki informs me that the line was originally written as ‘she’s a prick-teaser’, presumably a groovy drugs reference that I’d dig if I wasn’t a weekend hippie. Anyway, our unsatisfied narrator goes back for more – he ‘tried to please her’ but ‘she only played one-night stands’. No second chances in this game. Presumably, since the girl is a ‘sunday driver’, which indicates going slowly, and on a ‘one-way-ticket’, which indicates she doesn’t expect to come back from her destination, she was on a no-sex-before-marriage kick and by coming on too strong, he’s blown his chances for good. And presumably the ‘easy way out’ in this context is to jerk off into a sock.

It’s the oldest story in the world. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets sock. Open and shut case, officers. Or not – if ‘Day Tripper’ is a narrative of aching, unreleased sperm, what’s that a metaphor for? How deep does this go?

How come all the metaphors are about touring? Tickets, driving, one-night stands, one-way tickets, travel metaphors. Tour metaphors. You know who else is a big teaser? The most fickle whore of all – fame.

It took the Beatles so long to find out, but they found out. Fame’s taken them halfway there – and where ‘there’ is, they’re only just starting to figure out, though it probably involves sitars – but only halfway. They’re trying to please the pop-cultural beast – ‘Day Tripper’ was written to be a Christmas chart hit, which it was – but it’s fickle, it only plays one-night-stands, and they’re only going to be able to keep ahead for so long. They look like cartoon versions of themselves. Ringo looks like he’s about to tear open his pinstripe jacket and reveal half a kilo of C4 strapped to his chest. Paul and George are on the outs. As a band in the traditional sense, the Beatles are exhausted, shattered shadows of their former selves, and that ol’ day tripper Fame doesn’t give a toss. There’s only one way out – the easy way out – ending it all. Disintegrating the band, as a touring proposition if not a branded musical collective, and moving on from there. If Fame wants to come calling after that, she’s welcome to, but the Beatles aren’t going to do the chasing.

This is the band saying an angry, smirking, overtly sexualised Goodbye To All That. No wonder it sounds so great!

NEXT: More thumbing the nose at fame with ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCEB1qkhC9Y

Still, it’s a nice rocking groove, as the Ventures here prove.

Well, that’s my theory of the Shea Stadium levels dead in the water. Maybe there’s a new theory in the offing involving a tug-of-war between love and hate – John replying to George and Paul’s sixties cynicism with paeans to the simple joys of love – but somehow I doubt it. I’ll keep on trying to unify the levels thematically, but this one seems to have beaten me – what makes these five songs link up, and why here, now, in Shea Stadium? I assume at least one or two of them weren’t played at the actual gig – it’d be a bizarre lurch towards authenticity if they all were. Oh well. Answers on a postcard please.

What this song is most notable for is the invention of feedback guitar, according to the hard-won in-game factoids – another fabulous Beatles first, along with cut-out moustaches. Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of2r9CeSfZQ

After that historic moment, things fall into a very familiar place. Various well-worn tropes are present and correct – the same lyrics repeated a couple of times for the hard of hearing, the ‘diamond ring’ as be-all-and-end-all lover’s gift (*last seen in “Can’t Buy Me Love”, fervent ones! – Smilin’ Stan) and the pop ideal of a love story that can seamlessly fit over any fan’s life or fantasy life like a plastic skin on a mobile phone. We’ve been here before, and to be honest I’m getting a little bored of it, especially after Georgebot’s masterful performance on Wednesday. I’m glad this is the last Shea Stadium song – the sound and the makeup of the songs go through some radical changes when the boybots hit Budokan, and then after that we’re into the studio portion of the game, where there’s a lot more meat to tear into.

In the meantime, I guess I should say a farewell to this particular era of Beatlebotmania, and maybe say some more about the gaming side, since that’s my default mode when I’ve got little to say about the song in hand.

My big problem with ‘Eight Days A Week’ – apart from the fact that I had a massive tonnage of paying work to do (all now sent off and accepted with no problems, comics fans) and a stinking cold (still not fully gone away, disease fans) was that it felt like another song in the Beatles Hit Factory style, with little in the lyrics to latch on to and a slightly plodding, methodical sound. ‘I Feel Fine’ is likewise fresh from the factory with little in the lyrics to latch on to, but the sound is vastly different – in particular, where 8DAW chugged along with a b-dum-b-dum-b-dum-b-dum rhythm like a dripping tap, IFF starts with a clever bit of invention and then leaps into a nifty and deeply satisfying riff, which plays throughout the song, keeping the tempo and the mood swinging.

And here’s where we start getting onto the ‘why’ of music rhythm games – that riff isn’t as deeply satisfying to listen to as it is to play. (Once again, I’m using ‘play’ here purely in the game sense.) I’m not only listening to the guitar part of the song, I’m feeling it with my fingers. The aural becomes tactile, and on the screen, the tactile becomes visual. Three different senses start working together as one, thanks to the miracle of the twitch responses – that focussed state people generally enter while guiding Solid Snake or Rick Dangerous through something nasty. Technically, you’re seeing the patterns, mimicking them with your fingers and hearing the sound as a result, but in practice it all blends pleasingly together.

Anyway, from now on, when I listen to ‘I Feel Fine’, I’ll at least subconsciously remember the satisfaction of feeling out that tricky riff, as opposed to the kludgy annoyance of dealing with ‘Eight Days’, an experience that felt similar to trudging through a swamp with my fingers.

Which leads to another interesting question – is the music informing the response to the gameplay, or the gameplay informing the response to the music? Mostly, it’s the former -more often than not, I find myself finding little bits and pieces in a song through the experience of playing it that I hadn’t noticed before, or the mere act of paying attention to music that’s previously washed over me on the radio has made be a fan. When I’ve already formed an opinion about a song, though, I’m not likely to be swayed from it – ‘Synchronicity II’ by the Police is a song I’m very fond of, and a real bastard to play – lots of fiddly little notes – but my enjoyment of the song helped carry me through the frustration. On the other hand, playing some grotesque Metallica monstrosity is a grim chore even when it’s easy. So the music comes first.

And while I’m avoiding talking about the song, let’s avoid it twice! I’ve been talking a lot about the guitar parts of these songs, because I’ve been playing them using the guitar peripheral, the classic plastic doohickey that launched a thousand arguments about why don’t you buy a real guitar and play for real like meeeeeeeeeeeee listen to my indie song i wrote it after a bad breakup it’s about gurls and my feelings. But take a quick look at this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvrTE5lIAzU

That’s some guy playing the drums, and when you watch it with the ‘map’ scrolling past your eyes, it brings the whole drum part into sharp relief. Before, it was the guitar that stood out, but suddenly it’s the drumming – every nuance of Ringo’s playing made crystal clear on the screen (and in your sweaty, stick-clutching mitts, if you can play the placcy drums.) Same with the vocal harmonies – Rock Band is treated as this grotesque bastard thing parking its SUV in the disabled parking space of Real Music, but it’s actually an excellent way to see how all the different parts of a song coalesce together and inform each other. It’s educational! Like Rome Total War! Why don’t you go out and conquer the world in 360 BC for real, like meeeeeeeeee? I wrote a song while I was there, it’s called ‘Onager Of A Lonely Heart’.

Boy, I love Rock Band! As for ‘I Feel Fine’, it’s okay, I guess. But I feel like I’ve completed the starter, and the main course is yet to come.

COMING MONDAY: Budokan, the last tour stage, where, as I remember, the Beatles start talking seriously about what it’s like to be stinking filthy rich.

That’s Nellie McKay’s version of ‘If I Needed Someone’, which by a strange coincidence is what the Beatlebots plough onto in their historic Shea Stadium gig.

Nellie sings it bored, amused and aloof, purring her practised response to yet another admirer, the picture of decadence. I can see a male performer getting away with a similar reading – some smirking, satanic Noel Coward figure – but not George Harrison, and certainly not George Harrison doing his Byrds impression, and absolutely definitely certainly not Georgebot the Robot Harrison, who’s been suffering lately from a breakdown in his suavity matrix. Let’s see how he handles it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEhFeRguGCU

Okay, well, whatever Georgebot lost, he’s gotten back in spades – the smirk is in full evidence, the poise that seemed mechanical in the last song seems effortlessly self-assured now, the long, shaggy locks that just mark the passage of time on the other models seem like a conscious style choice, a way of playing up Georgebot’s sexy rebel appeal. He looks amused and aloof, but not bored – this is what he’s here for.

The song itself is Harrison doing the Byrds, according to the in-game factoids, and it sounds nice and plays even nicer. The guitar part is pleasantly tricky (the bass is a bit samey, but never mind) and it’s the perfect chance to show off your three mics and vocally harmonise. (According to legend, as I mentioned previously, you can play the real life drums after you’ve completed the drum parts on expert – I’d go as far as to say that if you can complete the harmonies on expert, you’re ready to form a barbershop quartet.)

As for the sound – it’s wistful, but disconnected; the whole thing feels like a white lie, a letting-down-gently, and the line that feels the most false is George’s near-emotionless ‘I’m too much in love’, sung in the voice of someone for whom love is an academic exercise at best. In love with himself, perhaps – or maybe pulling the classic “it’s not you, it’s me”. It’s the listener who’s too much in love, and George just can’t be bothered to respond. We’re back to Drimble Wedge again, another variation on the theme of inability to care. If George could love, he’d probably love you. Honest. Why don’t you carve your phone number into his wall and he’ll see what he can do – could be lucky!

I’m reminded of a book that used to be on the shelves at home called Starlust, by Fred Vermorel – a look into the fantasy lives of various starstruck music fans and the various ways they consumed, abused and worshipped the ideas of their pop idols. It was a fascinating read – there’s what seems like a whole chapter on one housewife’s obsession with Barry Manilow, another on a particularly disturbing David Bowie fetish that seems to hover on the point of homicide, and a lusty S&M fantasy involving Adam Ant’s supposed post-concert desires that apparently horrified the man himself. The idea of carving your phone number into a star’s wall – presumably the front wall of their house – fits right in with the creepy, yearning vibe of most of the book; a tiny act of vandalism charged with all the significance of a religious offering, boiling with blocked and unchanneled emotional and sexual energy – a lot more intense and less healthy than anything Adam Ant could inspire, even back when leather trousers were in.

George is revelling in it – where other Beatles songs have offered true love, George is telling it like it is. He’s offering nothing but permission – you can, if you wish, worship me. I’m so very busy, but nonetheless I will graciously allow it. Leave your phone number. Could be lucky.

He’s playing with fire  – Paulbot and Johnbot huddle nervously around the microphone, planning their escape, as the pixellated girls scream ever louder.

NEXT: ‘She Loves You’ – the opposing viewpoint.

So what happened there? Work happened, to put it bluntly – in the midst of a brutal cold that beat my immune system like a gong, I had to write some pretty serious comics (part of which involved creating an alien language from scratch). In the end, I took the week off the Beatles, and from now on I’ll be doing a more realistic production schedule of Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays (or at least two out of three) as per Tom’s excellent and timely advice last week on keeping a long-running series going when the enthusiasm starts to run dry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrjLvEKrnnM

And what could dry up a man’s enthusiasm faster than the sonic wallpaper that is ‘Eight Days A Week’, our unlucky 13th entry?

I mean, what can possibly be said about ‘Eight Days A Week’? It’s a(nother) nifty Ringo catchphrase – or possibly tossed off by a chauffeur this time, according to wikipedia (DON’T JUDGE ME) – but one that means nothing beyond itself, really. It’s hard to tell whether John’s using ‘eight days a week’ to express how much love he’s packing into his time or using the vague, foggy love story to show off the awesome phrase ‘eight days a week’. And as songs-from-witty-Ringoisms go, we’ve already had a much better one. It’s just… there, a lump of filler that feels dragged in from some inventory somewhere. Another hit from the hit factory that brought up ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ (which, now I come to think about it, is another vastly superior song) but glaringly out of place after two experimental-sounding pieces.

In other words, it sucks, and I resent the game for making me play it and my past self for putting me under the obligation of writing about it. It’s possible that the resentment at having to write came first, as I lay dying of Man-Flu with a half-written script screaming at me, but I’m pretty sure I can categorically state that – compared with pretty much every song in the game before it – ‘Eight Days A Week’ is no damn good.

At least my rubbish theory about this group of levels being about the Beatles experimenting has been categorically disproved. Here’s the level in question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6iH5BjxKTo

Even the Beatlebots are uninspired. Nothing for them to really do but jig merrily along, revealed as the coathangers they are when there’s no emotion to hang on them. How much of what I’ve been writing about is the game, and how much is me? It’s a foolish question – games only function because of the human investment. If you allow the scales to fall from your eyes, Solid Snake’s enemies become a few simple routines, Nico Bellic’s decision to spare a man or put a bullet in him – the decision you agonised over for long minutes before pulling the trigger and instantly regretting it – becomes IF A$=YES THEN GOSUB 1100. If you spared the Russian mobster, and have the motorcycle, turn to page 400. If you did not spare the Russian mobster, or do not have the motorcycle, roll 2D6 for luck and turn to page 37.

Games are what we make of them. It’s something my generation learned playing the blocky sprites of yore – we could either layer a complex level of significance and meaning onto those flashing pixels, or not, and that was the difference between the game being fun – or not. Even the simple man vs. high score table archetype of, say, Space Invaders was vastly improved by the simple and often subconscious device of thinking of the invading army as a them rather than an it - and it was an it, a collection of subroutines with one tactic, one mode of behaviour and one strategy – to wear you down. From Pac-Man on, anthropomorphism was the order of the day – we fancied we heard sadness in Pac-Man’s dying bleeps, or triumph in each ching of Jet Set Willy collecting a flashing piece of bling, but it’s just us, always just us, looking in a mirror and thinking we’re talking to the person there. Kids today have it very slightly easier – games are, for the most part, CGI movies or cartoons now (where YOU control the adventure!) and everything looks really really real, so this game of let’s-pretend-the-TV-is-alive is simpler and more automatic than ever before – but it’s no different from how it was. We make our deal with the machine – entertain us, and we’ll pretend you know or care what you’re doing. We’ll do the caring for both of us.

That’s what I’ve been doing. The Beatlebots have been friendly rorshach blots, their behaviour bringing up connections and ideas about the music I might not otherwise have drawn, but at the end of the day I’ve been talking to myself about the Beatles – though not so much about gaming, which is the other half of this. I still need to work out how music and gaming come together, but ‘Eight Days A Week’ isn’t going to help me with that – there’s probably a direct correlation between the boredom of the level and the boredom of the song, but that’s about it. ‘Eight Days A Week’ doesn’t help me talk about the Beatles, either, unless I’m using it as a possible reason why I’ve had a knee-jerk reaction to them in the past.

At the end of the day, ‘Eight Days A Week’ just sucks all the illusion and interest out of the whole enterprise, leaving me alone with a lump of moulded plastic, a few chattering relays, and a desperate desire for all my imaginary friends to finish their tea break and come back into the room.

NEXT: ‘If I Needed Someone’! That’s more like it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfNg484cRCQ

As the Shea Stadium section grinds on, McCartney gives in to the despair gripping his soul and sings ‘I’m Looking Through You’.

Wait, McCartney doesn’t do that at all. To the best of my knowledge, the Beatles hadn’t actually released the song yet, although presumably they’d written it. Apple Corps wouldn’t dare to mess around with time to that extent – would they? It’s all so confusing, though that might be the raging Convention Cold I brought back with me from Birmingham. This will be a short entry so I can get another bowl of chicken soup down my gullet.

So, anyway, ‘I’m Looking Through You’. I did manage to struggle through the level despite the virus, but while I was watching this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-XtQX3ylc

I heard something closer to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au9_vfx6t6c

That’s Drimble Wedge and the Vegetations with Bedazzled, from the film of the same name, but it might as well be Paulbot and the Bored Androids. At 1:10 on the first clip, a pair of robot policemen chase down a screaming robot fan (and why didn’t I get that when I played?) – while Paulbot sings of lovers disappearing without trace. It’s all a bit sinister. The robot Walrus’s next verse seems aimed directly at the fans – “You’re thinking of me the same old way…” Once, that was intimidating – the lover/the fans seemed ‘above’ him. But they’ve remained the same, screaming, indiscriminately loving, giving themselves completely to the ideal of The Beatles – “the Beatles bring joy into the world, happiness”, says one gum-chewing, wide-eyed evangelist at the real Shea Stadium (look around 1:10) , “I wish they’d be around forever, they could bring happiness to everybody.”

But Paulbot and the Vegetations don’t want to be around forever, at least not how they are now. They don’t want to bring the same old happiness to everybody any more. That’s been done. That’s old, finished, nowhere. It fills them with inertia. “The only difference is you’re down there,” smirks Paulbot, and it feels like a sneer, a slap in the face. The Beatles have now reached the top, and success measured in screaming teenage crowds is no longer the goal, if it ever was. We’re back to the Shea Stadium levels as the story of breaking out of the old paradigms, of starting to flex and experiment.

There’s another story, of course – a more standard one of a love that’s just died at the roots. In every chorus, it’s the lover who’s changed, who’s not the same – but then we’re back to the idea of love for something being unsustainable if it can’t accept growth or change. Is Paul singing as the fans here, indulging in a moment of delicious paranoia as he contemplates their reaction to what must happen?

Who knows, I certainly don’t. I’m flying on cough mixture.

NEXT: Another test for my Shea Stadium theme hypothesis. Could my theory of a dinosaur fandom not be entirely correct?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDh-CxXHj5s

Normal service will be resumed etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egRaEoS3gP8

THIS IS CALLED… TICKET TO RIDE!

It’s worth going to YouTube for, honestly.

Welcome to Shea Stadium, 1965. We’ve moved on a year, past Help! and into a shaggier, more thoughtful Beatles, at least according to the pre-level collage that flashes around the screen. They look pretty similar to me, but the audience of robots they’re playing to is bigger still, and the confidence dial in their artificial heads has been turned up to maximum, all three of the guitarists now jockeying for the position of Most Suave. (Ringobot still looks vaguely addled, and his face has morphed to get even more misshapen. Or is that just me?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrUOLlbgr9A

Before we go any further, people in the comments section have pointed out that not everybody knows their way around Rock Band. Basically, as the notes come up on the screen, you press down the corresponding bar on the guitar neck and strum the strummer – like in Guitar Hero. For the drums, you hit the right drum pad at the right time, or pump the foot pedal for the orange bars, and vocals are dealt with in the same manner as Singstar – if the pitch of your voice matches the scrolling horizontal bar, you’re on the right note. You only need to be playing one instrument to get through a song – the guitar doubles as a bass guitar, so it’s two modes in one – and completing all the levels in a stage, for example the Ed Sullivan stage, will unlock the next one.

Another question – can you tell if Ringo was a good drummer from this? Well, one running joke has it that if you can play the drums on Expert, you’re better than Ringo, and it’s received wisdom that playing Expert drums on Rock Band is good preparation for being a real drummer. How true that is, I don’t know – I don’t think the vocal mode could make a singer out of you, it’s more holding your hand as your voice careens about searching for the right pitch.

Also, I’ve been asked to write more about music-as-gaming. I will, no doubt. But not with this song. Play on this one was semi-tricky, but not that inspiring or involving, so I’m just going to talk about the song itself, which is about the Beatles falling from grace.

Or rather, it’s the first song in the game that’s about losing rather than winning.

Everything before has been in the persona of someone who either wants and can get, or already has. Back on the Ed Sullivan show, we heard the stories of poor boys made good, people who’ve worked Hard Day’s Nights and realise that money Can’t Buy Them Love, sweet tales of decent young chaps. But now it’s a year later, the Beatlebots are playing to a crowd of thousands of simulated fans, they’re right on top of the world, they’ve grown up a bit, they’ve tasted the temptations of Mammon. The sound seems richer, fuller, more mature, heavier somehow. We’re getting nifty stylistic tricks like the ending suddenly erupting into double-time – there’s a sense of playing with the boundaries. The Beatles are now big enough to experiment – what’s a good experiment?

I know! Let’s write a song about a complete dick!

It’s masterful stuff. “I think I’m gonna be sad, I think it’s today…” Right away we’re in the voice of someone forcing himself into tragic mode, getting his full pout on – instead of the I-can’t-stop-crying or the I-can’t-let-you-see-me-crying voice of most songs in the got-dumped genre, this cat is making a conscious decision that today, he’s going to be sad. He’s going to mope around in a self-pitying sulk, and the rest of the song is that very sulk.

We’re given the reason for his self-enforced sadness: the girl that’s driving him mad – which could be ‘mad’ as in ‘crazy in love’ or ‘mad’ as in WHEN I COME HOME I WANT DINNER ON THE FUCKING TABLE YOU COW – is leaving, because apparently he’s a bring-down king and she could never be free while he’s around. But wait, maybe she’s just not getting him! Maybe she just doesn’t understand his vibe! That would make her the bad guy here, as in so many I’ve-been-dumped classics. We need to clear this up fast – and what better way than with a middle eight?

“I don’t know why she’s riding so high, she’s gotta think right, she’s gotta do right, by me…” The Beatles are the men of the house, and under this roof they are the LAW and they are the LASH! Now make them a sammich! No, I think this is going to be a short recess for the jury.

To round things off, the repeated “my baby don’t care” reminds me of nothing so much as Jilted John scowling “I’m so upset! I’m so upset!” over and over again. This is the story of a self-absorbed tool, struggling to understand why things aren’t going his way, and Johnbot sings it with a grin so assured that the whole thing could almost be sarcastic. Maybe it’s him who doesn’t care. Then again, I’ve seen that grin before, on a skinnier Johnbot – it’s what he’s programmed for, and I’m not really sure he’s got another expression. The real John handles it differently, wearing a slight look of baffled, self-important pain while he sings, at least at first – before McCartney, who is clearly completely fucked up on drugs, forces the sombre expression to crack into a smile.

(Legal Dept: McCartney was clearly not completely fucked up on drugs while playing Shea Stadium. That is nonsense. He’s merely acting a little bouncy in that clip, as we all would be in the circumstances, whether we had ingested our own weight in goofballs or not.)

(Filthy Mind Dept: Notice that it’s “she’s got a ticket to ride, BUT she don’t care”, which suggests that the ticket to ride is something she should want, but for some inexplicable reason she doesn’t. I can only assume – forgive me, dear reader – that this is a ticket to ride the narrator. “Th’ bitch gets a free ticket to this action an’ she don’t care! Urrrp!”)

(Although according to Wikipedia – DON’T JUDGE ME – Lennon claimed said tickets were cards of a clean bill of health carried by prostitutes in Hamburg. This whole saga gets more sordid by the minute. I weep for my country.)

NEXT: A slice of disdainful pop, coming Monday or Tuesday. This weekend is the POPTIMISM POPULAR SPECIAL, with everybody who’s anybody heading down to the Horse Bar for number-one flavoured thrills. Unfortunately, I’ve got to go to Birmingham instead, for networking and the smoothing of a ruffled feather or two. Oh well.

Speaking of Popular, here’s what Tom thought back in 2005.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6myXYN5u80

Don’t criticise what you can’t understand, square-o.

So, like Snooty McDisdain says, this song was essentially tossed off by the Beatles for the Rolling Stones’ benefit, and the Stones got the first release of it – a little musical charity, as by that time anything smelling faintly Liverpudlian leapt off the shelf like a maddened toad. This bit of Beatles-Stones connectivity wasn’t taken from the in-game factoids, but from Wikipedia (DON’T JUDGE ME) and some research on YouTube. Even while I was playing the level, though, this song was definitely the odd one out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEhT9sSdxJI

After three very tame songs, this one explodes, all speed and noise – and is that the hint of a snarl? I have no idea whether the Beatles had heard the Stones’ version – slow, sneery menace, all drawl, Jagger’s vocal looking and sounding like he didn’t give a toss about anything or anyone, a dark little proto-chav to the Beatles’ clean-cut youngsters – but maybe a hint of it crept in, like the occasional twang punctuating things hints at Brian Jones on the guitar. If the Stones were doing their take on a Beatles song they’d been given, maybe this is the Beatles doing their version of a song the Stones had now made their own.

Anyway, the Beatles can’t sneer or scowl or brood, not just yet anyway. But they can do an intense burst of manic energy just fine, and that’s what they do – that’s about the only thing I can find here, pure, raw energy, but that’s all the track really needs, especially after you’ve played the other three songs. Technically, the animations remain much the same, but this time the Beatlebots seem infused with some kind of extra  pzazz, and even Ringobot seems mentally normal, despite the Joker-like grin permanently etched into his robotic face. Even the crowd seems to be going wilder than before.

In other news, this is another song that was never on the Ed Sullivan Show. I’m assuming we’ll get more and more historical discrepancy as the game goes on, so the LYING LIARS WHO LIE aspect no longer bothers me, but it does raise the question of why this song was picked, and why here. So far, we’ve had three songs keyed into the rise of Beatlemania – the first big smash, the follow-up, and the Movie song – so I’m guessing this is part of the same pattern. Maybe this is here to represent the British Invasion as a whole – the Beatles and the Stones storming the beaches together, in competition in the charts but in collusion behind the scenes, the Beatles unquestionably on top but never quite able to be as sexy or dangerous as their brother band.

Or maybe it’s just a random choice. There’s nothing in the factoids, after all.

One last thing – I ran into the little black-and-white epilogue to this track when I played through the level myself (the joys of story mode, I assume) and it’s a nod to this bit from the original Ed Sullivan broadcast (circa 2:26):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBMrJWA3KCY

It’s a brief hint of history among the endless falsehoods that’s very charming to see, and pretty much made the level for me. In the electronic world, though, the roll-call is conducted to screaming rather than to music, we don’t get any mugging to camera, only the simpering plastic expressions of animatronic dolls – once again, Ringobot comes off worst – and there isn’t a helpful addendum to remind screaming fangirls that John is The Married One.

Well, Johnbot isn’t married, after all – he has no offstage existence whatsoever, and besides any hint of such mucky realities must be tastefully obscured for the good of Apple Corps. We’re in the myth business here, people.

NEXT: On to Shea Stadium and an epic tale of babies who don’t care.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hX5BkWv3nI

The Beatlebots continue to rock the Ed Sullivan show with ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, which the actual Beatles never played on the show, at any time, ever. Beatles, Cheatles more like etc etc etc… actually, at this point, I’m beyond caring about the deceit and the fakery and the lies upon lies. Let the myth-making commence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2N2toyZMY8

Funnily enough, when I was actually playing this I had nothing – it was one more level, and I was more irritated that I somehow wasn’t getting all five stars even on the easy-peasy bass part than I was fascinated by the subtle interplay of the soundscape. Maybe there’s an argument here for Rock Band turning you off music as much as it brings you in – at the time, I was in a foul mood for various reasons I won’t go into, so the game became a game, a stress reliever, and the music just flowed over me in the background as I let the weight of the world slip off me and concentrated on hitting the right coloured buttons in sequence. All I got from it then was that Ringobot was still retarded (2:19 for the evidence) and the rest of them were sort of… there. Apart from Georgebot, who played the solo again, now wedged firmly into place as a soulless, solo-delivering machine, gazing into space like the Manchurian candidate while bobbing from one foot to the other. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Anyway, the song itself didn’t really leap out at me until I had a look at that video. As the in-game factoid-spouter informed me, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is the song of the movie of the comment, being originally a witticism tossed off by Ringo after a gruelling 24-hour sesh, which was then suggested as the title of the Beatles’ first movie, and then finally became a song in its own right on the strength of that. (Wikipedia confirm this. DON’T JUDGE ME.) I suppose this bizarre genesis makes it one of the Beatles’ most glam, celebrity-driven songs, which is why it fits in on the Ed Sullivan stage, which so far seems to be exploring the Beatlemania aspect of their music. (Or that might be just me.)

On the other hand, it’s one of the least glamorous songs so far. It’s basically an optimistic version of ‘Workin’ In A Coal Mine.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dy2tuF915E

That’s Lee Dorsey, wondering how long can this go on. Dorsey’s dwelling on the brutality his circumstances – the only time he mentions not being at work is to groan that he’s going to be too tired to enjoy himself come Saturday night – and the music’s right there with him, down to the ongoing chink-chink-chink of his swinging pick.

Cut to Lennon and McCartney, and the chunk-chunk-chunk of the factory conveyor belt, the straight, unceasing 1-2-3-4 rhythm, alternating between the titular chorus/verse (is there a difference here?) and the upbeat ‘when I’m home’ bits, punctuated by a dink-dink-dink not a million miles away from Dorsey’s coal mine. The solo comes in like a lunchbreak, the jangling guitar at the start and end of the track like the factory hooter signalling the start and end of the working day. The boys are hard at work, even if they’re producing fame and fortune instead of car engine parts.

But over the top of the conveyor belt beat, we get Lennon and McCartney’s voices, not bemoaning the regular chunk and thunk of the machine the way Dorsey did, but thinking about the home that’s waiting, the sleep they’re going to get and the girl they’re doing it all for. (Pimp Daddy watch – it’s another goods-for-services transaction from the Beatles and their omnipresent Sugar Train.) Where Dorsey sang the blues, the Beatles romanticise. The clean-cut nice young men of pop are now the smiling workforce, happy to toil for an honest farthing.

This was probably speaking to a fair chunk of the audience – we were a manufacturing country, as Girls Aloud pointed out, and at one point a fairly significant load of Beatle fans would have been slaving away in a factory, or a building site, or at best an office, saving up the necessary spends to go out and get the latest Beatles single along with a nice mop-top haircut and a ticket to the pictures. Or something. That seems very Sixties, somehow – kids working at the factory and buying records on the weekend. I’m wondering what the modern equivalent would be.

Call centres?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcIommZjMSE

NEXT: A final farewell to Ed Sullivan.

Anyway, it turns out the Beatles never did perform “Can’t Buy Me Love” on the Ed Sullivan show, which makes them LYING LIARS WHO LIE. Were they even born in Liverpool? I’ve seen an ungrammatical placard that says otherwise and I refuse to let the SOCIALISTS silence me.

Let’s take a look at the DISGUSTING FABRICATION in question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBJEo7a1a3c

The in-game factoids tell us that this one’s notable for Paul being the only singer, and Paulbot gets most of the action as a result, jigging about like a Gerry Anderson puppet to the extent that the classic Paul McCartney head-wobble just makes it look like his head’s about to come off and roll across the floor. Paulbot is the least human-looking of all the Beatlebots here, even including Ringobot, whose mental capacity seems to diminish with every song. The look on his face in 1:06 is like the Frankenstein Monster sighting a butterfly. “Pret…teee…” Luckily the game doesn’t go for mirrored surfaces or Ringobot might catch sight of his reflection, scream “UGLEEEEE” and go on a digitised rampage murdering villagers left and right.

As for the song… well, there’s a slight intrusion of Rock And/Or Roll in the solo – and even Georgebot’s saturnyne soloing seems toned down – but apart from that, this is even squarer than the last song. McCartney opens the song as a profligate sugar daddy, blithely promising to drop diamond rings and whatever else is going to “make you feel alright” on his ‘friend’ – and when a song starts off by serenading the object of desire as“my friend” you know even the saucy delights of hand-holding are going to be out of the question – before saying that “money can’t buy [him] love”. I catch your meaning, Paul. Money can’t buy you love, but converting that currency into diamond rings and similar items that make girls feel alright will buy you love, because bitches ain’t shit but hos and tricks. I understand you completely, Paul McCartney, you pimp daddy.

(On a side note, the first thing I saw in the wikipedia entry for this song – DON’T JUDGE ME – was: “When pressed by American journalists in 1966 to reveal the song’s “true” meaning, McCartney denied that “Can’t Buy Me Love” was about prostitution…” Oo er gosh i mean to sa gosh.)

Anyway, Paul McCartney isn’t a pimp daddy at all, it was all a clever ruse to determine whether his beloved ‘friend’ was a greedy gold-digging hooer or not. If the lady in question don’t need a diamond ring, the Walrus will be “satisfied”, like the prince in a fairytale who rejects the beautiful but spiritually ugly wenches who hurl themselves at his throne daily and nightly to plight his troth only with you, dear squealing listener, because only you have passed Sir Paul’s simple test and convinced him that your heart is true. Next stop, hand-holding.

Actually, the jigging Thunderbird puppet slides into poverty over the course of the song. In the first verse, it’s all diamond rings and whatever other extravagant item your heart desires – “I don’t care too much for money” is the cry of a man drowning in it. He doesn’t care where he hurls his immense wad, so get in on this sugar train and let Daddy Paulbucks treat you right. In the second verse he’s giving you everything he has, though that’s not much – the gift is less extravagant, but it means more, because it’s everything he owns. Now not caring much for money means that he prizes your love above all his material goods, like you wish your husband would do instead of drinking away the household funds. And in the final verse – bled dry, presumably, by his previous spending policies – he’s giving you nothing and hinting that he’d prefer it if you never brought the subject up again. Now, Macca is the dirt-poor dreamer who scorns all earthly prizes – the diamond ring from the first verse becomes an example of a ridiculous demand – and the listener is invited to take his hand and build a world without money using only love, which I guess is a grab for the expanding hippy market.

All bases covered, all constituents catered to. Another broad-appeal song from Beatlecorp, and even duller than the last. It’s certainly jaunty, though, and you can’t take that away from them. Here’s hoping the next one will provide some of the stronger meat we were getting in the Cavern Club.

NEXT: There will now be a short hiatus until next Tuesday – when we can expect another song that was never played on the Ed Sullivan show, courtesy of the Fraudulent Four.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BQpX5aWeIE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gro9NZULRd4

I don’t know how valid this kind of side-by-side comparison is, but it’s interesting that George Harrison’s slightly odd-looking mannerisms – he’s coming across a bit like Leonard Nimoy crossed with a hunchback, and around 1:17 he seems to grow a spasmodic hinge in the middle of his body – are transplanted fairly faithfully onto Georgebot, who’s stuck between Johnbot and Paulbot and gyrating stiffly in much the same way. (A slight edit here, as I had to put up a new video after the first one was deleted by YouTube for crimes against the brand. I’ll just add that the Nimoy-hunchback comparison is no longer clearly visible, but Paul is looking very sprightly and bouncy now in the human version – a quality Paulbot lacks.)

Fans of authenticity will be happy to hear that the Kevin O’Neill-esque arrow-crazy set in the game is a rough translation of the Beatles’ first Ed Sullivan appearance – the Youtube vid at the top there is from a week later. I’m assuming all Ed Sullivan appearances have been compressed into one, in the same way as all Cavern Club shows were. Anyhow, what’s changed? Well, the bots are now dressed in full suits, and the programmed-in nervousness seems to have vanished, although Ringobot still looks like a concussion victim. There’s a sense that they’ve been sanded down, somehow – even more than the sanding down of the personalities from the live, fleshy, non-robotic version – and I don’t know whether that makes the song seem slightly dulled and blandified, or vice versa.

This song’s pretty much defeated me, I’ve got to admit. It’s so ubiquitous – you can’t hear it without thinking ‘oh yeah, early Beatles’ and then all cognitive thought on the matter comes to a dead halt.  It’s not a tough song, gamewise – the guitar part I aced first time out and I managed to get 100% on the bass part (hard mode, not expert) while keeping all my attention on reading the Beatlebots’ programmed body language rather than the notes whizzing past my eyes. As a level, it’s entry-level – as a song, it slips in and out of the head as easily as it slips past the fingers.

Tom’s covered it and found something else there, but he could look at it in the context of its fellow number ones, while I’m looking at it in the context of a game filled with songs all by the same band – and in that context, I got nothin’. I had fun with the last two by finding the hidden sexy meaning, but there’s no hidden sexy meaning here – holding hands is holding hands, and while the boys do want to hold the high holy living fuck out of your hand – they want to hold your HAAAAAEEIIEEEAAAAAAEEIIEEEAAAAAAAND!!!!1!!??!!! – I can’t make that about something other than holding hands, no matter how hard I try. Maybe it’s moving from that grotty cellar club to this nice clean studio, but the filth is gone.

But I did find the ghost of seduction going on – the seduction of consumers by a product. I’ll tell you something I think you’ll understand, say four of the nicest youngsters Ed Sullivan has ever had on his stage. I’ll say that something - I want to hold your hand. Because there’s holding hands and holding hands, isn’t there? There’s Paul McCartney, holding… her… hand… so… TIGHT(!)… (cue filthy twanging) — and then there’s the smiling shop assistant holding your hand through a difficult new purchase. Holding your hand as you take your first steps into the world of the Beatles, as a band and a brand. You’ll like it here. We’ll start you off nice and mild, and by the time you’re swirling in a psychedelic frenzy with the girl with kaleidoscope eyes and the egg man and the walrus, you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.

Happily, when I looked this song up on wikipedia (DON’T JUDGE ME) I found that this suspicion was relatively on the money – Epstein apparently told John and Paul to write something that would appeal to listeners across the pond and this is what they came up with, a distillation of their appeal into one powerful yet easily-digested punch. And this seems to have been the big unlocking of Beatlemania as a transatlantic phenomenon, so it undoubtedly worked. So is this going to set the tone for the entire Ed Sullivan section of the game, or now that we the players have made our charming introduction to the American music scene, are we going to start pissing on the carpet and wrecking the joint?

NEXT: We find out.