THE BEATLES – The Poppees
But you won’t be thinking about any of that when you hear the Poppees; what will be going through your mind is “Beatles!” In his liner notes for the anthology album, Arthur Alexander recalls that the Village Voice ad that brought him to the band mentioned “must be into the Beatles” – and were they ever! You might miss the connection on individual songs buried on a compilation CD as I did; but put two or three songs together, and there is no doubt that this band loved the Beatles as much as anyone ever has. And not just any Beatles: “I Want to Hold Your Hand”-era Beatles.
Back in 1973, that was about as unfashionable as it got; but the world would soon catch up with them, and the Poppees found themselves right in the thick of one of the most exciting music scenes in rock history, playing clubs throughout New York City, including CBGB, the epicenter of New York’s punk/new wave scene, and the equally storied Max’s Kansas City.
Though I have had fun trying to pick up which Beatles song is echoing through the tracks on the album, the Poppees are not Beatles imitators or a cover band. Mostly they play their own material; in fact, the closest they ever came to covering a Beatles song is when they recorded “Love of the Loved”, an obscure Lennon/McCartney song that the Beatles never recorded. (Actually, it turns out that this song was included among the 15 songs on their famed Decca Records audition tape; Pete Best was still drumming then, so it wasn’t really the Beatles that we all know at that point). Instead, they passed it along to Cilla Black, a protegé of their manager Brian Epstein who had been a coat-check girl at the legendary Cavern Club, where the Beatles were honing their skills in 1961. Though virtually unknown on these shores, Cilla Black was the only important female artist to emerge from the British Invasion – and the second-biggest-selling recording artist out of Liverpool (after you know who) – and has been a beloved entertainer in England for decades. While “Love of the Loved” wasn’t a big hit, her version of “Anyone Who Had a Heart”, which came out in January 1964, eclipsed the original by Dionne Warwick and became the biggest selling record in Britain by any female artist in history: Cilla Black sold 800,000 copies of the single in England and another 1,000,000 worldwide.
“Sad Sad Love” is one of those achingly emotional songs at which John Lennon excelled; two versions of this song are included, and the spare demo version that closes Side 1 of Pop Goes the Anthology might be even better than the studio version. “Since I Fell for You” sounds like a lost Beatles track and is one of the “obscure R&B tunes the Fabs would surely have envied” (as Greg Shaw put it). But the Poppees really hit the mark with their hot fast songs; “She’s So Bad” (recorded live at CBGB) and “She's Got It” (the “B” side of their second single) recall the fury of the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” (their biggest cover song; the original was by the Isley Brothers).
(December 2010)
