The Beatles, Hey Bulldog vs. Lady Madonna Video Controversy

Posted in The Beatles, Youtube Favs on April 8th, 2011 by Willie

WELCOME to part 31 of my youtube countdown!  Today, I have a special Beatle-tastic history lesson, featuring clips of two insanely great Beatle rockers, Hey Bulldog, and Lady Madonna.  First, let present the sad story of Hey Bulldog, John Lennon’s lost masterpiece of rock.  Hey Bulldog is one of John’s most ferocious, manic rockers.  It’s a hard driving, piano riffed, distortion pedaled, philosophical nonsense song.  It has John barking one of his best late era vocal performances.  My knees buckle every time he launches into the “You can taaaallk to meee, YOU CAN TALK TO ME, if you’re lonely you can talllk to me,” refrain.  It is in my top 5 Beatle songs ever.  Now, why is the story of this amazing song so sad?  Because the Beatle myth makers, whoever they may be, did their best to sweep it under the rug of Beatle glory!  First of all, it was a song featured on the Yellow Submarine soundtrack, the least essential of the original Beatle albums.  If you’re not familiar, the Yellow Submarine album, was the album for the legendary cartoon, but featured previously released material, and the film score on side 2, making a bit of a throwaway…(though in actuality, it isn’t, and you should own it.)  Anyway, the second reason this song got the shaft was because a film team came into Abbey Road studios to film the Beatles record the song, and then, in their infinite wisdom, took the footage, and cut it up to go along with their then 1968 single Lady Madonna!  This was just so annoying.  Here you have a document of the Beatles recording and performing a late era Beatle song, an extremely rare thing I might add, AND as a full unit no less, and you fuck it up by pasting another song on top and turning them into lip-syncers.  It was a travesty until someone at Apple finally found the original footage and put it back together, thus restoring the glory of Hey Bulldog’s production.  So, for your enjoyment, I present both Hey Bulldog and Lady Madonna, for you to see just how often the people in charge of marketing the Beatles got it wrong.  I mean, you all should know how Capital just butchered all their singles and records until 1967, turning every one record into two, to sell more.  Anyway, that’s a whole other can of worms.  Here you go, enjoy the music!

 

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