Nouveau Retro: Big Daddy

Brief post today… Worked way later on writing-type stuff than I’d meant to. (So I guess that counts as an excuse, huh?) In any case, this one has decidedly nothing at all to do with writing.

Sometime back in 1991-92, I got a very curious gift from my brother. It was a cassette tape (I later upgraded to CD) of music by a group called “Big Daddy”; the title was Cutting Their Own Groove.

On the front, an antique-looking record player seemed to be playing, was it? yes! an old 45-rpm vinyl record. A rainbow of sparks was shooting from the needle at the end of the tone arm. I flipped the cassette over, curious to see what the playlist might be. As my brother knew, my preferred musical genre at the time was oldies, so maybe…

What was this?!? All the tracks were recent hits! Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All.” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” “Graceland,” by Paul Simon…

This was a stupid cover band! What was Mike thinking, sending me this crap?!?

Long story short: a cover band, all right. But a cover band with a difference. A difference which Mike knew would appeal to me.

Here’s the idea: Pick a currently (or recently) popular song. Crank it through an oldies sensibility. Sit back and, yes, watch the rainbow-colored sparks fly.

I picked up a second Big Daddy album a few years later: a remake of the Beatles’s entire Sgt. Pepper album, also recast as though it had been recorded in, oh, say, 1956 or 1960 or so. I could never find out much about the band itself; no one I ever talked to — other than Mike — had ever heard of them. (Mike himself had heard a cut from Cutting Their Own Groove on one of Vin Scelsa‘s late-night radio shows.) The Web to the rescue: in preparing this post, I did find one interesting site, Charles G. Hill’s “The Legend of Big Daddy.” Lord knows how much longer it will be in place (many/all of the external links have gone dark since 2002, when it was apparently last updated). But after some tongue-in-cheek stuff about the band’s background, here’s what he says:

Actually, the Big Daddy band had been formed in southern California in the Seventies, under the distended monicker “Big Daddy Dipstick and the Lube Jobs”, playing the oldies straight; one of their regular gigs was a floating houseboat at the Redondo Beach pier. Then again, “straight” is perhaps the wrong word. One of their tapes, a smirky rewrite of Willis Alan Ramsey’s “Muskrat Love”, replacing muskrats and love with hamsters and lunch, found its way to the Dr Demento radio show, and while “Hamster Love” never got a formal release as a 45, it was a regular entry on the Doctor’s Funny Five.

But truth or cruel hoax, it didn’t matter; Big Daddy was putting out some startlingly funny records in its strange hybrid genre, and two and a half more would follow during the next decade, poking fun at all manner of musical trends, from complete album remakes to Gregorian chant.

So they’ve been around a good while. Still around? No idea.

But for your edification, here, first, is the original version of “With a Little Help from My Friends” (assuming you need help remembering it):

And now, Big Daddy’s version:

Scary, no? But also hilarious. I’m not sure if this rendition is more a commentary on The Beatles or on Johnny Mathis.