Rock Flashback: Beatle Parodies

In the mid-1960s, Mrs. Elva Miller became an unlikely star despite being largely uncontaminated by talent.

When a cultural phenomenon becomes big enough, it’s ripe for parody. This happens pretty fast now — videos making fun of Lana Del Rey‘s universally-derided Saturday Night Live performance last month were on YouTube within hours. In earlier years, it took longer, but it happened. By late 1964, nearly a year of Beatlemania resulted in several Beatle parodies, and such parodies continued to sprout for years thereafter.

Parody specialist Allan Sherman cut a song called “Pop Hates the Beatles.” It comes across as mean-spirited now, but then, it expressed the opinion of millions of adults. Here’s a bit of it, performed with Dean Martin and Vic Damone on Martin’s TV show.

Other artists performed their own unique versions of Beatles songs. Here, British actor/comedian Peter Sellers performs “A Hard Day’s Night” in the style of the Shakespearean hero Richard III, on a British TV special featuring the Beatles themselves.

One of the strangest novelty acts of the 1960s was Mrs. Miller, a woman in her ’60s with a little musical training and lots of ambition. She recorded four albums of pop and country covers between 1966 and 1968, one of which sold 250,000 copies. The attraction of Mrs. Miller’s music was the awfulness of her singing — although she is said to have been unaware that people were laughing at her, at least at the start. She recorded her own version of “A Hard Day’s Night” in 1966, and later that year tackled “Yellow Submarine.”

We’ll stop now. For the love of God, we’ll stop now.

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