"The Invasion"

"The Invasion"
Buchanan and Greenfield
Rhino Records
Featured on Beatlesongs!
Album originally released in 1982, song originally released August 11, 1964*
Novelty
Vinyl (probably original release)
C+

OK, so I don't talk about album art much on this blog (Yes aside), but apparently there is an elephant in the room about the front cover, one I was blithely unaware of when I got this album ca. 1985, and indeed until I Googled this album.  A bunch of Beatles fans are on the cover, and the one on the far left of the front row (in front of the Walrus) is Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman!  If I had been asked to describe this cover from memory, I might've recalled the buxom blonde with the Beatles dolls, and I just would've assumed that Chapman was a generic nerd.  It turns out that the artist, William Stout, was making a point about how fans can become dangerously obsessive, but Rhino understandably put the back cover on front for subsequent releases.

Which brings me to the innocuous first track on this album of songs about the Beatles.   You probably have to be a Gen-Xer or older to remember how Bill Buchanan and various partners did novelty songs that sampled other songs.  (My late stepbrother had the "Jaws" one by Dickie Goodman, Buchanan's former collaborator.)  It's not especially impressive these days, with the world of music at our fingertips, but at the time, well, it was a novelty to hear those familiar songs used humorously.  Today, it makes me appreciate a little more the musical world that the "four mops" invaded.

*This is sort of a Best Of, so I'm going with songs' original release dates for date tags, and only something genuinely '80s will be labelled as such.