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The Beatles - Helter Skelter

“I was in Scotland and I read in Melody Maker that Pete Townshend had said: ‘We’ve just made the raunchiest, loudest, most ridiculous rock ‘n’ roll record you’ve ever heard.’ I never actually found out what track it was that The Who had made, but that got me going; just hearing him talk about it. So I said to the guys, ‘I think we should do a song like that; something really wild.’ And I wrote Helter Skelter. You can hear the voices cracking, and we played it so long and so often that by the end of it you can hear Ringo saying, ‘I’ve got blisters on my fingers’. We just tried to get it louder: ‘Can’t we make the drums sound louder?’ That was really all I wanted to do - to make a very loud, raunchy rock ‘n’ roll record with The Beatles. And I think it’s a pretty good one.” - Paul McCartney

(via chemicalcomfort)

“Helter Skelter” by Motley Crue

(Words/Music: John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Album: Shout at the Devil, Elektra Records 1983)

This song, originally recorded on The Beatles White Album, has a strange and tragic history. One of the more sonically charged songs in The Beatles repertoire, it is often associated with the Tate/LaBianca murders by the Charles Manson family. The song had become so linked to those brutal murders that it prompted U2’s Bono to decry that it was “a song Charles Manson stole from The Beatles” and his band’s performance of it would be “stealing it back.” 

I did not know any of this when I first heard the song on Motley Crue’s breakthrough Shout at the Devil in 1983. In fact, I don’t remember ever hearing The Beatles version at all at that point, making my personal history with the song somewhat skewed. To their credit, it fit so well into the rest of Shout at the Devil that it was a few years before I even knew it was a cover song, let alone a Beatles cover song. And in hindsight, if you had given me a choice at the time as to who was more famously associated with the song, The Beatles or Charles Manson, I probably would have chosen Charles Manson, but that would have been more due to its association with Motley Crue and their penchants for pentagrams. I believe it was during an interview in one of the metal magazines (Circus or Hit Parader - I wasn’t really a big fan of Metal Edge) that Nikki Sixx revealed, when asked why they chose to record that Beatles song, that they decided to cover it because it was the loudest and hardest Beatles song there was and none of the others would sound like Motley Crue. What struck me most about that statement wasn’t that he summarily rejected 99% of The Beatles songs as unworthy of being covered by Motley Crue, but that he seemed to acknowledge that the band had to cover a Beatles song. It wasn’t like he said, “Well, we thought about a few Stones songs, a Stooges song, or a T. Rex song, but decided on ‘Helter Skelter’.” He made it sound as if the band decided to cover a Beatles song then went about choosing which one. They probably knew the credibility that comes with covering a song by The Beatles as most versions are supported and discussed among their peers. Even if the rest of the album sucked, at least there was a decent version of a Beatles song. It also gives them a sense of credibility for their acknowledgement of the indebtedness to the bands before them. Certainly, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and a cover song is a musical recording of that flattery. Even when playing it off as “cool” that “Helter Skelter” was the heaviest song they could find from the Beatles, the fact that they chose The Beatles as the band to cover shows that Motley Crue understood where they came from and the debt they, and everyone, owed to them for paving the way for all kinds of pop and rock music. 

More Motley Crue: AmazonMP3 - last.fm - AllMusic - eMusic

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