Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

For those who may have missed it on Monday, NAational Public Radio's "Day to Day" had an interesting feature on recording artists who redo their songs in other languages for foreign markets. There's a clip of the Beatles doing "Get Back" in pidgin German during the filming of "Ley It Be." David Bowie is also singing "Space Oddity" in Italian. They had to change the lyrics because a literal translation made no sense. Pretty interesting (and funny stuff). Follow the link to the main page and access the sound clips from there. http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=17&prgDate=08-01-2005&view=storyview

How do you access the sound clips? For some reason they're not playing through QuickTime, but I'd like to hear them . I've taken about a year and a half of German in college, so it'd be fun to follow along.

Nevermind, apparently RealPlayer is the answer. The recording was great, though.

I always thought that Love was the Answer...

It's not "real German," I'm told, but a mixture of vernacular German that Paul apparently picked up in the old days. Still fun to hear them obviously having a good time.

My first wife, a German girl (my Astrid period) would always cringe at the Beatles' German versions. Seems they didn't quite master the language.

As the legend goes, the fab four didn't want to do those German versions (Komm, gib mir deine Hand, Sie liebt dich) at all. It was George Martin who pushed it strictly as a commercial effort into Germany.

Yea, I bet a native German speaker has a good chuckle over those things, but given that the boys probably didn't know any more German than "Hi honey, how much?", it was a pretty good effort.

Lol. I have also heard they were lothe to do it. They might has put a little less than their usual enthusiasm into it!