Helter Skelter – Aerosmith

If there’s one band I try to keep off of SFTD it’s the ruddy Beach Boys. Honestly. Those smug Bastards can fuck right off. Oh no hang on. I mean The Beatles. Sorry Mum! Honestly I do love them. I do, but what can I add to all that been written about them over the years? Aerosmith on the other hand? Aerosmith, doing the Beatles? I can wax lyrical for a paragraph or two on that topic just F.i.N.E fine.

There could be a respectable 12” single made out of Aerosmith doing Beatles covers and you’d get nothing new for your money. Hey, Record Store Day! You hear me?

Their most famous Beatles cover is the version of Come Together they recorded for the movie of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. A musical in which The Bee Gees played the Beatles and Aerosmith played The Blue Meanies. I promise you I am not having a psychotic episode. That really happened.

The one readily available relic from the whole thing (as a movie it was utterly terrible and so it is where possible disappeared from both Beatles and Bee Gees history*) is the rather fantastic Aerosmith version of “Here come old flat top, He come grooving up slowly, He got joo joo eyeball, He one holy roller” it oozes sleaze. So they did this. In the 70’s at some point. It made it’s way on to that Red and White wrap around covered single disc Aerosmith’s Greatest Hits and rubbed shoulders with Remember (Walking In The Sand) and all the bands headline status tunes from the CBS years.

You could fill an album with big name cover versions of Come Together. Arctic Monkeys, Paul Weller & Noel Oasis, Michael Jackson, Ike and Tina, Kate Bush, Joe Cocker, Soundgarden, Gary Clarke Jr. They all got Monkey fingers shootin’ coca-cola with feet down below their knees an’ shit.

They also did the old Beatles B-Side I’m Down on their 1987 album Permanent Vacation. A belter of an old rock and roll tune, it mimics Little Richard and Screaming Jay in places. You would have to have bought the single of Help! to have heard it first time round. Or perhaps you caught it on Past Masters or one of the Anthology albums to know the song over Aerosmith’s version of it. Me? I got it on side two of PermVacay and I loved it.

Obviously not a band shy of a cover there’s Train to deal with. There’s all the Fleetwood Mac and 60’s blues stuff. There’s Milk Cow Blues, Cry Me A River, Big Ten Inch Record, The stuff already mentioned in other posts.

In light of both of those cases though I’d go to bat for Helter Skelter as represented on the retrospective three disc compilation Pandora’s Box. It’s a killer rendition of latter day Beatles. There’s the implication of Charlie Manson and the U2 cover version from Rattle And Hum to compare it to. Motley Crue have been there too, so that’s four version if those Schlubs behind RSD want to flesh that out into an EP of the same song by four different bands. I’m giving this crap away for free!

Ultimately though after Pandora’s Box was gifted to me as a birthday present on my 18th I’m going to go with Helter Skelter because it is a fun raw, ragged outtake. A garage band thrash through a Beatles song. What’s not to love?

U2 stole this song from Charles Manson. I’m stealing it back.

*not really, the DVD and Blu-Ray are pretty widely available