Beatle Barkers

Beatle Barkers
Studio album by Woofers & Tweeters Ensemble
Released	1983
Recorded	1983
Genre	Novelty
Label	Lifestyle Records with versions also on Passport Records
Producer	Gene Pierson and Roy Nicolson

Beatle Barkers is a 1983 album released by the "Woofers & Tweeters Ensemble". The album consists of dogs barking in a parody of popular Beatles songs. In a review in The Boston Phoenix, the album was praised as a "real howler."

Back on the leash

The runaway 1980s novelty hit album Beatle Barkers is back on the leash and in the hands of its Australian creators after an independent Los Angeles record company opened the pound gates allowing pirated versions of the parody of popular Beatles songs to be sold round the world.

The album comprising computer simulations of dogs and other animals ‘singing’ a selection of Beatle hits sold close to a million copies in Australia in the early 80s. However the creative minds behind the project discovered in 2010 that it had slipped the leash and illegal copying had made it a runaway success again.

Record producer, label owner and one-time Australian pop star Gene Pierson (aka Giancarlo Salvestrin) and musician Roy Nicolson who created Beatle Barkers bared their teeth when they discovered their pet project had been stolen.

Legal bite worse than bark

In 2010 the legal hounds were sent in to discover who was responsible for pirating the material and to shut down access to illegal versions which had gone viral like a plague of fleas.

Hundreds of thousands of illegal copies had been sold from sites in the US, Russia and other parts of the world. Attempts to create a story around the album and its creation are mostly fabrication and guesswork, as Pierson and Nicolson kept their names off the credits attributing the novelty album to The Woofers and Tweeters Ensemble.

As they bring an end to the piracy they are prepared to tell the real story behind Beatle Barkers for the first time in discussion with professional writer Keith Newman.

Talking animal genre

The one-off Beatle Barkers album fits neatly into the novelty music sub-genre of singing animal songs which people either love or loathe.

This kind of music is most often released anonymously to avoid embarrassment to the musicians or creative people behind the scenes who do not want their otherwise serious music industry careers tainted through association.

More often than not there are actually no animals involved in the making of these records, they might be entirely synthesized or perhaps sampled, even using humans making animal noises, then tuned to play via a musical keyboard.

The Beatle Barkers album, with a soundtrack created by three studio musicians backing the Barkers' computer created ‘vocals’ is likely to elicit either howls of laughter from those who love the spoof or howls of anguish from offended music lovers.

Comedic collaboration

Gene Pierson first met Englishman Roy Nicolson in 1982, shortly after he had released novelty song I Eat Cannibals which was a novelty hit across Australia. Nicolson invited the producer and entrepreneur to his Redfern studio, near Sydney where he showed him a computer program that could emulate a wide range of different sounds.

“We were having a couple of red wines and he began to create these animal sounds and play them like an instrument. I had never heard anything like this before and jokingly asked if he could do a Beatles song with dogs barking,” said Pierson.

Nicolson looked at Pierson strangely then within a short time the competent musician had created a credible version of Paperback Writer. Considering how primitive computers or even synthesizers were in 1983 it was no easy task to create a simulated sound that did not sound too corny.

Nicolson looked even more incredulous when Pierson suggested they do an album of Beatles songs. ‘I’ll give it a go Gene but you’ve got to get off the wine and make sure I get paid and that my name is not on the cover.”

Nicolson stayed up half the night working on a couple of tracks which he presented the next day. Pierson was impressed but said more variety was needed to prevent them from becoming boring. He asked for chickens, sheep and cow noises to be added to the main dog 'vocals' and after three top session musicians put down the backing tracks for 12 Beatles songs the Beatle Barkers album was born.

Marketing a novelty niche

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Gene Pierson was working as a producer, creating compilation albums, including ‘best of’ and box sets for major record labels K-Tel and J&B records.

As there was very little comedy on the music charts there was some concern about how to market the novelty album. In a eureka moment he approached David Hammer the head of Demtel which used skilled marketing approaches to sell items including steak knives, with the catchphrase ‘but wait there’s more’.

Hammer listened to the album and said it was so outrageous he wanted to release it. Both Pierson and musician Roy Nicolson agreed as long as their names were kept off the cover.

Beatle Barkers was credited to The Woofers and Tweeters Ensemble. The liner notes stated it was released in middle of night in New Zealand where the sheep had been recorded and made light of the story of how the album was created.

Demtel signed off on all the licensing rights to reproduce the Beatles music, ensuring publishers' royalties, and created their own cover of cartoon dogs with musical instruments.

Over the next couple of years Beatle Barkers gained momentum, initially on the ABCs youth station 2 Double J (later Triple J)and soon, with shrewd marketing from Demtel, it gained widespread airplay around Australia.

It sold 850,000 albums and, because their purchase price for the rights was so low, Demtel made a substantial amount of money during their licensing period.

Meanwhile the minds behind The Woofers and Tweeters Ensemble maintained their anonymity until three decades later when Pierson decided to digitize and re-release the 80s novelty icon through his own Lifestyle Music label.

That’s when the doggy doo hit the fan.

Pirates raid kennel

On arranging through a legitimate digital aggregator site in the US to make the songs available for legal download, Pierson discovered Beatle Barkers was already on the loose. He was barking mad and after employing investigators and legal agents finally tracked down who had let his creation off the leash.

When Pierson’s legal team finally caught up with the independent Los Angeles record company owners who he had done business with in the past, he admitted releasing the album without permission and promised outstanding royalty payments would be forthcoming.

When payment never materialised further legal approaches were made and the aging record exec then declared bankruptcy.

The dog catchers now have Beatle Barkers back in their home kennel and Pierson’s legal agents continue to clear up the copyright and piracy issues by closing down illegal access country by country.

Doggerel vs credibility

Pierson believes he and Nicolson may have lost millions in revenues through the pirating of Beatle Barkers. There are about 10 different versions on the web, with different stories and cover designs.

One version of the story has the album bring recorded in the late 1960s and held back from release until 1983, another markets it as Tales From the Pound: The Beatles - The Lost Tapes - A Parody. The Examiner in Washington says real dogs and farmyard animals were used in the recording.

Even Amazon.com has various versions of the album under different names and covers, selling downloads for $1 each.

An English website markets the album as ‘the first release from England’s popular pup combo the Barkers” called Meet the Barkers with a cover parody of the Beatles debut Meet The Beatles.

One blogger and Beatle fan, incredulous at having discovered the album 30-years after its creation, calls it “the stupidest idea for recording since Edison cranked out the wax cylinder”. Facebook is also rife with efforts to put images to the Beatle Barkers soundtracks.

Regardless all the songs are simply pirated versions of the Beatle Barkers tunes created by Nicolson and Pierson in 1983. Today the only legal copies of the Beatle Barkers album are available from Pierson’s Lifestyle Music and available for download through IODA.

Track listing

All songs written by Lennon–McCartney.

1. "I Wanna Hold Your Hand"
2. "Love Me Do"
3. "Ob La Di Ob La Da"
4. "We Can Work It Out"
5. "I Saw Her Standing There"
6. "I Feel Fine"
7. "Can't Buy Me Love"
8. "All My Loving"
9. "Day Tripper"
10. "She Loves You"
11. "A Hard Day's Night"
12. "Paperback Writer"

Sources and references

• Interview with Gene Pierson Jan 2011

External links

• Roy Nicolson listings on http://www.discogs.com
• Demtel website
• Buzz Feed blog
• Frank Lorosa blog
• Amazon.com