Read other letters about this article
...I hope I'm the first one to mention this, but I'm probably not. The novelty group Big Daddy did a song-for-song cover version of the Sergeant Pepper album 15 years ago; their gimmick is that they covered each song in the style of a different 1950s artist ("Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" as Jerry Lee Lewis; "Within You Without You" as beat poetry; "Lovely Rita" by the young Elvis, etc.) and it's an astonishing reinterpretation. You get to see where the Beatles were coming from based on who their influences were. It's been out of print forever, but if you can scare up a used copy it's WELL worth listening to. I like the Beatles version, but I liked it more after listening to the Big Daddy one (which sounded so faithful to the 50s that a friend of mine thought their cover of "A Day in the Life" was actually a Buddy Holly song he'd never heard).