Music / The Masked Marauders

"The public should not be subjected to such GARBAGE!"

"It can truly be said that this album is more than a way of life; it is life."

— Rolling Stone, in the October 18, 1969 issue

Toward the end of 1969, rumors began circulating about an unprecedented event in Rock history: all of The Beatles except Ringo teamed up with Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger in an isolated recording studio on the shores of Hudson Bay in April of 1969, and spent three days recording an album together. Solomon Penthaus, the president of Deity Records, famed for their Sounds of Nature series, obtained the tapes, and was impressed enough to make it the label's first rock album. Owing to the legal difficulties of properly crediting these iconic performers, Deity called the group The Masked Marauders upon release of the album. Rolling Stone reviewer T.M. Christian obtained a test pressing of the album and raved about it in the October 18 issue, leading Reprise Records to pick it up for national distribution, making the album the music event of 1969.

Or so a lot of people really wanted to believe...

The truth was that Rolling Stone's reviews editor Greil Marcus had grown annoyed with all of the Supergroup pairings that proliferated in 1969 (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Blind Faith, Al Kooper's Super Session album), feeling that they were peddling subpar music purely on the strengths of their famous names. Marcus and a friend jokily started speculating what a Supergroup with the biggest names in Rock might sound like, concluding that they'd do "the same stupid things that everybody else was doing". Marcus tossed off a review of the fake album, which Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner loved and agreed to publish. Almost immediately, the magazine was inundated with letters from fans and record store owners asking about the availability of the album, which amused Marcus, since he'd thought the review was so patently silly (what with the album allegedly containing McCartney doing a cover of "My Mammy", plus a "sensitive, yearning" rendition of "Kick Out the Jams") that no one could possibly take it seriously.

Marcus and fellow Rolling Stone staffer Langdon Winner decided to extend the joke further. They asked The Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band, an eclectic Bay Area Folk Music group with a sly sense of humor (their one and only album had been called The Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band Greatest Hits), to cut actual Real Life versions of three of the songs mentioned in the review: Bob Dylan singing lead on the Doo Wop standard "Duke of Earl", Dylan fronting a countrified Instrumental called "Cow Pie" on guitar and harmonica, and Mick Jagger doing a grungy "instant classic" Blues number called "I Can't Get No Nookie". Winner took tapes of the songs to two San Francisco radio stations where they were played on the air. Most listeners got the joke, but still somehow dubs of the songs got distributed to radio stations throughout the country. Several record labels, some under the misimpression that it really was Dylan, et. al., contacted Winner and Marcus with immediate financial offers (Motown reportedly offered $100,000—upwards a million in today's money), before they signed with Warner (Bros.) Records for a deal with Reprise Records. Marcus, fearing conflict-of-interest problems with his Rolling Stone position, dropped out, but Winner and the other musicians regrouped to finish the album.

Unleashed on an unsuspecting public right before the holiday season, accompanied by an ad campaign that kept things deliberately vague about the album, the combination of people who knew it was a joke, and those taken in by the ruse, led to sales of over 100,000 copies and a run on the Billboard Top 200 album chart (peaking at #114, while cracking the Top 100 on the rival Cashbox album chart). It's retained a place in music lore, and has sustained a minor cult following.

Tracklist:

Side One

1. "I Can't Get No Nookie" (5:30)
2. "Duke of Earl" (3:21)
3. "Cow Pie" (2:19)
4. "I am the Japanese Sandman (Rang Tang Ding Dong)" (3:46)
5. "The Book of Love" (2:21)

Side Two

1. "Later" (1:12) - a continuation of "Book of Love"
2. "More or Less Hudson's Bay Again" (3:32)
3. "Season of the Witch" (10:14)
4. "Saturday Night at the Cow Palace" (1:30) - a reprise of "Cow Pie" over which a listener gives an assessment of the album

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Alleged Personnel:

• Bob Dylan - vocals, guitar, harmonica
• George Harrison - vocals, guitar
• Mick Jagger - vocals
• John Lennon - vocals, guitar
• Paul McCartney - vocals, bass, piano
• "a drummer as yet unnamed"

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Actual Personnel:

The Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band:

• Annie "Dynamite" Johnston - percussion, backing vocals
• Phil Marsh - vocals, guitar
• Gary Salzman - lap steel guitar
• Brian Voorheis - vocals, guitar, harmonica

others:

• Allen Chase - vocal on "More or Less Hudson's Bay Again"
• Anna Rizzo - drums
• Vic Smith - bass
• Mark Voorheis - drum solo on "The Book of Love"/"Later", spoken word commentary on "Saturday Night at the Cow Palace"
• Langdon Winner - piano, backing vocals

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Saturday Night at the Trope Palace:

• Bawdy Song: "I Can't Get No Nookie", in which "Mick" complains about his girlfriend rejecting his requests for "nookie" and "head". Hilariously, then-FCC chairman Dean Burch, obviously not knowing anything about the song's origin, cited it by name (with a United Press International article about the speech calling it a "popular rock ballad") as an example of what he claimed was rampant indecency on radio and television.
• Becoming the Mask:
  • Greil Marcus says that a few years later, his younger brother was visiting a friend in Amsterdam, and the friend excitedly pulled out a white label bootleg album that turned out to be the Masked Marauders album. The younger Marcus tried to explain that it was a hoax perpetrated by his brother, but his friend wouldn't believe it. So an album that began as a fictional parody of bootleg albums became a real legitimate release, then got turned into a bootleg.
  • "I Can't Get No Nookie" has been misattributed as an actual Mick Jagger recording (from the Jamming with Edward! session from 1969).
• Can't Have Sex, Ever: The narrator of "I Can't Get No Nookie" gets rejected even when his woman is laying on a bed.
• Charlie Brown from Outta Town: Calling the "supergroup" The Masked Marauders invokes this, by suggesting that these are huge rock stars masquerading as other people. Reprise even did promotional photos of a group of men wearing masks.
• Cover Version: The album includes covers of three classic Doo Wop songs—"Duke of Earl" (Gene Chandler), "The Book of Love" (The Monotones) and "I am the Japanese Sandman" (The Cellos), plus a not-entirely-respectful reading of Donovan's "Season of the Witch".
• Epic Rocking: "Season of the Witch" extends past 10 minutes. "The Book of Love" is implied to have a really, really long drum solo, to the extent that the label faded it out early and rejoined it in progress at the start of side 2 for "Later".
• Face on the Cover: Zig-zagged. For the original Rolling Stone review, Marcus went with a very subtle sick joke for the fake album's cover photo: a picture of the recently-murdered Sharon Tate, which was a cropped version of a still◊ from The Fearless Vampire Killers (taken from a Playboy photospread) where Count Von Krolock looms over a nude Sarah in a bathtub◊. For obvious reasons of legality and taste, Reprise refused to use the photo for the actual album release. Instead they just brought in some models and re-staged the scene for a new photo. Still, it's been misreported that the real album has Tate's picture on the cover.
• Fake–Real Turn: A famous example, but in fact the final album doesn't really much resemble the album described in the original Rolling Stone review. There, it was a double album that also included everyone sharing vocals on "With a Little Help From My Friends" and "In the Midnight Hour", Dylan and Jagger doing an A Cappella duet on "Masters of War" ("you'll truly wish, after hearing this cut, that you 'could stand over their graves until you're sure that they're dead'"), a "twelve-minute John Lennon extravaganza" version of the James Brown classic "Prisoner of Love", and a Grand Finale version of the Gospel Music standard "Oh Happy Day". The excuse given by the label was that the album was subject to a lot of last-minute tinkering and remixing.
• In the Style of:
  • "I Can't Get No Nookie" takes aim at The Rolling Stones (Band), with the lyrics being a raunchy riff on "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and the music being a Suspiciously Similar Song to the Stones Instrumental "2120 South Michigan Avenue".
  • "Cow Pie" is a dig at Bob Dylan's Country Music dabbling on John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, with "Is it rolling, Al?" at the end referencing Dylan's "Is it rolling, Bob?" at the beginning of Skyline's "To Be Alone With You".
  • "More or Less Hudson's Bay Again" is Dylan circa Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, including his habit of adding extra adverbs into the song's title.
• Limited Lyrics Song: While basically an Instrumental, "Cow Pie" does include "Bob Dylan" saying the song's title once, and asking "Is it rolling, Al?" at the end. Greil Marcus says that he did in fact write some Toilet Humor-laden lyrics for "Cow Pie", but the band refused to sing them, so the song stayed an instrumental.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: "Mick Jagger" sings "I Can't Get No Nookie", "Bob Dylan" vocalizes on "Duke of Earl" and "Cow Pie", and they each sing a verse on "Season of the Witch". The lead vocal on "The Book of Love" seems like an attempted "Paul McCartney" voice. The vocal on "More or Less Hudson's Bay Again" is several people in unison doing a Dylan impression.
• Precision F-Strike: The man in "Saturday Night at the Cow Palace" minces few words in expressing his displeasure with the album.
  "What is this anyways? I pay five dollars and eighty-six cents for a record that has Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon, and an un-billed drummer, plus Mitch [sic] Jagger, and what do I get? This piece of shit!"
• Shout-Out:
  • The intro of "I am the Japanese Sandman (Rang Tang Ding Dong)"—"Sherman, set the WABAC Machine to 1955."
  • The whole idea of a long, all-star version of "Season of the Witch" is a dig at Al Kooper's Super Session album, which featured an eleven-minute take on the song with Stephen Stills on guitar that was an underground FM radio staple at the time (with the added absurdity of Dylan covering a song by Donovan, who started his career as a Dylan imitator).
  • The vocal style on the monologue on "Saturday Night at the Cow Palace" was apparently inspired by pro wrestlers Pat Patterson and Ray "The Crippler" Stevens.
  • Greil Marcus wrote the review as "T.M. Christian", a reference to The Magic Christian that he thought everyone would get, and thus would be tipped off that the whole thing was a joke. They didn't.
• Troll: The original album review was a pure example, ostensibly trying to make readers believe that a truly monumental album existed. The Real Life album falls into this category even more, since it's very obviously not by the musicians it's purported to be.
• Word Salad Lyrics: As a Bob Dylan parody, "More or Less Hudson's Bay Again" naturally includes these.
  The sheriff in his Microbus wandered in today
  He said his tape deck had broken down and he needed a place to crash