Get Back with Joe Pesci

The long awaited return of a rock-kitsch curio.

Maybe this isn’t the best time.

This very minute, all across the world, music people are reveling in the intimate look at the Beatles provided by Peter Jackson’s documentary Get Back. They’re enthralled by the carefully edited rehearsal footage showing songs coming together and the group coming apart. They’re struck by the still-curious-after-all-these-years presence of Yoko Ono, seated in the loose circle of musicians, reading the newspaper.  They’re being reminded, once again, about the still-astonishing melodic grace that defined the entire Beatles endeavor. They’re having insights that start out sounding glory-days nostalgic and wind up more in the vicinity of awe.

Into this moment strides Joe Pesci, the character actor of Goodfellas fame. Who, way back in 1968, worked as a singer named Joe Ritchie and followed many more successful entertainers onto the Beatles-cover gravy train. Some of those TV-variety-show denizens interpreted individual songs – who can forget Frank Sinatra crooning George Harrison’s “Something” like he’s chasing away barroom ghosts? Some did whole albums: There’s Basie’s Beatle Bag, one of two (!) albums of covers by the Count Basie Orchestra; The Chipmunks Sing the Beatles Hits, The Swingle Singers’ Ticket To Ride: A Beatles Tribute, and Sarah Vaughan’s Songs of the Beatles, with smart arrangements and production from the father/son team of Marty and David (Toto) Paich. To name just a few.

Pesci’s contribution to this canon: His versions of “Got To Get You Into My Life,” “The Fool On the Hill” and “Fixing a Hole” on the previously hard to find Little Joe Sure Can Sing. A Brunswick Records release from ’68, this has recently been spiffed up and returned to circulation after years as a kitsch obscurity. Presumably by popular demand.

Dare you to take a listen. I’ll wait.

For starters there’s that unfortunate “Ohhh” in “Got To Get You Into My Life.” It’s a stinkface “Ohhh” not a love-rhapsody “Ohhh.” Whatever else the track has going, when Pesci puffs himself up to lean into that refrain, the spell is broken and he is revealed. As being on the Pat Boone side of the cool kids/squares divide. As a creature of an entertainment business that, at the time, saw nothing aesthetically wrong with making and selling gaudy hatchet jobs on precision-crafted songs. 

Little Joe Sure Can Sing travels quite a range of singing styles. There’s some woeful ersatz blues and a mildly interesting reading of the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody.” The charts – by Artie Schroeck, who crafted the Frankie Valli smash “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” – are opulent in that Jack Jones Rat Pack-wannabe way, with plush strings helping to blunt the rough edges of Pesci’s vocal instrument.

As an album, it’s an audition -- here’s Little Joe doing his best to sound like a seasoned veteran of the Vegas showroom circuit. He’s a go-getter and a rascal and a let-me-tell-you-how-it-is guy, and this gives the entire collection a delicious tonal dissonance: He’s trying to come off as “real” while plying the tricks expected of those in the lounge-singer trade. The earnestness needed to sell a “When Sonny Gets Blue” sounds tragically feckless and phony on these ubiquitous culture-transforming hit songs; every line reminds us that these are works that require more phrasing nuance than he can muster. His is the desperate, fitful dance of one attempting to align himself with what the kids like. 

It's a useful sort of mess, an artifact of a particular era of show business when the old guard would do just about anything to break off a piece, however small, of rock-culture credibility. John Lennon and Paul McCartney endured more than their share of this kind of catalog abuse. If they didn’t like what happened to their songs on the secondary market, they didn’t show it.

Instead they responded in the best way possible: By evolving. They developed ever more intricate song structures and linked them to richly dimensional modes of expression — and, over and over again, created works of transcendent beauty that the Joe Pescis of the world just couldn’t sing.

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