With “The Beatles Complete on Ukulele,” Roger Greenawalt and David Barratt hope to spur a uke revolution.
Roger Greenawalt and Dave Barratt are men on a mission — a mission that, by its 2012 conclusion, will find them using thousands of hours of studio time recording with hundreds of local musicians, writing hundreds of essays, and producing almost 190 songs, all for the purpose of spreading one single message to the world: that The Beatles were a ukulele band.
Ukuleles donated to Omaha’s Girls, Inc. with the proceeds of their Spike Hill benefit show
“John Lennon started on ukulele,” says Greenawalt as he discusses the pair’s web site, The Beatles Complete on Ukulele. “His mother Julia had a ukulele, and that was the first instrument he played. When he met [Paul] McCartney, he had just gotten a guitar, and he only knew ukulele chords.”
The Beatles Complete on Ukulele project began on Inauguration Day, when the pair recorded a version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” with local folk trio Dandelion Wine, accompanied by Greenawalt on uke. Since then, they have placed a new, uke-tinged version of a different Beatles song on the site every Tuesday — complete with ukulele accompaniment, and also paired with an original essay penned by Greenawalt — and will continue to do so until the eve of the London Olympics on July 24, 2012, by which time they will have recorded all 185 original Beatles songs, and all with different guest artists.
Greenawalt and Barratt, both 48, are music industry veterans. Greenawalt, who began his career as a “tea boy” at the Boston studio owned by The Cars, has been producing for thirty years. He discovered singer/songwriter Ben Kweller, and has recorded with the likes of Iggy Pop, Albert Hammond Jr. from The Strokes, and David Crosby & Graham Nash. Barratt, also a veteran producer, has mixed for David Bowie, and wrote the hit “Heaven Knows” for Robert Plant. They both currently reside in Brooklyn, and record all the songs for the project at Greenawalt’s “Shabby Road” studio in Williamsburg, or on Barratt’s laptop studio — which he calls, “The Abattoir of Good Taste” — at his home in Fort Greene.
According to Greenawalt, the uke’s natural symbiosis with the guitar makes it a natural for adapting Beatles songs.
“The ukulele is like a little baby guitar. It has the guitar’s four highest strings in pitch,” he explains. “So if you know the basic positions on the guitar, they work on ukulele, except the ukulele is much easier to play. So a lot of things that seemed like bizarro chord progressions, like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ or the intro to ‘If I Fell,’ they’re all extremely easy to play on ukulele.”
George Harrison in particular, he says, used the ukulele on many of both his classic and his later recordings.
“Probably the last twenty years of his life, it was his main instrument,” he says, “and a lot of his writing is also ukulele-based, from ‘Here Comes the Sun’ to ‘Long Long Long.’ All these things sound fantastic on ukulele.”
As for Greenawalt, his own fascination with the instrument began in 2001, when a cousin in California introduced him to some ukuleles he had picked up in Hawaii.
“I started playing them and really got hooked,” he says. “It’s transforming. The kind of personality that Obama has? You get that from playing ukulele. It’s aloha zen.”
A lifelong Beatle fan, he began transcribing some of their songs for the instrument, and when he downloaded the band’s songs onto iTunes, he realized that the entire Beatle catalog took up only 9.4 hours — which meant that you could play the entire catalog in one day.
He and Barratt recruited about forty musician friends and sixty-seven singers, and performed a 14-hour concert at Spike Hill in Williamsburg, playing every original Beatle song, and raising several hundred dollars for charity.
Somewhere along the way, an Emmy-winning musician named Peter Buffett had heard about the project, and contacted them about getting involved. This led to a very unusual connection for the pair, as Buffett’s father is famed investor Warren Buffett — who, it just so happens, is a tremendous fan of the ukulele, and a player. So Greenawalt and Barratt soon found themselves having lunch with the world’s second wealthiest man, and discussing their mutual favorite instrument in great detail.
“We took all the money from the show and decided — this was at the beginning of the recession — that we should give it to Warren Buffett,” says Barratt. “We could spend it on fine wine, good food, Viagra and stuff like that, but we thought it was best to give it to someone who’s better at allocating capital. So Roger and I took the proceeds from the concert in a large brown paper bag, had breakfast with Warren, and gave him the money [for charity].”
(l-r) Roger Greenawalt (left) and David Barratt (right) present the proceeds from their benefit to Warren Buffett
The pair videotaped the breakfast, (some of which can be seen at their site), during which Buffett recalled how he began playing the instrument in college in a failed attempt to woo a girl he liked, and also how he later taught the instrument to fellow billionaire Bill Gates.
The pair were caught off guard by both Buffett’s love of the uke and his generally breezy manner.
“I was expecting him to be blazingly bright in a Mr. Spock/Bill Gatesian sort of way, and have no discernible personality,” says Greenawalt. “He turned out to be extremely funny and self-deprecatory, and he kept steering the conversation back to a kind of ukulele utopia. He couldn’t have been more charming.”
While The Beatles Complete on Ukulele is driven by Greenawalt and Barratt’s love of the instrument, Greenawalt acknowledges that the ukulele ultimately serves as merely a connecting force, leaving great freedom for approaches to the Beatles catalog from all over the musical map.
“Shakespeare [actually, Hitchcock - Ed.] would call it the MacGuffin,” he says. “It’s the thing that the actors all care about, but the audience doesn’t. In this case, it’s the one unifying factor; the only rule we have.”
This is borne out by the sheer variety of the adaptations. Jamie Rae Branthoover’s version of “Good Night” — the song Ringo Starr sang to close out “The White Album” — is a gorgeously-crooned and simple duet between Branthoover on vocals and Greenawalt on uke; “Yellow Submarine” is a silly and off-key kids’ version that highlights the vocals of the Fort Greene Children’s Choir (ages 7 and up); and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy), by JJ Appleton and Tamara Hey, shifts from a drum-machine- and uke-driven first section to a madcap coda propelled by distorted kazoos.
In the site’s essays, which are constructed simultaneously with the songs, Greenawalt examines the Beatles music in the context of the music itself, the band member’s personal lives, and the times in which they lived. For his essay on “Good Night,” he delves into the contrast between the song’s syrupy beauty and the apocalyptic chaos found elsewhere on the album, while for “I Want You,” the topic is the creeping influence of Yoko Ono’s fine art minimalism on John Lennon’s output. For Greenawalt, deconstructing these classic songs musically and analyzing them intellectually go hand in hand.
“In the case of ‘Run for Your Life,’ which has the really horrible narrative, ‘I’d rather see you dead little girl/than to be with another man,’ the essay is basically, ‘oh my god, what an embarrassing lyric. Why did he do that?’” says Greenawalt. “So our reaction was to get the cutest girl we knew who was a lesbian to sing the song to a girl, and [then it becomes], how dare you leave me for a boy.”
While the pair describe the project as an end unto itself, they also have hopes and ambitions beyond it, including hopefully getting Sean Lennon to record a track, making last year’s concert an annual event, and eventually turning the essays into a book.
But ultimately, the goal of The Beatles Complete on Ukulele is to reinforce the greatness of both the ukulele as a universal instrument, and The Beatles as an unparalleled cultural force.
“We’re making a claim that this is a canon — like the 37 plays of Shakespeare [for actors] — that musicians need to master and understand,” says Greenawalt. “It’s part of the literacy. So many more people have heard and been influenced by The Beatles music in the last 40 years than by Shakespeare in the last 400. The Beatles are so much more important, and they will be around forever.”
Across The Ukulele Universe
While Greenawalt and Barratt are providing new approaches to The Beatles on ukulele, perhaps the best ever uke-driven version of the Fab Four comes from a Hawaiian musician named Jake Shimabukuro, a ukulele virtuoso who performed “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” in a performance that O’Brien called one of the best things he’d ever had on his show. While that performance is unavailable online due to copyright restrictions, you can watch a video of his version of the song on YouTube, or at jakeshimabukuro.com. Spellbindingly beautiful, it shows just what a gorgeous instrument the ukulele can be.
For a more comical approach to the instrument, check out The Hazzards (formerly The Ukes of Hazzard). Led by Sydney Maresca and Anne Harris, who performed as a duo until recently expanding to a five-piece, The Hazzards had a viral hit with the song “Gay Boyfriend.” See them at Crash Mansion (199 Bowery @ Spring Street; 212.982.0740) on July 8. — Larry Getlen
Larry Getlen is the Editor-in-Chief of City Scoops magazine. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/larrygetlen.
Last 5 posts by Larry Getlen
- It's All Good: Harry Connick’s Wide-Ranging Success - July 20th, 2010
- Killing Barney - July 20th, 2010
- Ready to Party? Andrew’s Your Man. - March 31st, 2010
- Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television: George Carlin Was A F***ing Comedy Genius - November 19th, 2009
- A Groundbreaking View of America Comes to the Met - November 19th, 2009
