When Harry Nilsson covered 17 Beatles songs at once
The mashup song has become a cornerstone of popular culture and internet scrolling over the last few decades. While medleys had been in common usage since the earliest days of theatre and music, the mashup is its own unique entity: layering two or more songs over each other to create an entirely new product. As the house music boom erupted in the late 1980s, mashups were suddenly club hits. Dance music changed forever, but when tracing history back to the first pop music mashup, the artist responsible didn’t have anything to do with electronica.
That artist was legendary singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, the forward-thinking musician known for his gleeful subversion of established genres. With interests that varied between classical composing, rock and roll belting, and interpreting the Great American Songbook, Nilsson was a singular character in the world of music. This was the man who could take a heartrending ballad to number one and sing about putting the lime in the coconut on the same album.
Nilsson first became prominent thanks to his sophomore LP, 1967’s Pandemonium Shadow Show. Featuring a chorus of vocal overdubs, a strong set of self-penned songs, and a couple of choice covers, Pandemonium Shadow Show made the musical world notice that there was a new wunderkind in town. At just 26 years old, Nilsson broke down barriers in pop music and threw out the rulebook.
Nowhere was that more clear than on Nilsson’s cover of The Beatles’ ‘You Can’t Do That’. Originally a foot-stomping rock and roller from John Lennon, Nilsson transformed ‘You Can’t Do That’ into an entirely new song by doing something radical: fitting in lines, melodies, and references to as many other Beatles songs as he could in two minutes.
Although the song is ostensibly a cover of the A Hard Day’s Night album cut, the first line is actually cribbed from ‘She’s a Woman’, the Paul McCartney-penned single released a few months after ‘You Can’t Do That’. The very next line is a quote from ‘I’m Down’, another McCartney single. When Nilsson goes in for a third alternative Beatles reference with the “beep beep, beep beep, yeah” from ‘Drive My Car’, it becomes crystal clear that this is no ordinary cover.
Throughout its brief runtime, Nilsson’s version of ‘You Can’t Do That’ quotes no less than 17 songs from The Beatles’ catalogue, including ‘Rain’, ‘Day Tripper’, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, among many others. Suppose non-lyrical references are also taken into account. In that case, it’s possible to hear as many as 20 different nods to The Beatles throughout the cover, making ‘You Can’t Do That’ effectively the first mashup song in pop music history.
Nilsson also included another Beatles cover on the album, ‘She’s Leaving Home’, despite Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band only having come out a few months earlier. The clear talent held by Nilsson, combined with his obvious fandom of the band, endured Nilsson to The Beatles, and a friendship was soon forged. Nilsson would eventually become Lennon’s drinking buddy throughout the latter’s ‘Lost Weekend’ in the mid-1970s, taking time to work on the album Pussy Cats during the off-hours.
Listen to ‘You Can’t Do That’ down below.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.