The strange, twisted world of Beatles soundalikes!

These lovely ladies are not The Beatles, as you may have guessed.

I wish I had a great story about becoming a Beatles fan, but in truth, I found the group's music in a clunky, roundabout way. That's the case with most of my lifelong interests. In the late 1980s, when I was in junior high school, my older sister briefly became friends with a somewhat artsy girl whom I will call Willow. That friendship ended acrimoniously, but it lasted just long enough for Willow to dub some cassettes of a few Beatles albums for my sister. And she, in turn, dubbed some copies for me. 

That's how I first heard Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), Abbey Road (1969), The Beatles (White Album) (1968), and Rubber Soul (1965): through muddy, third-generation cassettes that I listened to on a portable tape player. I can still remember how I'd listen to "Within You, Without You" and imagine myself as an English secret agent deployed to India, chasing some scoundrel through a public market. There was just something about that track, with its exotic instrumentation and dry, reserved vocals, that ignited my imagination. 

A precious commodity.

As far as I know, my sister's interest in The Beatles dwindled away to nothing when her friendship with Willow ended. She even let me have her precious, store-bought cassette of The Beatles 1967-1970 (1973). I became a full-on Beatlemaniac after that, devouring whatever I could about the group. Within a few years, I'd acquired all the group's canonical EMI albums on compact disc, and I'd started accumulating books and magazine articles about the band, too. By the time I was in high school, I even owned a few bootlegs. Their songs were playing on a 24-hour loop in my brain.

Typically, I gravitated to the weirder and wackier elements of the Beatles saga: Magic Alex, Zapple Records, May Pang, The Rutles, "Paul is dead," etc. The rarities and obscurities interested me more than the big hits. And then there was all the pop culture detritus that surrounded The Beatles: the merchandise, the endless repackaging, the shameless rip-offs and imitations. I'm sure I was made aware of a bizarre-looking novelty album called The Beatle Buddies (1964)—a collection of Beatles covers by a quartet of severe-looking, unsmiling ladies in black sweaters—due to its inclusion in Geoffrey Giuliano's coffee table book, The Beatles: A Celebration (1986). Unfortunately, the internet didn't exist back then, so such albums were not readily accessible to me.

Cut to 2026. I am a middle-aged man now, and my love of The Beatles has waxed and waned over the decades but has never totally gone away. At some point, I decided that I'd purchased the same basic material enough times and pretty much stopped buying anything else related to the group. The deluxe versions of the albums? Didn't get 'em. The latter-day documentaries? Didn't even watch 'em. I feel like I've devoted enough of my time, money, and shelf space to these four guys, not to mention the real estate they take up in my brain.

And yet, I can still apparently be tempted to part with a few bucks... if the offer is good enough. I'm a regular viewer of a weekly YouTube series called VCR Party Live, and recently, one of their episodes was sponsored by a Tucson-based organization called the Trial and Error Collective. Describing themselves as "a group of music lovers from around the globe," they have an online blog, a printed 'zine, and a podcast, all about their various musical interests and obsessions. Recently, they launched a spinoff project called Vinyl Vault, a 'zine that examines vintage budget-label records, the kind that were sold in drug stores and department stores back in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. These LPs included off-brand, soundalike versions of songs that were popular at the time.

The inaugural issue of Vinyl Vault focuses on Beatles-inspired knockoff records from the 1960s. When The Beatles hit our shores in 1964, the American record industry scrambled to capitalize on this new musical fad. Soon, the budget labels were belching out cut-rate albums of Beatle covers and other vaguely Beatlesque tunes by groups like The Buggs, The Liverpools, and, yes, The Beatle Buddies. Some of these artists were hastily-renamed garage bands, some were just anonymous session musicians. I was especially interested in a group called The Wyncote Squirrels for a few reasons. Not only are they an imitation of Alvin & The Chipmunks, an act I dearly love, but the Wyncote label holds a special place in my heart due to one of its cheapjack Christmas albums.

If any of this sounds like it's worth exploring, I will refer you to the Trial & Error website, where you can order the 'zine for yourself. Vinyl Vault #1 includes a printed, 20-page risograph about the "fake Beatles" phenomenon, a mix CD containing tracks from these albums, and four souvenir buttons featuring artwork from the 1960s LPs. If you order this package, a recent issue of the Trial and Error Collective 'zine is included for good measure.

Receiving all this material from Trial and Error transported me to another time—not the 1960s, which I didn't live through, but the 1990s. This was the golden age of lovingly-made 'zines and mixtapes. Obscurity was a virtue. Back then, to purchase music, you'd go to an honest-to-goodness, brick-and-mortar record store where hipster clerks would be deep into conversations about bands new and old that you'd never heard of. I'm surprised and happy to learn that, in some corner of the world, this stuff still goes on. The dream of the '90s may have once lived in Portland, but maybe it migrated to Tucson.