Think of songs where one musician slyly quotes another’s music. One of the cleverest examples I can think of is in Bob Dylan’s song “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” In the chorus he sings:
“No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe.”
This song came out in 1963 — right after the Beatles had a hit with “She Loves You.” Who can forget that song’s famous chorus?
“She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah”
Dylan’s No, no, no is sung on three notes (a descending minor third, to be technical), the exact same three notes the Beatles used for their Yeah, yeah, yeah refrain. He must have intended his anti-love song as a snide rejoinder to the Beatles’ hit song.
Matthew Fisher, after he left Procul Harum, did a solo album with a song entitled “Going for a Song.” The lyrics keep saying “Please don’t make me play that song again,” and there’s a short quote from “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” to make it clear what he means.
In Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “I Dig Rock and Roll Music,” they do musical imitations of the Beatles and the Mamas and the Papas. It’s not exactly what the originals did, but it sounds like them.
Similarly, the Beatles quote from the Beach Boys’ sound in “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” especially with the middle part {“Those Ukrane girls really knock me out” etc.).
ELO’s version of “Roll Over Beethoven,” has a quote from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
In the late '70s, I was drinking in a Munich beer hall – the same one Hitler used as a base for his putsche – when the brass band launched into “Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles,” just long enough to get our attention before swinging into a polka.
The Beatles did the self-referential bit with “All You Need is Love” by throwing in a “She Loves You Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” in one of the choruses. (And the Rutles did the same thing, tossing in “Hold My Hand, Yeah, Yeah” on their version).
In the recorded version of “Sunshine of Your Love,” in the first 4 bars of the guitar solo, Eric Clapton plays the melody from “Blue Moon.”
The Beatles had another clever self-reference: In “Glass Onion,” John Lennon sings, “I told you 'bout the fool on the hill,” after which there is a quick flute phrase, recalling the flute from “Fool on the Hill.”
On the song El Camino from their first album, Ween break into a totally twisted yet recognizable take on Jefferson Airplane’sGo Ask Alice for a few bars right in the middle of the song.
Yes did a cover of Simon & Garfunkle’s song “America.” They transformed the gentle acoustic ballad (“All come to look for America”) into a full-blast rock-‘n’-roll rave-up. It was mainly an excuse for extended electric guitar jams.
But in the beginning part, Chris Squire on bass plays a couple bars of the melody of Leonard Bernstein’s song “America” from West Side Story—you know, the one with the Puerto Rican girls singing “I like to be in Ame-ri-ca”, playing with Latino rhythms, 6/8 crossed with 3/4, thrown into Yes’s 4/4 jams.
Tim Rice’s lyrics in the musical “Blondel” have about a million of them, but few people are interested. One example: This 1983 show has a song sung by Richard the Lionheart called “I Just Can’t Wait to be King.” Where was that lyric reused? His brother Richard sings in counter-point “Saladin Days,” which was one of Tim’s and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s first songs.
If you want anymore, e-mail me. But I ain’t gonna be hanging by the computer.
At the end of Barenaked Ladies’ song New Kid (On The Block), the ending is a sequence of (you guessed it) New Kids on the Block references. It goes like this:
New kid on the block (step one, I was fun)[sub]I think that’s what he says…[/sub]
New kid on the block (think of what you say, think of what you do!)
New kid on the block (oh oh, oh oh oh oh!)
New kid on the block
The parts in parentheses are sung in the background, and each is a reference to a NKOTB song: the first is from Step By Step (the line NKOTB sings is actually “Step one, we can have lots of fun”), the second is from Games, and the third is from The Right Stuff (You Got It).
Another BNL one: in their cover of the song ‘McDonald’s Girl’, they include the old McD’s jingle at the end.
Was just listening recently to Zappa’s Strictly Commercial compilation, & a musical quotation in “Nanook Rubs It/Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” was eluding my memory. My wife got it: it’s from the old standard “Midnight Sun”, of course. (Frank knew his cheesy jazz standards: Lather at one point throws in an uncredited rendition of “Laura”–it’s at the start of “Flambe”.)
Wanna talk about Zappa’s musical quotations, you could write a book. How about in “Billy the Mountain” from Just Another Band from L.A. — he parodies the Latino riff from Crosby, Stills, & Nash’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” singing farcical lyrics that totally destroy the mystique of Stephen Stills’s enigmatic pseudo-Spanish lyrics. “He was born next to the frozen beef pies.” But that is as broad as parody gets, nothing the least bit subtle about it.
I was going to say that the Beatles tipped their hat to Bob Dylan with Rocky Racoon. I think I read once while they were poking fun at some of his music, they had a deep respect for him.
In the later versions of Crash by Dave Matthews Band he says the lines: “I’ll be your dixie chicken if you’ll be my Tennessee lamb.” Which is from a country song called Dixie I believe.
Nah, the song’s “Dixie Chicken,” by Little Feat. Not exactly a country song, more like Rock n Roll/Blues/Country hybrid.
One of the best live songs ever, for those of us of a certain age…
The first thing that came to mind on seeing the thread title was They Might Be Giants, who have to be the reigning undefeated champions of this sort of thing. It’s usually more subtle than direct quotations, but they musically allude to the whole range of American music of the twentieth century: Broadway show tunes, jazz and pop standards, work chants, etc. Their cleverness extends beyond being inveterate smart-asses in their lyrics to the music itself. As often as not, their songs are about music as much as the nominal subject.
Oasis has a lot of Beatles references, perhaps too many to list. For example, the Na Na Na part in All Around the World off Be Here Now by Oasis is around the same length of the Na Na Na part in Hey Jude by the Beatles (saw that on Pop-Up Videos).
In Weird Al Yankovich’s “Slime Creatures from Outer Space,” as the track is fading, Al asks, a la Ray Parker Jr., “Who ya gonna call” and the bg singers yell “Slime Creatures!” It’s cute.
Stevie Nicks did a gig at The Whiskey that was recorded live, and she worked in the lyrics to “When Doves Cry” by Prince into her own song, “Edge of Seventeen.”
Veruca Salt references their own song in “Volcano Girls” with the lyric
I told you 'bout the Seether before
The one who is neither or nor
Here’s another clue if you please
The Seether’s Louise.
The Seether is another Veruca Salt song, and the lyrics to that are like “The seether is neither loose nor tight. The seether is neither black nor white…” Louise is a band member.
In The Who’s “Pinball Wizard” version with Elton John singing lead vocals, there’s an interlude in which they transition to “Can’t Explain,” an early Who hit.
These aren’t quite on the same lines as the above ones, but here are my observations anyway.
I was watching a rerun of an early episode of Star Trek Next Generation a couple of nights ago (the one with the Binar). When the Enterprise docked into the space station, the music was extremely similar to the music from Star Wars when Vader’s shuttle docked.
In the old computer game Descent II, the music from the 2nd level (I think, it’s been a few years since I played) is “Ase’s Death” from the Peer Gynt suite by Grieg, only sped up a bit and with a stronger beat.