Meet the Beatles' lawyers

Steve Dirkx's Beatles in a Blender project is pretty much just what the name implied, or as close as the law and modern technology would allow. Last August, while learning how to use his recently purchased sampling equipment, the former Telefones bassist liberally cut and pasted his way through the Fab Four's back catalog, coming up with eight songs that were as illegal as they were clever. (Except for "Hari Georgeson," which contained no Beatles samples, Dirkx notes, only "a dash of Ravi Shankar and a pinch of the Beach Boys.") Even the song titles -- "Acid Is Groovy, Kill the Pigs, Etc." and "Ringo Is God Is Acid," among them -- wittily mixed and matched Beatles conventions, paying tribute and spoofing them at the same time.

Dirkx didn't plan on doing much with Beatles in a Blender, only making a few tapes to send to friends and family. That's still his plan for the most part, but the project has grown a bit bigger than he originally thought it would. Now renamed The Butcher's Covers and available on recordable CDs, Dirkx's collage homage has made it into semi-regular rotation on New York's WFMU-FM. Not exactly the sort of exposure that's likely to make Dirkx into a household name, and copyright law being what it is, that's probably a good thing. If you're interested in your own copy of Dirkx's quirky condensation of the Beatles' anthologies -- and you really should be -- contact him at stevedirkx@hotmail.com and he'll tell you how to get one. Read: Don't ask us.