You’re at the Mala Restaurant on Maui on New Year’s Eve, and there’s a pretty good band playing some classic rock. At one point, they launch into the Beatles’ “Come Together,” with a trio of singers you’d never expect to see together — Steven Tyler, Alice Cooper, and Weird Al Yankovic. Naturally, you whip out your cell phone to record the moment for posterity…
Note that Weird Al is the only one who doesn’t need a lyrics sheet, even though Tyler’s the only one who recorded a version of this song — he and Aerosmith did it 30+ years ago for the soundtrack of the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” movie that Robert Stigwood produced with one of the oddest casts ever assembled: Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees, Donald Pleasance, Steve Martin, George Burns, Earth Wind & Fire, Billy Preston, and Carel Struycken, with dozens of cameos by people like Carol Channing, Dame Edna, Jack Bruce, Leif Garrett, Jose Feliciano, and Keith Carradine. I hosted the 1978 premiere and had to apologize to the audience the next day on my show.
There was no apology necessary for the ecstatic crowd in Hawaii that night, except perhaps to Mike Myers, who was also there (with Tom Arnold?) but didn’t get to the microphone until the song was over.