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"Anyway You Want It"
Legion of Rock Stars

The Spin I'm In
@ YouTube

Warning Extremely Obnoxious! (but to others, including myself, very funny).

In the last two weeks two friends of mine sent me a couple of YouTube videos that I thought were hilarious. They were both famous rock videos with the real music replaced by a bunch of pranksters. I first thought that this was the new YouTube trend (like lip-syncing was), but I found that these were done by the same people who are obviously ahead of the YouTube curve. When I conducted my crack investigation of who was behind this I came across the band Legion Of Rock Stars. I was bummed that I hadn’t heard of them before being that they are from LA and have actually played out live a few times. They’re not huge or anything but their video skewers are getting around. They’ve also invented a new approach to creating music:

 

Legion of Rock Stars (LRS) pioneered PURE PLEASURE, in which the band listens to original recordings of rock and pop songs on noise-blocking headsets, and then plays along. Freed from the shackles of practicing, the band is able to deliver PURE PLEASURE.

 

From what I can gather, the band members with headphones on can’t hear each other, but they can hear the original recording and voila! Cacophony ensues. No one is spared: Mysterious Ways by U2, Lay Lady Lay, Let’s Spend The Night Together and on and on. They’ve made 162 of these YouTubes!

I did a search on YouTube for Any Way You Want It.The results were quite interesting: of the first six videos only three real Journey videos came up. The other three were a lip-sync, a video game replica band, and the bastardized version by Legion of Rock Stars. These other three even were more “popular” than The Dave Clark Five’s song Any Way You Want It and the cover of that song by The Ramones with Eddy Vedder.

Personally, I find YouTube absolutely amazing for historical footage of bands and funny prankster stuff. But future music lovers curious about pop music history are going to have to weed through a lot of imposters and cyber junk to get to the real deal.