Yeah, I don’t know why, but for some reason all three greats were at the same New Year’s Party in Maui (annual meeting of the White Singers with Long Hair Club?) and they all hopped up on stage to take on the Beatles’ classic “Come Together.” Fortunately, Yankovic and Tyler knew the song cold and Cooper had the lyrics written down so, unlike another John Lennon-penned song performed that night, nothing got mangled…

Watch the video below:

(h/t Rolling Stone)

Cain, apparently not imagining he would run for president some day, performed the over-the-top parody in a white preacher’s robe with a gospel choir.

Imagine there’s no pizza
I couldn’t if I tried
Eating only tacos
Or Kentucky Fried

Imagine only burgers
It’s frightening and sad

You’re lucky you have pizza
To feed your kids for you

No defrosting or cooking
And no dishes you must do

Imagine eating pizza
Each and every day

You may say that it’s junk food
But to me it’s so much more

It gives my life its meaning
And it makes a lot of dough

Imagine mozzarella
Anchovies on the side
And maybe, pepperoni
Rounds out your pizza pie
Imagine getting pizza
Delivered to your door

You don’t have to give up now
On my skateboard I will go
I’ll be back in 30 minutes
I just bought Dominoes

All I am saying
Is give pizza a chance
All I am saying
Give pizza a chance!
All I am saying
Is give pizza a chance

Watch Cain’s 1991 ode to pizza below:

(h/t Daily Beast)

In other news, do talk show hosts not get to do the coolest stuff ever? Just a month ago, Fallon was covering Willow Smith with the Boss. If I knew that’s what you could do if you got your own talk show, I totally would have majored in Hosting back in college. Instead I studied Internet Criticism with a specialization in Snarky Deconstruction of Beloved Acid-Based Pop Music Lyrics.

Check out the clip from NBC below:

Some simple housecleaning led Jonathan Cott to the tapes, which were just chilling in his closet, minding their own businesses. He gave them a listen, something he hadn’t done since he’d originally conducted the interview thirty years ago. Rolling Stone is releasing the transcribed interview in its upcoming issue and has made the audio available on its website and for free on iTunes.

Excerpts from the interview have Lennon mulling over a potential Bealtes reunion, as well as him wishing never to be the “dead f*cking hero” that he would become later in the week.

In the remarkably candid interview Lennon lashes out at fans and critics who went after him during his five-year break from music. “What they want is dead heroes, like Sid Vicious and James Dean,” Lennon says. “I’m not interested in being a dead f*cking hero…so forget ‘em, forget ‘em.”

He also talked about plans for a possible return to the road. “We just might do it,” he said. “But there will be no smoke bombs, no lipstick, no flashing lights. It just has to be comfy. But we could have a laugh. We’re born-again rockers, and we’re starting over…There’s plenty of time, right? Plenty of time.”

You can stop by the Rolling Stone site to read and hear more from the interview.

The video is below, but here’s the thing: It wasn’t created by Google, it was created by the John Lennon YouTube channel, which is inviting people from around the world (er, across the universe?), to submit birthday messages for Lennon, and words of peace in honor of the day, and, obviously, of the pervasive message of Lennon through songs like “Imagine” and “Happy Christmas (War is Over).” (This is probably not the time to bring up my grammatical quibble with the now-iconic refrain of “War is over, if you let it.” So I won’t.)

Anyhow – the John Lennon YouTube page is actually a treasure trove of messages from not only from people across said universe, but artists like Brian Wilson, Aerosmith, DMC, Heart, the Jonas Brothers (really), George Thorogood, a dude from Incubus, jazz prodigy Nikki Yanovsky, Brett Michaels, REO Speedwagon (really) plus people like basketball player Grant Hill, skateboarder Tony Hawk, comedian Penn Jillette, and, weirdly, the cast of Cirque du Soleil. Also some Polish band whose favorite Lennon song is “Don’t Let Me Down” (they’re called Sublim, and I thought I was clicking on Sublime – my bad). And, of course, Yoko Ono, thanking him “for giving us so much in his short and intense life on this planet,” —and who, like her or not (as some fans do, er, not), has been the faithful custodian of his legacy for the past 30 years (and, it should be said, was the partner Lennon himself chose). The result is an odd, sometimes awkward but ultimately compelling mish-mash of off-the-cuff video tributes, some surprisingly moving. We’ve got a selection on the next few pages, but for now, here’s Google’s take:

>>>NEXT: Lennon Tribute Videos from Yoko, Ringo Starr, Aerosmith, DMC, Brian Wilson, the Jonas Brothers, George Thorogood and a truly random assortment of people

Case in point, according to Beck, are the lyrics to the song ‘Revolution’ which “spells it all out” (literally and figuratively). And alas, I do not think Beck reached this conclusion by listening to the record backwards. Says Beck:

I really listened to the words of this and I got to tell you the Beatles spell it all out, it’s all about understanding how progressives have been operating…You say you want a revolution but how do you go about changing the world without waking too many people up that don’t want your kind of change?

The answer is not that you form the most famous rock band in history. The answer is that you remove the letter ‘R.’ It’s all about ‘evolution.’ Beck explains all in the video below. If you listen closely you can hear John Lennon rolling over in his grave.

This is not the first time, by the way, that Beck has drawn these comparisons. He spent a portion of a show back in August making a similar point. However, that was before he became the second most popular person on television so perhaps he felt it needed redressing. Maybe ‘Revolution’ is destined to be the ‘I’m Every Woman‘ for the Beck generation. Beck video below, Beatles performing live below that.

– Glenn Beck on yesterday’s ‘Fox and Friends’ suggesting that FOX and talk radio are the only things standing between the United States and a communist/fascist/socialist/dictatorship.

Does it follow then that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Beck are now playing the role of Founding Fathers? Hey, who’s to say that when Franklin said “a republic, if you can keep it” he wasn’t actually looking to cable news hyperbole as the keeper! Meanwhile, Lee Siegal says Beck and his followers are actually the 21st century’s version of the hippies of the 1960′s.

In society, culture and now politics, what was once considered countercultural is today the establishment. And so it’s no surprise that what was once considered the establishment—the war cry of patriotism, religion, and morality—is the new counterculture. The parallels between today’s right-wing radicals and radical tactics of the 1960s are striking. Sixties’ Dada theatrics—e.g. Allen Ginsberg leading people in an attempt to levitate the Pentagon (my favorite)—are echoed in the alarmist and conspiratorial theatrics of right-wing cable television. Then, too, just as the radical left was inspired by a few personalities—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Mark Rudd et al.—today’s radical right is whipped up by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin et al.

Does this mean we should expect a Glenn Beck bed-in as the logical follow-up to last weekend’s 9/12 event?

And while your mother screams and pulls her hair waiting for the game to come out, you can dig into a piece like New York Times Magazine “While My Guitar Gently Beeps,” which paints a comprehensive picture of what it all means (and what Paul and Ringo think of it). But it takes a technology-savvy magazine like IEEE Spectrum to explain the technological feats that made the magic possible.

Says “The Making of The Beatles: Rock Band” by David Kushner:

Rock Band requires that each instrument — drums, bass, guitar, and vocals — be laid down onto a separate track. This works fine for a contemporary song recorded on a 48-track system. But roughly the first third of the Beatles’ catalog had been engineered using much simpler recording equipment.

Though the Beatles were innovators in the use of two or four tracks, they often put all the instruments on a single track and then used the remaining tracks for ancillary sounds and effects. Apple Corps wanted the game to cover the span of the band’s career, so Harmonix would have to find a way to extract the different instruments from those early songs.

Now, here comes the interesting part, when The Beatles meet CSI (and, no, Paul is not dead):

[The software developing] team turned to audio forensic software normally used by law enforcement and in restoration projects. These tools, equipped with advanced digital-signal-processing capabilities, include more controls than those offered by most audio-filtering packages. Myriad audio parameters can be tweaked in order to zero in on specific sound elements.

(See a detailed explanation here.)

Another interesting piece of information the article gives all you Yoko-haters out there: you need to thank her for the Fab Four looking alive in the game. When she saw the initial animations, she demanded that they were given more “soul.” (Now, be good to her for a change, and repeat “Thank you, Yoko”.)

The game comes out on September 9, which is “909”. Get it, man?

Wait—shouldn’t it come out the day after that… Or is the date “090909,” which, you know, would be a reference to “Revolution 9”? Hm.

Can you play the game backwards?

Ok, I’ll stop.

BONUS TRACK: Best joke on The Beatles: Rock Band so far came from Ben Greenman in McSweeney’s:

“If you depress X and Y while pulling the right stick downward, Yoko Ono will meet John and be unfairly blamed for the breakup of the band.”

Video: The Beatles Rock Band Trailer