A supergroup alleged to feature The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Mick Jagger evolved from a prank carried out in a music magazine.
Under the pseudonym The Masked Marauders, the music legends were said to have come together and recorded a handful of songs. Dylan, Jagger, George Harrison, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney were said to have worked on the album together, but their names were absent because of contractual agreements, the legend goes. A review of a reported bootleg in circulation appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine, claiming the legendary musicians had worked on sessions for the album. The spoof came about after Greil Marcus pitched the idea to Rolling Stone, with a review of the fake supergroup appearing in the magazine.
Though no such recordings existed at the time of the review’s publication, it prompted such interest from fans, the public, and even management directly connected to the artists at hand, that the decision was made to actually record an album. Both Allen Klein, manager of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones at the time, as well as Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, got in touch with the magazine to ask for further information. But the sessions with Jagger, Dylan, and three-fourths of The Beatles never happened. Not quite, anyway.
Klein and Grossman had both allegedly asked for information regarding the bootleg, as had fans and retailers. This prompted Rolling Stone to hire a group of musicians to record the album, with three songs initially recorded. Cow Pie, a play on Dylan’s Nashville Skyline period, as well as I Can’t Get No Nookie from the fake Jagger, and Duke of Earl.
After the songs were given airtime on radio stations across the United States, Rolling Stone Magazine began shopping the album around to record labels. Marcus managed to secure a $15,000 offer from Warner Bros., with the label releasing The Masked Marauders in November 1969.
The band hired for the album, Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band, were hauled back into the studio to make a major label full-length album. In November 1969, Warner released The Masked Marauders as a single LP on its newly created Deity imprint and remarkably it sold more than 100,000 copies.
Revisiting the album decades on from its release, a review published by Cult Following hailed the skiffle heroes for successfully replicating the top musicians of the time. It reads: “What could have been, had McCartney, Jagger, Lennon and Dylan formed. It sounds great on paper but in practice would likely have been as disastrously messy and fraught with ill concepts as the latter half of The Masked Marauders.
“To their credit or mercy, they are the real deal in the face of parody and myth. The Masked Marauders do stand on the firm shoulders of legendary musicians, but they also find time to lay down some slick and expectedly strong beats from a time of musical mastery.”
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