About a year too late but it got here, The Beatles final album release from the original sequence has been given the same treatment as Pepper, White Album and Abbey Road. There are a few surprises but mainly this was the set that I expected to be a labour of worship for the sifting duties alone. Untold hours of tape of the band rehearsing, getting distracted by jams and occasionally reforming into a musical unit to deliver some songs old school. The version of Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues on Anthology 3 sounded so tired it was painful and the tracklists of old bootlegs from these sessions never quite enticed me as they seemed packed with stuff like that. So, props to the crew who presented this ... kinda.
My anniversary take on the record can be found here. The six hour extravaganza retooling of the filmed material is still to appear as of this writing and, while I have never been fond of the movie, record, stretch of time in the band's history, I'll be subscribing to the Disney channel to see it ... a few times. Lifelong tragique, sorry. But enough about me, what do I think about this presentation?
Five CDs and a Blu-Ray housed in mini-LP covers and set in a gatefold cardboard holder which is easy to handle, the discs slide out without labour and are returned to the slots without drama. The book is hard cover and on good glossy stock (there'll be more in the separately available Get Back book). All of this slides into a solid cardstock black case with die cut holes for the faces o' the Fabs. Though a lot more limited, you can do a Physical Graffiti by putting the black and white pics of the disc folder in those holes for a super arty look. And then change it back and so on every few songs as the tracks play on. The days aint gettin' any shorter. Anyway, a really lovely physical package. Now the content.
The Blu-Ray
The Spector album in three presentations: Stereo and DTS Master Audio 5.1 in 24 bit/96 Khz and Dolby Atmos at 24 bit/48 khz. The stereo in hi-res allows little more light or air into the mix but on your home system will feel full and present. The DTS is extremely crisp, not needles in the ear crisp but delivered with such breathtaking precision and range, such clear lines on everything to horn sections, choirs or the shiny notes of acoustic guitars that you could really just stop with it there. But go to the next step: the Dolby Atmos might disappoint for a few bars because it feels a lot less detailed, less crisp than the DTS. It also sounds more gathered to the centre. This is not because of the lower sampling rate (any more than anyone can genuinely hear the difference between one 44.1000th of a second sample from the next) it's a lower rate because it has more to do. Not fly around the room like the sound in a movie but to stay put and put you right at the heart of the music and, whether it's the rustling guitars and close harmonies of Two of Us or the soaring solo in Let it Be or the choirs and brass of Long and Winding Road, it gives you the same sensation of being in the perfect spot at a prefectly mixed gig. Vocals reach out, the tom toms propel, the kick ... kicks. You are there with the band and you feel loved. Ok, alright, but it is a beautiful way of presenting multichannel music. Long gone are the days of the Doors on DVD-Audio where the guitar riff of L'America flew around the room for no reason whatsoever. You've got the best seat in the house and the music is breathing in front of you.
Oh, almost forgot, they have finally got the menus right. Sounds trivial but what I mean is that when you put this into your Blu-Ray player you get a menu that, while it does start with a toned down title track, asks you how you want to hear it INSTEAD of just playing the thing, leaving you to scramble around your remote trying to get that cursor in the right place to choose the right format by which time at least some of the vibe has crumbled. This one let's you decide first. Completely different experience which erases a sore point on all the other hi-res digital releases. This one waits for you. You choose. You sit back and bliss out. Heaven.
The Book
Hardcover with good photos and content on every page including brief memoirs and a handy track by gtrack article with recording sheets, lyrics in biro on lined paper, and the story behind the songs and recording. Paul writes a fuming note to Allen Klein about Spector's orchestral arrangements that ends: "Don't ever do it again." There's less to it than there was to the books for Pepper or the White Album but there was a lot more to cover for them. This makes a pleasing companion to the music and is worth looking through while listening. I know that sounds like something from a 1969 EMI catalogue but it's accurate.
Recommendation: If you just want the album with the new mix could I suggest that you find a online retailer that has hi-res downloads with a non-lossy compression format? Flac is the file type I use but there are others. It's not just the higher resolution as a benefit (really CD quality is better than most of us can physically hear) but the dynamic range. I took a look at the CD files in a wave editor and all of them are compressed to the wall. The loudness wars have unfortunately not finished. This can contribute to a fatiguing experience, the music might well feel a little breathless. All the hi-res download versions offer good dynamic range which makes the music feel a lot more natural.
CD1 The original album, kinda
The new mix of the album follows the trend from the Sgt Pepper rerelease by beefing up the bass and gathering things that were extremely panned toward the centre. This doesn't create mono but serves, with an eye on the compressor and EQ, to warm everything up and allow for a more realistic sense of space. It's a robust, contemporary sounding album. If you didn't already now, the arrangements follow Phil Spector's presentation from 1970 so Paul is still strolling along the winding road with a heavenly choir o'erhead and the one on Across the Universe is still there. I Me Mine is the same extended edit and Get Back still ends the album with the joke about the audition. Unless you prefer the thinner sound of the original this will delight.
CD2 Get Back - Apple Sessions
I know a fair bit about the band but I'm not going to take the tonka toy home on Mastermind with a Beatles speciality. That said I have a feeling from some of the chit chat here that some of these tracks are from the initial time at Twickenham Studios. Does it bother me? Not on your nelly. It's a lot of takes and aborted attempts at new songs mixed in with whimsical cover versions and chat. Will you listen to it mofre than once? How much ironing do you have to do?
CD3 Get Back - Rehearsals and Apple Jams
The most immediate value lies in the noodling versions of later tracks from Abbey Road as well as solo careers. Paul helps John with the middle eight of Gimme Some Truth and both John and Paul help George with the opening line of Something. All things Must Pass sounds like it's being tried out at the same time as the band and studio staff or film crew are lunking around making tea and lifting furniture. In the midst of the noise Paul joins George in a shimmering harmony of the chorus of All Things and seems to like it so much he's still singing it after the jam. There is a jammy song with Billy Preston on lead vocals that is worth hearing if only for how he kind of wipes the floor with the kind of thing they were leaning toward on songs like Don't Let Me Down.This might have been the spot to put the wonderful version of Besame Mucho that they do in the original film. But no.
CD4 Get Back LP - 1969 Glyn Johns Mix
This is one of the many drafts of the album under its working title submitted to the band by engineer Glyn Johns. If you read the accounts of this you have to wonder how prissy The Beatles had to be to just keep knocking him back when he was already forging ahead as a producer in his own right and not someone who'd knowingly push bad solutions. You can read about the in-fighting and egos all you want but the real political contest you need to be aware of is that between the band and Glyn Johns who was left to guess how to present the hours of failure and ear-numbing shambles. Hotshot or not he wasn't in the position to go and thicken everything up and apply the audio polyfilla until it was slick and unrecogniseable. They'd said they were going back to the basics, warts and all, as nature intended but they weren't ready for how thin and unpolished it was sounding and would sound as a record if released. The original cover art (reproduced for this set) was a recreation of the debut album Please Please Me with the band shot from below, leaning over the rails of the landing at the EMI building, only years later with much longer hair and new style. With that in mind pretty much anything Johns offered would have driven to the bone the difference between the bright energy of the first album and the ragged op shop version of the band on this new one.
Johns opens with a live and tougher version of One After 909 which does provide a good link to the old days as it was an abandoned number from the early years. The Let it Be version has none of its drive or Harrison's stinging Telecaster lead and becomes a completely redeemed number for me (I still skip it on Let it Be). Also, it ends with the audition joke that was put at the end of Get Back with which it has been most closely associated. The rest is a lot less spectacular with a sloppy jam edited together of oldies and a chorus of the next track. I hate Don't Let Me Down, the chorus is repetitive and interminable and the song never develops. Even the middle eight is nothing special and the whole thing is played at a glacial pace, preceded by too much banter and larking. A lacklustre Dig a Pony follows with a loose band who sound tired and a Lennon who is uncharacteristically off pitch. I've Got a Feeling is the take that appeared on Anthology 3 and is ok but hs none of the dynamics or force of the Let it Be version. Get Back seems to have been tirelessly practiced as it always sounds good. Yes, it's a simple song but the arrangement is a thing of elegance. Here again. Very slight talky bit from Paul in this one. For You Blue shows that George had some decent chops as an acoustic player. Johns keeps it low and detailed. While I never liked this one the difference in the mix alone allows a few listens. Teddy Boy which Paul cleaned, pressed and presented on his solo debut the year after. While its not as sabotaged as severely here as the Anthology 3 version you still have to strain a little to get a feel for what became a modest but lovely McCartney number. Lennon's square dance calling is kept to the end and is thankfully lower in the mix (sorry, but it only ever comes across as bitchy). A slower Two of Us with less energy follows. Maggie Mae is the same as the one on Let it Be. There is more Dig It than on Let it Be if that's what you wanted. Let it Be itself is more or less the single version with the leslied guitar solo that could never compete with the revised one Harrison tore out for the released album. The Long and Winding Road has more space than both Spector's and subsequent orchestra and choir free versions but it still sounds like a run through than a song. And with a a curio version of the outro of Get Back the album that would be comes to a final fade.
Johns has steered a cautious course through the stated intention and what quality he could discover in a Sargasso sea of tape. He keeps the feel live with a lot of banter so that it sounds like a working band but not so over-professional as to come across like Beach Boys similar attempts which were all but scripted. The other side of the coin is that he had to keep the edits inconspicuous and so needed to let more of the original tape run without flown in vocals from this take or a bass track from that. In fulfilling The Beatles wishes he was effectively forced to offer them two sides of comparitive garbage and the fault was clearly theirs. That slick and cheeky Please Please Me mockup was looking dodgier by the day.
If this had been released before the monumental Abbey Road (whose slickness and rich production pretty much stands for what is considered timelessness in a rock record) this dragging artefact might have remained a completist's must-have, one step above side two of the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. But all of these discs with their mix of songs that remained in a low development state and others that got through the filter to the glories of Abbey Road and early solo albums does give pause as to why some of them did get left behind. McCartney has been happy to play Let it Be or Get Back in his live sets for many years now. Across the Universe was chucked in through a lack of material from Lennon, having already been recorded and committed to a charity album, never to be quite done again seriously, despite its durable beauty. It was Phil Spector's skill that made I Me Mine a real album track, Harrison apparently just left it as this tiny moment of potential. It begins to look like a messy room after a bully boy kid has gone through it and taken all the good toys.
So, it was never going to work in that way. See also the grander plans for the live gig that was meant to be the culmination of the film. Greece? The Sahara? It took a few years and Pink Floyd to get that one done right but they weren't The Beatles at the end of a long and grinding decade. they went to the roof of the building they were in, played a few numbers and packed up. This was not going to cut it as a document of those times anymore than an accurate depiction of a battle will necessarily come off as anti war. But it really is nice to have.
The EP (and what it isn't)
Four more iterations of tracks from the album in their single forms. This is the contraversial platter. Both Sgt Pepper and the White Album had their great expectations that were dashed on release day. We didn't get a Carnival of Light nor the 27 minute version of Helter Skelter. And now we don't get the complete rooftop concert. Long bootlegged and of great significance to fans is the gig the band did actually do at the end of the movie and the last time the four of them played live under their name. It's gold and it's not here. But let's think about that.
The set list includes three Get Backs, two I've Got a Feelings, two Don't Let Me Downs (aaaaargh!) and one each of One After 909 and Dig a Pony. If you've ever seen the original film you might have a Mandella effect memory of it being a lot richer than that. But that's what the content is and the only changes that can be made are abbreviations. Wouldn't it still be good, repetitions or not, just to listen to what people in the streets were hearing on the day? You bet and I'd probably give it more than a few spins. And, look, if you're going to give us the whole soporific Glyn Johns album couldn't you at least shell this out?
Well, that discounts any concern about low quality: this album's place in history depends on its listeners knowing it was meant to be raw and unscented. Spector's cosmetics don't quite put a lie to that as so much of the banter and surrounding atmosphere were retained. So why not a warts and all rooftop concert?
Well, let's go back to those other examples for a second. Carnival of Light by the accounts of folk like Beatles scholar Mark Lewisohn is a formless soundscape of mumbles, bangs, echoes, shouts, feedback etc., starting nowhere and going back there repeatedly for what must seem like forever. Do I want to hear it? Sure but I bet I wouldn't return to it. The Beatles were great at sweetening and garnishing their songs with the noise and moment of avante gardism but when they attempted to start and stay there results were mixed (then again, if I listen to the White Album I won't skip Revolution #9). As for the 27 minute Helter Skelter it's best to read up on it in books like Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. First, it's not a long version of the one on the White Album. There were only two complete takes of that and both are on the Super Deluxe of that album. No, it's the listless attempted blues (on the SD but also in a shorter edit on Anthology 2) which broke down into jamming and a rendition of Blue Moon and whatever was in the air that day. It's not hard to play something for that long and get carried away with the mood of it but go and listen to the slow take again and see how long you last. On the other hand the White Album SD did include the glorious Esher demos which are compelling and feel like a real part of the tapestry.
My point is that the projected precentage of people who would pay for these alleged holy grails would shrink rapidly as soon as they were tabled as real propositions. The other Beatles themselves opposed McCartney when he campaigned to include Carnival of Light in Anthology 2. He had a book coming out that depicted him as the real avante gardist and this Macca-led freakout would sweeten the performance of the page turner. You really don't have to be that cynical to understand that.
The other thing is that the mammoth documentary is yet to come. It will almost certainly be supported by a blu-ray or even 4K physical release which is where the Rooftop gig might find a place. This would feel like fan milking on a global scale and is absolutely not beyond the likes of the benefactors of the Beatle legacy/merchandise/product. Why put everything out when a little bending of the context makes it yet another dollar spinner? Nothing personal, it's just business.
For me, I'd like it here. Among the exhausting reiterations of the same material the context alone would give it compulsion. They gear up on a cold morning. Warm up with a few run throughs, play some songs and get shut down. This is the way the world ends. And then Abbey Road. Just makes sense to me.
There was a deluxe version of the original album with a box and a book and an LP. I've only ever seen pictures of these but it's worth a thought. The LP came out after the one really recorded last which was Abbey Road with its joyous but saddening note of farewell. The outpriced special ed of Let it Be was soon replaced with a single sleeve record which is how I bought it and most others knew it. That packaging seemed a little more honest about what was to meet the listener, a record by a band who sounded relaxed enough to goof around, and a few good songs. As it had come out later than the real series finale I, like many, thought of it as the exhausted end of a gigantic career. A bit of reading fixed that (when the books appeared) but the impression presists to this day that it's the last corporeal statement of The Beatles. This is one ofthe dangers sewn into the fabric of the fragile idea of reducing greatness to humility without a clear direction. There is no direction to Let it Be which is why it's so bitsy and contains more than its share of numbers that anyone can express disdain for without pushback from lifelong fans. So, now here it is again, in a big expensive box whose handsomeness is savagely belied by the often crunching failure inside. And here I am again, a contemporary tragic, shelling out for the biggest and best set of the many it comes in, whingeing about the omissions. But then, I'll sit in the dark, choose the Atmos mix and cosy up whenever it gets good. Because it does, always, eventually get good.
No comments:
Post a Comment