#in recording order not release order because abbey road and especially the second side is the most perfect final album and i'm literally

[radioprune]

abbey road. ever heard of it

[harrison-abbott]

MUSINGS ON THE BEATLES

      Veteran music critic and writer David Hepworth, whose career has spanned seven decades and who pioneered the creation of several top UK culture magazines, remarked a few years ago that, “The Beatles are underrated.” I totally agree with him.

    Are you familiar with stage monitors? (Doesn’t matter if not. Basically the amplifiers that musicians use in order to hear themselves whilst playing live on stage. To help them keep in time with each other, whilst the full amplification is directed out to the audience.) Monitors actually weren’t invented properly until the 1970s. Therefore, when you’re watching footage of The Beatles playing to tens of thousands of fans in stadiums in the early 1960s, they can’t actually hear the volume of their own voices or instruments. Mostly because of the screaming girls. But yeah. So they cannot even hear themselves and yet they all perform in synchronisation, do not make mistakes and sing in three-part harmonies.

    The first album The Beatles released, Please, Please Me (1962) was compiled of fourteen tracks and was recorded in nine hours. It topped the UK charts on its release and stayed there for thirty weeks, until it was replaced by the band’s next album, which stayed there for twenty one weeks.

    When The Beatles first toured in the US they refused to play in venues where black people were segregated from whites in the audience. The venue owners did not want to miss the opportunity of ticket sales and thus allowed mixed audiences of black and white, in some cases for the first ever occasion.

    John Lennon was awarded an MBE by the Queen in 1965. He (literally) returned it in 1969, along with a letter, declaring that it was in protest over British military involvement in Nigeria and support of America’s invasion of Vietnam … and signed it, ‘With Love, John Lennon’, also sending the same letter to then Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

    The fan website beatlesdaily.com rank ‘Yesterday’ as the “saddest” ever Beatles song. ‘Yesterday’ is the most covered song in pop music history, with over 3000 recorded versions by different artists.

    In 2019, Abbey Road came top of the UK album chart, for the second time, 49 years and 252 days after it first hit the summit.

    ^ The above examples are just a jumble of facts and stories. And I could go on and on adding to the list. But I think these examples are the embodiment of what The Beatles are all about. The power of music. The spirit that they create. … And I’m not suggesting that the band members were angelic gods and perfectly good people. There are many stories that contradict this notion (especially with Lennon, ironic as it is). I’ve heard many people say they don’t even like The Beatles. They find them generic, repetitive and annoying, out of date. Fine, it’s all subjective anyway. Opinion is what music is for.

    But, umm, let’s just look at their work objectively.

    The first hit the band had was ‘Love Me Do’ (1962). A song which has three chords in it. Fastforward five years and The Beatles release ‘I Am the Walrus’ (1967), which has sixteen chords in it and uses a chord from every letter in the musical range, A to G. … In reference to this, there was a psychology experiment where the experimenter got a group of kids together, in a room, and played the children ‘Love Me Do’ first, and then ‘I Am the Walrus’. The kids all being hitherto unfamiliar with The Beatles’ music. And then asked them, after both listens, whether they thought it was the same band / same musicians playing in either song. Most of the children (not all of them) thought that it was an altogether different band on ‘I Am the Walrus’.

    This latter track has only the sixteen chords in it, and yet it’s still an astonishingly catchy song. Rather than going into technical musical jargon, their tunes have so many hooks that cling on to the listener. (And actually, now I remember a side story from my earlier life. I used to work in a kitchen. And the chef Dave and I were on a shift and he was playing music from his iPod on the little speakers that we had. We were chatting. And I asked him if he liked The Beatles. And he said, “Nah, I fucking hate them. Can’t stand them.” … Later that shift I managed to get control of the speakers and I put my iPod in [ha!] and I stuck it on shuffle. And at one point ‘Come Together’ came on, by chance. And I looked up at Dave, to see how he would react, grinning at him because I knew he hated them. And he actually didn’t do anything, aside from sing along to the song whilst he was chopping his vegetables. He knew all the words and he sang along to it. And then afterwards, even when the song was over, he kept humming the chorus over and over without quite realising it.)

    Hmm. What else?

    Bob Dylan, Kurt Cobain, Daniel Johnston, Bruce The Boss Springsteen, Michael Stupe, Jimmy Page, Brian Wilson, Brian May, Tom Petty, Joe Walsh, Keith Richards, Daron Malakian and Billy Joel all said that The Beatles were huge a influence on their output.

    I actually didn’t know this until this minute (as I’ve just researched this information). But, Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the Soviet Union, once declared:

 “More than any ideology, more than any religion, more than Vietnam or any war or nuclear bomb, the single most important reason for the diffusion of the Cold War was … the Beatles.”

 And even Mr Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, echoes similar sentiment:

 “[The Beatles brought] a taste of freedom, a window on the world.”

 Folks from many varied backgrounds are in agreement it seems.

    And yet, I’ll repeat, not everybody does agree. Lots of people find Paul McCartney cheesy, and his lyrics poor or mediocre. I kind of agree. Other cats say that they think Ringo was a shit drummer. On this I definitely do not agree. I was speaking to a girl once at a party about John Lennon and she said she thought he was “just an arrogant dick”. I don’t think he was ‘just’ that but there is probably a bit of truth in those other words. … I’ve actually never heard anybody say anything negative about George Harrison …

    Anyways. Just thought I’d relay a few musings about this musical group. Hugely excited about Peter Jackson’s docuseries / TV documentary coming out next month. Hence what prompted me to write this lil essay.

    You know that Number Ones Beatles compilation CD, with the red cover and the big yellow 1 on the cover? My eldest brother bought my twin brother and I that as a gift when we were wee. (Cheers Brodie.) And my twin (Jack) and I just listened to those songs over and over after we got it, night after night. And it taught us melody and harmony and modulation and so many other elements of composition – taught us joy. … I remember this time in my first year at university where it was at the end of the year in the summer. So I would’ve been 20. And I hadn’t been able to make any friends across both initial semesters.

    And I was out at a party after the exams were done and it was hot and whirly and all the students were having fun. And I got chatting to this girl with curly hair whom I fancied. The night persevered and everybody was drunk. And I thought I’d go in and kiss her. Just do it romantic. Brash, brave. … And I met her lips. And she kissed back a tiny bit and then she just ducked her head in embarrassment and pulled away. I blushed and stormed away and bailed from the party. And it remains among the more humiliating scenes in my life. All the others who were there saw it too and they thought it was cringeworthy as well.

    BUT. Anyway. The next day, morning, I was all blue and depressed, thinking about it. I had the day free. And I decided to play that Beatles Number Ones album. I found the playlist on YouTube and stuck it on full blast volume. … Made me feel like I was a kid again. And I knew all the bits by heart because I’d listened to the tracks so many times with Jack whence a tot. Listened to it the whole way through. Glorious. And it cheered me up completely. Wasn’t purple in the face anymore about what happened with that girl.

    Do you know that The Beatles’ rooftop gig was the last time they ever performed together in public? Such stuff as dreams are made on.

[krispyweiss]

Rewind: The Beatles - Let it Be… Naked (2003)

It’s almost never a good idea to mess with a classic, even when that classic is so obviously flawed as the Beatles’ 1970 swan song, Let it Be.

Never one to actually let it be, Paul McCartney - who stoked controversy by flipping the famous Lennon-McCartney songwriting credit on his 2002 Back in the U.S. LP - helmed a redo of Let it Be to strip the album of Phil Spector’s over-the-top production and erase the studio chatter that linked the songs together. In the process, McCartney resolved the issue of the too-slick original, but created a new problem by also wiping all the extra-musical asides that made the LP more fun than it otherwise would have been.

In exchange, Let it Be… Naked comes with a companion disc - “Fly on the Wall” - that contains 22 minutes of banter and seconds-long song snippets that adds nothing to the album proper. Without the context of the actual songs to give meaning to the Beatles’ conversations, these poorly edited musings are unlikely to interest even the most-devoted fanatic.

To make matters worse, the disc is sequenced as a single track, making it difficult to skip through to bits of songs both familiar (“Don’t Pass Me By,” “She Came in through the Bathroom Window”) and lesser-known (“Child of Nature,” “Fancy My Chances with You”), plus “Maggie Mae” and “Dig It,” which were scrubbed from the original and replaced with the B side “Don’t Let Me Down.” (The album is yet to join most of the rest of the Beatles’ discography on streaming services).

With a rejiggered running order and stripped to just the four Beatles and keyboardist Billy Preston, Let it Be… Naked still fails to capture the lean, live-in-studio feel the band was going for when in entered Abbey Road to record an album with the working title of Get Back. Because of the volume of tape the Fabs recorded during the sessions, there’ve long been differing versions of the Let it Be songs available to people willing to seek them out, and these versions are mostly superior to their Naked counterparts.

But here the biggest beneficiaries of McCartney’s handiwork the title track, “Across the Universe” and, especially, “The Long and Winding Road,” which was always weighed down by the goop Spector piled on. As a bonus, this one features a slight lyric shift that makes a significant change to the song’s message. On the minus side, the charming crack in Lennon’s voice on “Dig a Pony” is fixed, giving the song extra - and unbecoming - cleanliness.

Though it seemed like a terrific idea at the time, Let it Be… Naked still comes off as awkward even 15 years after its 2003 release. As such, the original album, and the mountains of tape that produced it, still seems ripe for another go-around, a longer and more comprehensive release that captures the Beatles warts and all and presents the music exactly as it was played.

Let it Be… Released might be a good title.

As it goes, the flawed 1970 original still trumps the also-flawed 2003 reboot.

Grade card: The Beatles - Let it Be… Naked - B-

6/3/18