Beatles rock band
The Beatles were never a “rock band”
Not sure I want to discuss The Beatles “rock band” so let’s get it out of the way quickly!
I enjoy the occasional video game but even the most successful ones are of a transient nature. Lara Croft anyone? Even todays bigger sellers have no guarantee they’ll be around tomorrow so it’s hard to see the logic for a permanent link to what will probably be the final issue on CD of one of the allegedly greatest back catalogues of the 20th century.
Granted that it may well prove amusing for a generation of music critics, or indeed drummers, to discover that Ringo isn’t quite as easy to mimic as you might think!
Here’s hoping so. The lack of appreciation for Ringo does border on ignorance far too frequently for my liking. Yes it may be funny to joke that he would struggle through the opening levels. It also shows a woeful lack of understanding of just what he did so right all those years ago. He served the song!
Then again, who knew all those years ago we’d still be discussing and listening to this stuff forty years on.
The suggestion is that it’s all about bringing the music to a new generation. I agree with the concept but remain to be convinced this particular idea goes beyond preaching to the converted and the commercial joys of cross-selling to those same people.
I can’t see that I’d buy any of the existing versions unless I was already heavily into the artist in question but then, assuming I’m not the target market, perhaps best to leave it there, if only because the thought that I might be the target market leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It’s not hard to see some seeing this stuff is too pure for that!!! I’m not comfortable with it but it’s essentially a modern version of all those tacky mags and dolls with authentic Beatle haircuts featuring exactly the same band all those years ago. Cross-selling is just a bit more sophisticated nowadays.
Suffice to say I remain intrigued enough to want to know how this new generation will be distinguished from the existing one when it comes to assessing how many people will have bought the imminent reissues.
Still, as has been observed elsewhere, at least Noel Gallagher has another Beatles sim now that Oasis have split!
Many years from now
So, what of that music then? So ubiquitous in our lives that it has almost become meaningless. Do the remasters do anything to change that? I suspect the sense of anti-climax will be overwhelming. Sadly, not so overwhelming that it stopped me ordering it! A lack of apparent logic extends far beyond video game link ups when it comes to music.
I had to pause for a second and ask myself what was I thinking? I own the red one, the blue one, the second and third of the anthologies, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper and The Beatles aka The White album. Critically speaking I should apparently also own Rubber Soul and Abbey Road. I can’t quite bring myself to do so as I fear the parts of the former with which I am familiar have led me to the conclusion that it is somewhat over-rated, whilst the latter is well, how shall I put this, er, not actually very good! Iconic cover or not (and aren’t they all?) the contents have always seemed to me to be overcooked, a bit stodgy, and, accompanied by the sort of dead production that screams out “nobody cares that much by now!”.
Just my humble opinion you understand but it does rather beg the question as to why, when I can’t even be bothered to acquire the critics best of the apparently poor 1987 Beatles on CD, I would want to treat myself to 13 CDs which actually include the aforesaid downbeat career bookend, not to mention “The Beatles”.
The latter, whisper it, is a fascinating record not of genius individually blossoming, as is often claimed in the moribund monthly music magazines endless regurgitation of the mantra, but more a frequently embarrassing record of great talent running out of control as a reflection of all four members straining to cease to be defined by “The Beatles” as an entity and clearly falling out with each other.
That isn’t to say that it has no great moments. It plainly does. It’s more that I don’t find them where others do. I will for example defend Ob-La-Di to the death simply because not only is it a great pop song, it has inspired musicianship and arranging from all concerned. Does McCartney repeat that bass line before the chorus once? Of course it presages the more dismal moments of the solo years but to attack it, for example, for the banality of the lyrics seems to me to forget that this was the band that wrote Please Please Me. The difference is… ?
As for much of the resy of it. It’s as though three Beatles decided to preview their imminent solo careers with the worst and most lightweight of their solo material. Granted we do now know much worse was to come but we really ought to have paid attention at the time. Small mercy that Ringo at least kept us in suspense.
You may gather that I am bewildered by anyone finding the so called “White Album” anything less than hard work.
This is before we get onto the concept of the early Beatles being barely more than a covers band and that being reflected in their early albums. Indeed the very reason I chose to not get the first anthology. Again, what was I thinking?
I want you (you’re so heavy)
In reality, I wasn’t thinking it all. I paused for a second you may recall. Not much of an exaggeration. The thought entered my head one evening. Two evenings later the deed was done. Anything you read here is nothing more than justification after the fact. If musical purchases required logical thought processes we’d never buy anything let alone a tombstone of 13 CDs at around £200 a throw.
So, probably just as well to mention that whilst over the years I have read at least two fabulous articles by Paul Du Noyer offering up a justification for the importance of The Beatles, I remain to be convinced that anything outside of Help! to Sgt. Pepper was truly great in a musical sense when you look at the albums. That’s not exactly a run comparable to say The Other Side Of Bob Dylan through to Blonde On Blonde.
The trouble nowadays is that we forget the huge significance of their run of singles. Say what you like about Dylan, and I have as much Bob as most people ought to, but the run of Beatles singles will probably stand always as the greatest in the history of popular music in terms of artistic development and sheer mastery of the art of the 45. I am a great believer that the orthodoxy of what constitutes great music generally consists of those albums most admired but perhaps least listened to. Nowadays despite a thriving singles chart we seem to have all but forgotten the sheer excitement of a great run of singles.
It was refreshing recently to read in The Word an article trashing this idea that the great albums of The Beatles were their creative peak. The truth is that for most people they were simply the most exciting thing they’d ever seen and the majority of singles up to those “great” albums reflected that.
The Beatles In Mono
Having said that, I may as well offer up my real justification. Its relationship with the foregoing is tenuous at best. I have bought and await the mono box set. I have done so simply because… I want it. It is desirable.
I can report with some relief that Magical Mystery Tour, Let It Be, Yellow Submarine and (yes!) Abbey Road are not included. Laughably, I only realised this after I’d clicked “Buy”.
So, I can offer up a host of justifications for not buying. I have also offered up my negligible reasoning for actually doing so. The problem is that regardless of the above I have bought something rather specialist and it offers the opportunity for all sorts of retrospective justifications to be applied.
Whether I like it it not these put me rather squarely in one of several camps I would rather not socialise with but with whom I must confess a more than passing acquaintance. These may not have been the actual reasons I clicked “Buy”, or more appropriately “Bye” but they do seem uncomfortably familiar!
On the one hand, the “I heard them in mono first time around” clique.
This is true. I inherited a well worn set of Beatles 45s and a nigh on unplayable copy of Sgt. Pepper when I was not even a teenager. Let’s leave the latter album out of the equation as it was stereo, but, my recall is that those mono 45s were more powerful than anything around at the tine bar (ahem) glam rock.
In my head I am convinced it had nothing to do with the vinyl because those 45s were never played on anything better than a Dansette. I never bought any Beatles vinyl after that initial inheritance but, to me, the combination of those dreadful hard panned stereo mixes and these mono memories loom large.
This brings us nicely but rather uncomfortably to the audiophile “they sound best in mono” gang. I say uncomfortably because of course it is all too convenient nowadays to associate vinyl and mono with quality whilst overlooking the fact that most of us never listened to these things on anything resembling audiophile equipment. Back to that Dansette I mentioned above.
The reality is that the Beatles recorded in mono because it was initially all there was and whilst it seemed powerful at the time much of that power may have derived from the single speaker it mostly blew out of. “Better” has to be measured against the vastly improved quality of even the most basic midi systems. Oh dear, could it be that we will never actually recapture that initial magic precisely because our listening habits have changed? Not an admission anyone with a high-end system wants to face up to!
An honourable mention too for the “the Beatles only bothered with the mono mixes until Sgt. Pepper” crew. I have a kind of vague awareness of this argument from glancing at some articles and forums online. It really was no more than a glance but I fear that even vague awareness may be enough to condemn me in the eyes of some.
It does open up the can of worms about who was improving what. This idea that the artists intentions are paramount strikes me as fallacious. Okay, so maybe they weren’t initially that fussed about the stereo mixes. Does that really mean they get the last word? Should they?
I have in mind here the films finally issued in definitive Directors Cut version because of course no-one else understood the “vision”. Inevitably, the corrupted, edited version was better!
I’m not sure the analogy fits because film directors tend to want to add whereas the Beatles tended to want to simply capture the best version of something and then move onwards. Their involvement in the vision is questionable. Not least when one considers the music business of the 1960s and it’s control over even the most independent of artists. Whose vision are we honouring here then?
Putting aside the mono reasons for buying a mono box one should also not forget the “box set collector” er, collective. Those people who ignore an artist pretty much completely until a definitive box that looks pretty is available. Er, not often perhaps but, occasionally… guilty as charged! On this occasion? Undoubtedly!
A passing mention too for the increasingly desperate sounding “immaculate replica covers” posse too. Sooo important!
And yes, over the years I have become that too. I have scant regard for the fetishism around vinyl. Few people obsessed with it’s loss as an audiophile format, or dedicated to it in some form now, ever listened to anything other than second (or worse) generation recycled vinyl in the 1970s. Perhaps even fewer on something containing more than one speaker. Such revisionism sucks, he says hypocritically, being in the midst of dedicating an article to retrospective justification for exactly that sort of revisionism.
Something of significant cultural importance was theoretically lost though when cover art was forced into jewel case sized squares, or so the argument goes. I’m not so sure that you’d find much justification for this argument were you to browse through the dog-eared collections of those with a vinyl collection of any size. Sure there are exceptions but, putting aside the fact that such things do age and do get dog eared, I see few but the fetishists getting hung up on it. Fortunately for those people, cover art is making a comeback and the replicas for these issues recognise the importance of getting it right.
I’m not sure even I believe the validity of this latter argument. Might it have seduced me here? Absolutely.
Ahem, it would appear that “one of several camps” is perhaps an underestimate. A Venn diagram may be required!
Horrendously, debates on the merits of the stereo versus mono Beatles have been going for years. Obviously, it’s in overdrive at present. My position on this is clear. After all, I have ordered the mono box. Er, well, yes and no.
Apple I fear have somewhat messed up. Even if I went for a simple line of merely wanting to hear each album as intended e.g. presumably With The Beatles in mono and Sgt. Pepper in stereo, I can’t actually do that unless I buy at least the mono set plus individual stereo sets. Of course, this is what I will now do. Er, they may not have actually messed up at all. Damn!
There is though a debate to be had as to the meaning of “intended”. I just read an interview in Record Collector with several of the team responsible for the remasters. Although they presented a logical explanation for their choices I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable by the end. Is there really a clear relationship between fixing a dropout and removing an unintended background noise? Was the aim to present what was there properly for the first time? Is that not corrupted when you take out the unintended? Where do you stop?
The end
Right here actually.
It comes down to the fact that I have been seduced by all of the above arguments and more. I recognise the stupidity of this. I don’t care. I want it.
It strikes me that I should be listening to the box set whilst reading Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner, currently sat on the bedroom floor yelling “get on with the Naomi Klein already!”. I shan’t, as I rarely read and listen at the same time (and the Naomi Klein also deserves some time).
I shall however reflect again, and doubtless make a much improved attempt to retrospectively justify my purchase, once it has arrived and been digested.
Oh, did I mention? Apparently the mono box is a worlwide limited edition of ten thousand. I may not even get one.
Can I have my words back please?
