Love

Personally I prefer the mashup originality of Love to the disinterred perfection of the Remasters. The difference is fun! Whilst I am glad to have the Remasters I like the remix irreverence of Love and the story that Cirque du Soleil try to tell in the Las Vegas show. When I heard the album I thought, oh this is reclaiming the Beatles as a shared nostalgic experience. The way I Want to Hold You Hand is screamingly introduced is set up to reproduce their impact on the USA in 1964. Starting with “Get Back” the opening section is explicitly full of nostalgia and, in the show, John’s song about his mother Julia segues into I Am The Walrus which plays out to a Mary Poppins tableaux reflecting the Dickensian London out of which the Beatles thrillingly emerged. Post-modernism; don’t you just love it when music and history are in a mash-up!

Then the first of the great mash-ups which distinguish the album Love, Drive My Car (yep it is a VW Beetle) The Word / What You’re Doing. The great triumph of the remasters is the emergence of Paul’s bass as a key musical instrument across all the albums and here on Drive My Car it takes charge from the outset until the closing word “beep-beep”, yeah!

Cirque du Soleil are brilliant at what they do and have several shows running in Las Vegas. So it is unsurprising that the Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite mash-up is staged so well as circus is what they do; mind you I didn’t see Henry The Horse (unless it was that guy in Row Z?) The timings of the Circus Royale are brilliant and here is a video giving you a taste of their inspired high-wire antics in response to the poster Lennon bought near the Strawberry Fields of Sevenoaks in Kent.

I thought the mash-up set to be the single, Within You Without You / Tomorrow Never Knows was subtle, witty and danceable, but it wasn’t successful as a single, indeed Love undersold against expectations. Here is the official video and it works well enough for me; enjoy.

Now here is a surprise. In the Vegas show of Love one of the highlights is… Octopus’s Garden! The scene is set so that the audience seem to be sitting on the sea bed and the imagery lifts the song into a real highlight. No pictures from the show but here is the sharp mix that helps to make this a real highlight.

Famously The Beatles wrote and recorded Hey Bulldog whilst they were filming a video for Lady Madonna and in Love they are mashed up together then cleverly segued into Here Comes The Sun. Here is a quite brilliant video from Tony AB who uses that video for Lady Madonna against the Love mix, great stuff.

My favourite moment on the album is the edit from Come Together to Revolution. George Martin made of note of highlighting how good he through Come Together was after listening to it again for the remastering process and here someone with great ears pulls the opening drumbeat of Revolution into a dynamic prologue which, with a whip smart segue, unleashes the rock section of the show. On this video tonyab1708 gets the video editing just right and matches it perfectly.

Still a couple of more videos to add…

My Top Ten Beatles YouTube Videos

Here are the Ten Toppermost of the Poppermost Beatles videos used on this site, with a focus on the videos I discovered whilst writing this. The very first performance of the Beatles I experienced visually was their triumphant 1963 Royal Variety Show Performance which they stole without being top of the bill. I particularly loved the performance of Twist and Shout. Introduced by Lennon with characteristic acerbity it was genuinely shocking at the time as he joked about the Royal Family. However the video I liked best is this Australian outtake of them playing a medley of 5 of their 1963 hits, unfortunately disabled for embedding by YouTube! Anyone know why? So embedded here is my bonus track, the Lego Beatles doing I Saw Her Standing There; 1! 2!! 3!!! 4!!!!  

Home

Let It Be

Paul was right; Get Back was a brilliant concept for a film and Let It Be…Naked is the better album. Let It Be the album however is what we were bequeathed at the time, in an expensive box set, from a failed, or perhaps unrealised,  fascinating project. Still the rooftop concert shows what “Get Back” might have become and almost pulls it off with five terrific live performances, despite the cold, inhospitable surroundings and police presence; semolina pilchards climbing up the Apple tower. This was Paul’s “good little live band”; Beatles plus Billy Preston. As they said in 1966 they would need more than the four of them to do the songs justice.

Two factors scuppered Paul’s plan; wrong context, wrong atmosphere. The studio at Twickenham was the wrong context, Abbey Road was where their studio creativity flourished best, and to where they returned at George’s insistence for their final flourish. Masters of Abbey Road they could let their tacit brilliance flow and work to their own rhythms. At Twickenham, when they were filming, they were back to being hired hands in their own movie. Secondly whilst there were four Beatles working on the White Album now there were none, well possibly one. The collaboratively ferocious work ethic of the Fab Four had been replaced by four increasingly independent young artists and businessmen working out how they could make their own way in the world.

Nonetheless even half-realised Let It Be still had some real gems. Two of Us is full of beautiful sentiments, but perhaps not truly reflective of that moment in time. The recurring word Home suggests an origin in the same thoughts that prompted the unrealised “Liverpool” concept album, captures the nostalgia for their early rock n roll camaraderie whilst looking forward to their new, post band lives. Two of Us breezes along yet drips with this hometown nostalgia. Here is a great studio version. 

Got To Be Free

ABBEY ROAD

Abbey Road is a great album which still sounds great today for all sorts of reasons. However when it came out the non-touring Beatles were surrounded by loads of bands who, like them, were also “self-contained units” writing and recording their own material, but who also played live. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream and the Who had all released double albums at least as interesting as the White Album, and new groups like King Crimson, Soft Machine and Free, to name but three I saw, were blisteringly good live. No longer were The Beatles effortlessly better than their peers. Ironically 1969 was arguably the most productive year the four Beatles ever had as they worked on 2 Beatles albums, 3 singles and a film as well as their solo work (3 albums and 3 singles by Lennon, 2 albums by George, film acting by Ringo and the production of Badfinger and others by Paul). To fans like me it didn’t seem like they were working hard at the time as the “Get Back” film was put on hold. Nonetheless Come Together was immediately  recognised as a great rocker and, after the Love remastering, even George Martin likes it. 

And Then There Were Four

The White Album

Ringo had called Sgt Pepper a “great album where I learnt to play chess” but now it was time to “shake out the jams” and be a group again. In May 68 they gathered at George’s house and put together a tape with 27 songs on it, they had 35 ready, before going to George Martin. Partly influenced by Donovan (the Beatles were influenced by everybody, that was part of their genius) this started off as their Unplugged album but it became a gift from the garden in the foothills of the Himalayas to the flower children.

In fact George Martin coped with this cornucopia by setting up three studios and working on the songs in parallel, it was Paul backed by John, George and Ringo and so on. Four individual geniuses working shifts, who were now so creative and confident that they didn’t function as The Beatles any more,  bashing out an album with a bit of everything, full of great playing and loads of studio effects. No studied perfection like Eleanor Rigby or Day In The Life but loads of creativity, innovation and fun. The pleasure in the White Album isn’t in any one song but the smorgasbord of possibilities it offered to middle class students thinking of forming bands rather than working in an office. It was an early, revolutionary template for “middle youth.”

As ever the Beatles open the White Album with a zinger, the wonderful Back In The USSR, driven by Chuck Berry with harmonising courtesy of the Beach Boys, what’s not to like? Well it was banned in large parts of America for promoting Communism! Well irony in harmony doesn’t scan but it knocked the Ukraine Girls out; and me and most everyone in little old England. You don’t have to be a communist to singalong and enjoy.

We Are All Together

Magical Mystery Tour

The feeling in the UK in the winter of 67/68 was that the Beatles had split up as they hadn’t released a new album for a few months. Consequently George Martin made the mistake of releasing the single Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane in February 1967 to cover the gap, and so scuppered the idea of the new album being a story about Liverpool. Even so by the time Sgt Pepper was released the Beatles had already completed 6 new songs, had a rough idea for Magical Mystery Tour, and the cartoon film Yellow Submarine in the works. Oh, and they released the single All You Need is Love a month after Sgt. Pepper.

Magical Mystery Tour, which will be an album in the 9/9/9 Remasters, was released in various forms at the time. I was given the UK double EP edition for Christmas, and it had very odd track sequencing, the three psychedelic tracks mixed up with the three “mumsy” tracks. The US album release not only included the recent, wonderful, singles and B-sides, but has a brilliant track sequencing which both make the magical “Mystery Tour” tracks flow and sets up the bonus tracks as musically logical consequences of them. John called it “one of my favourite albums because it is so wierd”. This time the Americans got a better deal and created this canonical version of the album, which my brother bought on import and always put a big sunny smile on our faces.

Opening with the bright and cheery Magical Mystery Tour, which almost made Sgt. Pepper and was consciously made to highlight the upcoming film, this is an amazingly upbeat opening track which, as is common practice on TV today, prefigures the sequences of the story. It only works as a set up though and is, in effect, the film’s overture.

What Would You Think?

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

The release of Sgt Pepper’s was a huge cultural event; “The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815“. It created the album as a coherent artform, created modern rock and set a new benchmark. Unlike, say, The Velvet Underground and Nico, it was listened to endlessly and stayed in the album charts til well after The Beatles split up three years later. It’s release on June 1st 1967 had been set up by the wonderful Liverpool dyptych of Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, a mini Sgt. Pepper’s in a single.

It was very much a conceptual album in that it had the conceit of being a release by Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, you can see them on the cover, and NOT by The Beatles; thus removing expectations of what the album should be. Even so they opened with a rock track, a rock overture, before opening with Ringo’s song, the first of many unusual moves. The film Yellow Submarine captured much of the faux-Edwardiana of the album. It should be noted that many of us were wearing faux-Edwardiana at the time so Pepper felt both surreal and contemporary.

Where Do They All Come From?

REVOLVER

Revolver came out 6 days after England had won the Football World Cup at Wembley in 1966. A week later the Beatles rushed off for their last, fractious tour of the USA. As a famous post in the NME asked “Where is famous Beatles Band?” Caught between embracing the counter-culture and fulfilling old musical industries contracts the Beatles were curiously absent from their own high-water mark; and so were we. Ray Davies of the Kinks, who were amongst the new English bands challenging the Beatles that summer, the Stones, Who, Troggs and Yardbirds, slated the album. With his own bitter-sweet hit of the summer Sunny Afternoon, lazily capturing our triumphant summer mood he was in a position to talk. It was Number One when Revolver was released. The other big cultural aspect of the summer of 1966 was the sudden proliferation of  pirate radio across Europe which, as we all owned little transistor radios, was the musical distribution network of choice, and suddenly radio playlists were sprinkled with the little bits of vinyl magic from the album. This time we didn’t need a big cultural event from The Beatles to cheer us up as a nation, the Charlton brothers and the West Ham Academy had seen to that. Instead the Beatles seeped out through the ether, and their new collaborative democracy was signified by Ringo singing the single and George kicking off the album with the misunderstood Taxman, “the Taxman’s taken all I’ve got” indeed; it’s a shame about Ray…

The Word is Love

RUBBER SOUL

Rubber Soul holds a special place in my Beatles iconography as it is the first album I bought at the time it came out. Actually I got lucky, we were in Germany and a lots of goods were tax free. That immediately cut the price by 25% but we were also allowed on to Allied bases and just 20 miles from Hamm was Soest and the legendary Canadian Army PX. Just like today, and all times in between, albums were cheaper in North America, so you could get an album then for around a £1, about 60% of what we would normally pay. However this also meant that you were at the vagaries of whatever was fashionable in Canada, which fortunately at that time, like the rest of the world, did include the Beatles.

I’ve commented previously on how every Beatles album had a track that sounded like an unreleased single. This time they were legion, indicating the quality of their writing, playing and collaborations in the studio.

Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys commented to his wife at the time that every track was a classic and then went off and wrote Pet Sounds as a riposte, despite Mike Love’s effort to stop him. Our own teenage response to Rubber Soul was an endless debate about what the best track was. Michelle, Girl and Norwegian Wood gained early support back in 1965.

I was 15 when I first heard Rubber Soul, trapped in Boarding School, abandoned in my little German enclave, and without access to Top of The Pops just before Pirate Radio rescued us when it seemed to colonise all of Europe in 1966. For me personally it was 1962 all over again.

With Rubber Soul The Beatles moved from cultural heroes to counter-cultural heroes, almost, like Orson Welles, living their lives backwards. Only their lives were even more remarkable than the Citizen with the mark of Kane, and they didn’t lose any of their booming popularity, beep, beep yeah.

So, as was customary, they gave us a bright and cheerful opening track to hook us in; old pros and consummate entertainers. Drive My Car, driving song; metaphor or opening gambit? Here is a video from their cartoon days. 

Awake now? Ready to take a journey?

Unbutchered

THE BEATLES UNBUTCHERED

The Beatle’s albums are often divided into early period Beatlemania and late period mature artists. Their run of classic albums is universally seen as beginning with Rubber Soul. Difficult for me to disagree with that as Rubber Soul was the first album that I bought and, from Sgt Pepper onwards, each new Beatles Album was BOTH a media event and a musical event, as well as being a coherent artwork. From the perspective of the twenty first century it seems obvious that an album is an album, but at the time Beatles albums were thrown together as they rushed around the world, burning up records. However my own interest in the Beatles is because they created new forms; they imagined new futures. Perhaps they didn’t realise they had invented the rock album until Brian Wilson released Pet Sounds; his response to Rubber Soul. Despite the coherence of Rubber Soul and Revolver my guess is that Sgt Pepper was the first album that they consciously planned as an art work. What we mostly got in the sixties was the “outlier genius” of the Beatles, accidentally creating new possibilities.

As we look back at Rock’s rich tapestry, the Beatles are seen as a corner stone; actually no, they are the foundations, they created its lineaments, one of which is the album as art form. For me their only pre-cursor in popular music is Frank Sinatra’s 1954 (!) “In The Wee Small Hours” a concept album shot through with coherent brilliance. I am going to leave aside that classic quartet of jazz albums recorded in 1959, as jazz’s relationship with the album is different, and argue that Beatles invented the album in it’s modern creative form. And, secondly I am going to argue that they achieved this with Hard Days Night. The reason we didn’t recognise this at the time is that Hard Days Night was (just!) a soundtrack, Beatles for Sale was weak and HELP! was also a soundtrack; leaving Rubber Soul to be revealed as their first stand alone album work of genius.

Now I disagree with George, and others, who see Rubber Soul and Revolver as a dyptich. For me the great divide in Beatles albums is between Rubber Soul and Revolver. Why? Because they went from being great songwriters playing their songs well to being the first great musicians of the recording studio, Pet Sounds notwithstanding. Rubber Soul is both the last album of the glorious Beatles Band and the last of the mid-period Beatles. For me the “mid-period Beatles” released three classic albums.

1) Hard Days Night, a stumble upon multi-media classic

2) Unbutchered; Digg It! The one they put together as their first bite of the Apple

3) Rubber Soul; the delicious flowering up of their genius

And the stone classic five-star album Unbutchered, as we all know, starts with Eight Days a Week. Here’s the cartoon version;