Album Reviews

If you want to quickly know if you’re going to like Giles Martin’s The Beatles remixes start with “Long, Long, Long”. If you don’t like that one, you’re probably not going to like the rest, but for me, that remix in particular is far superior to the one on the two original “Top Loader” U.K. pressings I have: more transparent and more spacious, with a holographic George front, center and three-dimensional as he’s not presented on the original.

You can add to that greater textural delicacy and transparency all set against blacker backgrounds. So if that track doesn’t do it for you, I’m not sure what might.

The eager anticipation with which this double LP was met and the way in which it transfixed a generation might be difficult for today’s youngsters to fully appreciate. Following the psychedelic high of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band released late May 1967 in the U.K. and shortly thereafter in America came the low on August 27th of Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s surprising accidental drug overdose death at age 32.

The loss of Epstein’s guiding hand affected everything Beatles that followed. John Lennon was quoted as saying “I knew that we were in trouble then. ... I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. I was scared. I thought, ‘We’ve f---in' had it.”

The group had recorded the song “Magical Mystery Tour” shortly after completing Sgt. Pepper’s…. but McCartney’s Merry Pranksters/LSD influenced movie was on hold while the group finished songs for the animated film “Yellow Submarine” and performed live “All You Need is Love” for the groundbreaking “Our World” world-wide satellite feed TV show.

Epstein’s death put the movie idea in the production hopper but little or none of this was known to fans waiting for the Sgt. Pepper’s… follow up so when, just before Thanksgiving, in November of 1967 the Magical Mystery Tour LP arrived in American stores eager fans gobbled it up.

I remember buying it at a store in Ithaca, NY and running home to play “the next Beatles album”, which of course was a major letdown. Most fans then didn’t know it was a Capitol Records cobbled together “Christmas season product” album that combined the “Magical Mystery Tour” soundtrack songs on side 1 with single releases on side 2 The Beatles never intended to be issued on an album. Magical Mystery Tour was released in the U.K. as a double E.P. only. So rushed was the U.S. album that George Martin hadn’t time to mix the singles in stereo so Capitol’s “stereo” LP was on side 2, fake stereo. In 1971 side two’s singles were mixed for stereo and became available first on the German Hör Zu (Listen!) magazine record label’s edition and then on Mobile Fidelity’s real-time duplicated cassette release.

Even for fans that did not (could not) understand what was happening, it seemed that without Brian Epstein’s guiding hand, The Beatles ship was sinking—which is not to say that the album did not contain some great songs because it surely did—along with some duds. And in America it had the usual Beatles chart success. George Martin was quoted as regretting not including “Strawberry Fields Forever” on Sgt. Pepper’s….. But Magical Mystery Tour was a concocted collection of songs and not an album that The Beatles had intended to release.

Shortly after the Magical Mystery Tour album release, in Feburary of 1968, and still shaken by Brian Epstein’s death and exhausted by being “The Beatles”, John, Paul, George and Ringo traveled to Rishikish, India to receive advanced Transcendental Meditation training at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram—along with an “eclectic” entourage that included wives and girlfriends and Beach Boy Mike Love, Mia Farrow, Donovan and others, and that’s where The Beatles album story begins to unfold.

The trip to India was well-covered in “living color” in Life Magazine and elsewhere. For many Beatles fans this felt like a “WTF” moment, though that term had yet to be invented.

The mess that ensued—unfounded charges that the Maharishi had behaved badly with women in the entourage including Mia Farrow— is well-covered elsewhere but Ringo left after two weeks, McCartney after a month, while Harrison and Lennon and wife Cynthia remained through much of April. During this short Indian interlude group members wrote an estimated 40 songs.

In May, Lennon and McCartney, home tape recordings in hand, met with George at his Kinfauns bungalow in Esher and recorded 26 demo versions of songs, most of which would appear in finished form on The Beatles, which, thanks to the late pop artist Richard Hamilton’s stripped down plain white cover became known as “The White Album” (but you already knew that!).

The Esher demos escaped the bungalow as poor sounding bootlegs but here they are presented as the superior recordings they always were—taped on Harrison’s 4 track Ampex recorder. The Esher tapes’ inclusion is but one of the vinyl and digital set’s attractions and offers irrefutable documentation that the studio effort that followed was more cooperative and collaborative than was at the time reported.

Blocked booked time at Abbey Road studios began May 30th, 1968 through July with all sessions and mixing ending October 14th,1968. Some recordings took place as well, at Trident studios.

As Giles Martin pointed out during the recent presentation at Power Station at BerkleeNYC Studios, the recording process here differed from that of previous Beatles albums. Instead of being planned out, rehearsed and then produced and recorded, the sessions were open-ended with take after take recorded “live” and overdubs added later.

This was both costly and eventually drained both Apple Corp bank accounts and George Martin, emotionally. He split for a vacation late in the process while the band toiled on, leaving a very young (20 year old) Chris Thomas in charge of producing The Beatles ! Geoff Emerick too, quit some time July over this recording method. 20 year old engineer Ken Scott came on board. And there was also the famous late August Ringo walkout, said to be caused by Paul’s criticism of his drumming.

While the team spirit prevailed at Esher, it frayed once in the studio. For the first time, wives and girl friends appeared at sessions (Yoko’s presence was said to have seriously damaged the Lennon/McCartney camaraderie) and individualism took hold over group efforts, though this was later exaggerated into “this was a series of solo songs” and not a Beatles album. Of the 30 songs on the album all four Beatles participate on only 16 of them.

The final editing and track assembly plus some final overdubs took place in a 24 hour session that final day in October with songs razor edited to butt up against one another in some cases, added snippets of music between tracks in other places and cross-fades in others. On the original U.K. album there are no visible track breaks between songs, which added to the album’s minimalist feel.

None of this drama nor the opinions of the various Beatles that were later reported (such as Lennon characterizing “Ob-La-Di,Obla-Da” as “granny shit music”) made its way to the 400 or so freezing souls standing outside of The Record Runner Record Store November of 1968 as I drove up in the owner’s Volvo P-1800 sports car with boxes of the English import “White Album” filling every available cavity. I wrote about this in the review of the stereo album in the stereo box set.