I have had it up to here waiting for the Beatles catalogue to be remastered

Today I learned that the band started working on three or four Abbey Road songs with leftover time from the Let It Be sessions, which is a curious bit of overlap. Let It Be, the album and sessions, were such odd outliers.

I think only four songs were new compositions during the Abbey Road sessions: You Never Give Me Your Money, Come Together, Here Comes the Sun and Sun King.

Which is so odd, because this movie depicts the band struggling for material, scraping the barrel even, when there were all these other songs apparently far enough along that they went to work on them immediately.

pretty grim reading about mal evans.

Maureen Starkey is a pretty brutal wiki read as well.

Maureen Starkey is a pretty brutal wiki read as well.

Very. "When the Harrisons were visiting the Starrs, Harrison confessed how much he loved Maureen, which led to an affair" - I remember this being a bombshell when I picked up Rolling Stone's special issue on George after he died. That issue didn't mention Starr's own infidelities and growing alcoholism, which may have helped push Maureen into it.

Zak Starkey reposted some of Rob Sheffield’s RS Get Back piece on his Instagram (@therealzakstarkey), along with a neat photo of Maureen with Zak’s “uncle” Keith Moon.

Nobody on the roof is a bigger fan than Mo. She was a screaming girl back at the Cavern Club — she’s the only person here who ever stood in line and paid money to hear this band. … She’s waited years for this gig.

Mo was the Beatle wife everyone loved. Even Ringo. Apparently he was by her side when she died.

Mo is the best

Yes you can vindicate any coat of Mo

And you gave me a hard time the other day for a bad pun, on a thread dedicated to suchlike?

?

Lads...

let it lie

Boys. Let's not fight about yesterday. Or every little thing. We can work it out. Dig it?

:)

Uh oh, wild Mike Love sighting

Love that Fender Bass VI that you see both John and George playing.

i quite liked that John still had an old setlist taped to his guitar

like it’s a nice detail & i like thinking that he was still somewhat sentimental & not just lazy lol

I'm going to close my eyes this evening and see in my dreams these beautiful golden faces in front of an amazingly azure sky...

Cyn...

Jane...

Mike Love....

yes you can tolerate any beard you grow

Underrated post.

Yes you can vindicate any coat of Mo

On its own, would have been a groaner. As a follow up to the previous post? Peerless.

Beard beatles ranking:

1. George
2. Paul.
3. Ringo
4. John

Paul
Paul
Paul
George

Mustaches:

Ringo
Paul
John
George

Muttonchops:

John

watched episode 1 last night and loved it. made me so happy to see them fucking around, switching instruments, doing silly voices while procrastinating writing songs. such a universal experience

it did kind of make me think that apart from the harmonies you know, i could have been in the beatles, why not, it doesn’t seem too hard

I think I could have been a Glyn Johns. Or maybe a Magic Alex.

glyn johns' stupid grin at banging on the hammer in 'maxwell's silver hammer' cracked me up

suddenly i sound like some kind of beatles pub bore so i apologise but that was mal evans not glyn johns

Being a master charlatan like Magic Alex seems really hard! I'm trying to picture seriously selling a proposal where the Beatles live on a Greek island (at that time under a military regime IIRC) in individual circular glass houses houses connected by a tunnels to a central house so they can be served by their staff such as Mal and Neil. And that's on top of the day job of selling vague audio-visual solutions that haven't yet been invented to individual Beatles.

It still amazes me that there were utterly no consequences for promising a 72-track recording studio, and delivering precisely nothing, plus a cartoonishly goofy "prototype" of a rotating double-necked guitar.

Like, I have a whole job where I tell people "We're going to do some cool things some time in the future." That is literally my job. It's how I can pay my mortgage and feed my children. But there is a whole structure of expectations. Standards of proof. Requirements to show past success. I wouldn't last six weeks - let alone months or years - on stuff that never panned out.

oh and hardcore dilettante, I confess that I have become unhealthily obsessed with that pony-digging linguistic formula of "you can (fancy verb) any (noun) you (verb)."

Like, just this morning I was getting a kid breakfast and found myself singing "yes you can accessorize your oatmeal, bro."

hopefully answered by a request for some toppings with good bite and texture, because "all i want is chew."

He invented vaporware - that's something.

re: I assume it’s down to something more than just studios moving to transistorized desks (as Abbey Road had just prior to Abbey Road), but I dunno.

for the beatles i think the big shifts that lead to that 70s feeling on abbey road are indeed the transistor desk - that really changes the colour of the recording - but also the addition of moog synths to their sound palette. not sure it's really any more than that

I read a book last month that is based around this idea, called Solid State

was it good? this conversation (and listening to Abbey Road side 2 right this moment) has got me interested in this. cause i could totally imagine a world where basically they were recording this largely like The White Album, heavy on after-the-fact overdubs on each other's songs, etc., but the equipment change-over yields a much more precise, 'clean' sound, rather than the fascinating and sometimes unsettling sense of closeness on the earlier record. but i have no idea.

one striking example: the "out of college, money spent" vocals from Paul - the effect on those is something i'm sure they used on earlier records, but it somehow feels more pasted-in to me. i love it, i have no beef with it, but it does feel like he literally picked up the handset and phoned that one in.

ranking George's beard over Paul's beard is basically being in Q Anon

And now,

your host for the evening,

Mr. Mike Love.

XXP - It was decent, I can't say it brought any great insight but it was a good summation of the transition period, I think it could have done with being a bit more technical really.

I started watching this last night and I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. And I am not the worlds biggest fan.

there’s an interview excerpt with Alex Van Halen that Dave q posted once where basically he says that the 70s close-micd, dry drum sound was largely about making it easy on the engineers.

He invented vaporware - that's something.

Was going to say, he's very much a Silicon Valley character.

surely Da Vinci or someone deserves the vaporware-inventor title tho

loved this whole thing, felt like part 3 was way more of a slog than the other two but whatever, the part where John and Paul sang that one song through clenched teeth was pretty funny

I still don't get any of the criticism that this is getting, it feels very magical and mundane to me, something about the whole vibe of this reminds me of the Gus Van Sant Cobain movie that I thought was hilarious (prob the only music biopic I've liked) but a lot of people hated

The magical mundanity tour

basically he says that the 70s close-micd, dry drum sound was largely about making it easy on the engineers

But were drum sounds in the '60s any great shakes either? Generally not, in my opinion. I've seen Jimmy Page credited with popularizing the notion that the mics should be pulled back from the kit, to provide a more reverberant sound on tape. (Culminating, of course, with setting Bonham up in a stone hallway.)

But were drum sounds in the '60s any great shakes either?

Motown, Stax, Dylan (particularly Highway 61), James Brown, the Impressions ("A Fool For You" especially), Hendrix' first two records, Phil Spector's productions, Shel Talmy's Kinks and Creation records, the Sonics,...and that's before we even get to Glyn Johns' engineering work on Who, Small Faces, and Rolling Stones records.

The Beatles were acutely jealous of the Motown drum sound(s), and seriously looked into recording at Stax (which, it was found, would've been insanely expensive, due to a few clauses in their EMI contract).

Vast halo, this is a little confuzzled, because 60s drums were not close-mic'd, it was usually room microphones.

Geoff Emerick almost seems to credit himself with inventing close-micing, because EMI had strict placement standards that he bravely ignored in order to get the punchy sound of mid-career Beatles. Glyn Johns is famous for a 3-mic technique.

I associate strict close-mic technique with 70s when it became economically feasible to have one mic per drum.