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

(Thinking about Gary Wilson repeatedly yelling "she's so real!" about his girlfriend that probably doesn't exist)

It helps that Help! was the one I listened to most as a child (we only had that, Let it Be and Abbey Road) but I think it's at least as consistent an album as Rubber Soul, which I often want to skip tracks on.

I can't listen to anything pre-Revolver. Not into the moptop stuff. Rubber Soul has its moments but it's still basically a pop album. I only like the Beatles once they turned into a rock band, which they did with Revolver.

if i went to see a 'pop' band and they rocked as hard as the Beatles do on Please Please Me thru A Hard Day's Night, i'd feel pretty darn rocked.

is it a huge challop to think 'let it be' is better than 'abbey road'?

For With The Beatles, I often want to skip the whole album.

With the Beatles has All My Loving on it you lunatic.

With the Beatles is excellent. "It Won't Be Long," "All I've Got To Do," "All My Loving," the Motown covers, all great.

if you do not rate the early beatles records then i do not respect your opinion lol

Not only is Help an underrated album, but underrated George's song "I Need You" is underrated.

Maxwell's is 10 lbs. of shit in a 5 lb. sack.

Haw, OTM.

I keep thinking about how much I'm enjoying this 9-hour documentary on the making of my least favorite Beatles album ever. It's made me wonder whether I would enjoy the same kind of treatment to any of the other albums. Maybe seeing them record "I Want You" in a broom closet or whatever instead of the asteroid careening through space that I have pictured in my mind would kill it for me.

I mean, honestly, I probably wouldn't mind a field trip to the sausage factory because you know what? I'm not really all that crazy about sausage in the first place.

1st and 3rd records are excellent - but WTB does nothing for me, though I quite like the 'bugger off everyone' attitude of 'Don't Bother Me.'

my brain can barely take the suggestion that the beatles only became a rock band with revolver, that's a new one

arguably they codify power-pop on that one, i'll give you that

They rocked and popped hard from day 1

One of the things that made the Let It Be album seem second-class when I was growing up in the 80s was that every copy of the LP seemed beaten-up - scratchy, with the binding coming apart and stains on the jacket. This is the true physical manifestation of this music for me, not a box set with multiple discs and a coffee-table book.
Also, growing up with the blue album, it had the "wrong" versions of "Get Back" and the title track.

The blue album had the "correct" (single) versions, I mean.

They rocked and popped hard from day 1

― J. Sam, Tuesday, December 7, 2021 10:21 AM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

one of my fav moments from part 1, when paul put on the old man voice and said "remember when we used to rock??"

Contend that the LIB guitar solo on the album is the superior one, the way it screams out of the chord bed instead of mellowing out in it

lol yeah, Let it Be is totally one of those records where every copy is shabby from edge-wear and ring-wear. agreed that this is somehow more fitting than the cover in pristine condition; the design itself is nice, but also somewhat misplaced IMHO. the music within is neither a serious statement piece, nor a snapshot of these four musical personalities coming together.

My friend and I used to laugh at the note on the back cover: "This is a new-phase Beatles album".

birdistheword OTM. With the Beatles is in my top 5 Beatles albums for sure, and possibly higher. Also the incredible EP that comes out just after that. It's gotta be the closest their recordings ever came to what they sounded like on a great night at the Cavern or in Hamburg.

one of my fav moments from part 1, when paul put on the old man voice and said "remember when we used to rock??"

someone else remarked on it upthread, but one of the true astonishing moments of the doc for me was seeing the 1966(?) setlist taped to john's guitar. so powerful to be shown such a banal little item as a totem from what seems like a completely different world. people remark on it all the time but it still never fails to blow my mind how relatively brief the whole arc of the beatles' career was, it feels like a generation of time passed between shea stadium and twickenham, its breathtaking to then be reminded it was still recent enough for the setlist to just be right there, like "oh huh, lookit that"

the early catalog is kind of annoying with all those cheapo american releases, UK vs US tracklistings, semi-packaging of albums under different names and slightly different tracklistings, even revolver the u.s. version omits the perhaps best song on the album (and your bird can sing)

Paul's 1963 violin bass (his second) is famous for having the 1966 set list taped to it. I believe it was still taped there as recently as 2010.

One of John's Rickenbackers also had a 1966 set list taped to it, but I don't remember that being in the film (wasn't he mostly using the stripped Casino)?

Can I very quickly hate on this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/12/06/beatles-get-back-documentary-songwriters/

idk guitars but theres def a brief moment of john showing off a setlist on his guitar while in the apple studio (unless it was other footage inserted thru some kind of editing fuckery)

Thanks, One Eye Open, I probably just mushed it up in my brain with the well-known Paul bass that (as far as I know) still has a set list taped to it. There is so much footage and so much of it is so similar that I don't remember which

Like, this thing gave me such a brain-fog that I saw the poll thread about whether jeffrey epstein killed himself and I legit thought it was about whether brian epstein killed himself and it took me a while to disentangle the threads

"Another Girl" is so damn fine.

re: with the beatles, "hold me tight" is one of my favorite songs they ever did

apparently neither the band nor critics liked that song at all but they're all wrong

and "It Won't Be Long" is euphoria in a can.

yeah
YEAH
yeah
YEAH

the early catalog is kind of annoying with all those cheapo american releases, UK vs US tracklistings, semi-packaging of albums under different names and slightly different tracklistings, even revolver the u.s. version omits the perhaps best song on the album (and your bird can sing)

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, December 7, 2021 11:21 AM (forty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

The US Revolver, um, butchering is incredibly annoying. To this day, I'm still caught slightly off-guard when "And Your Bird Can Sing" comes on after "Good Day Sunshine." But the US The Beatles' Second Album is one of my favorite records ever. It shares a few songs with With The Beatles, but the sequencing is so much more effective. And "Money" is one of the greatest things they ever did; however great the post-'66 stuff was, they never recorded anything with that degree of intensity again.

The US version of Revolver is so weird, John has fewer songs than George!

yeah -- the version I owned for years

i don't have any insightful observations and i do not cultivate challops -- i am just a lifelong Beatles enthusiast and I am LOVING Get Back. I wish it were 60 hours of footage.

tipsy mothra otm upthread about identifying with Ringo & the harmonies -- those are the things i noticed as well. i avoided reading the avalanche of takes about this before seeing it myself bc i didn't want to ruin something so precious. good move on my part!!

"hold me tight" is one of my favorite songs they ever did

Wouldn't go that far but I love the key change into the bridge. "Little Child" is the underrated gem of that album for me, so high-spirited.

"little child" is so good

That one I'm a little cool on, mainly b/c the rest doesn't measure up to that crashing harmonica-piano intro.

For sure UK >> than US versions.

Still, Yesterday and Today is kind of a great record on its own merits. Super guitar forward.

And having a version of Rubber Soul that starts with "I've Just Seen a Face" totally makes sense, especially if that album is heard as their "folk rock" record.

hmm
mm
mm
mm
mm

If anyone's really interested in the history of the Capitol versions of the records, Dave Marsh's book The Beatles' Second Album goes into detail about the guy who sequenced and mastered them, and apparently hated the group.

And having a version of Rubber Soul that starts with "I've Just Seen a Face" totally makes sense, especially if that album is heard as their "folk rock" record.

The US Rubber Soul, considered the best Beatles album by Greil Marcus.

That's a tremendous book. Dave Dexter was the guy at Capitol who passed on their singles through 1963. He didn't seem to have many (any?) friends in the industry.

xp

Yeah Dave Dexter's a complete sack of shit. (Among other things, after Lennon was killed, he wrote an editorial basically spitting on his grave and for whatever reason the trade paper that employed him agreed to publish it.)

The U.S. albums are nostalgia relics for me. The few times I've tried listening, I couldn't stand the shitty way they sounded (the echo, crap EQ, etc.) The UK set has everything in better form - iIf the U.S. counterparts ever fall out-of-print again, I won't miss them.

Rubber Soul is the only one where I keep both versions - I really really got to know the US one for years and years before ever hearing the other sequence, and the "folk" version works so well for me. playing the UK one feels like playing a fascinating import edition with a variant sequence incorporating never-before-released bonus tracks.

Found this from a podcast blurb:

“Capitol Records exec Dave Dexter was the man who initially declined parent company EMI’s requests to issue The Beatles’ records in America. Then, after being ordered to do so, he not only oversaw remixes that slathered much of their music with reverb and fake stereo; he actually ensured he was credited on the records for what rock critic Dave Marsh would later refer to as 'genuine stupidity.'

“Back in the 1960s, courtesy of Capitol Records executive Dave Dexter, Jr., American Beatles fans bought different records and often heard very different mixes to those enjoyed by their British counterparts: ones bathed in reverb and converted into fake stereo 'with the assistance' of Mr. Dexter.”

I love the crappy stereo separation and added reverb on The Beatles' Second Album. I haven't heard Meet The Beatles! more than a few times, and am curious if its reverb is similarly ladled-on.

Only thing I hate about Second is that it wasn't their second album in the US. Vee-Jay beat Capitol to the punch with Introducing The Beatles (which is Please Please Me minus one or two songs), so Meet was their actual second album.

xp Rubber Soul still works well in the U.S. form - as pointed out, not only does Greil love it, Brian Wilson was only aware of the U.S. version when he heard it, and he's stated that's the album that motivated him to do something that was conceptually strong from the start-to-finish, i.e. Pet Sounds. But I still prefer the U.K. version: "Drive My Car," "Nowhere Man" and "If I Needed Someone" are much better than the two cuts that were added. I feel like the U.K. version has a welcome touch of soul that's filtered out in the US version too (there's a reason why Paul titled the album as such).