Is the Beatles 1962-66 (the 'red' alb) the only record of theirs that you need?

red and blue is how i got into the beatles, via cassettes in my family's ford taurus during road trips

i was 7, maybe 8

Mostly excited for the remixed Red album based on this: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/beatles-now-and-then-1234862777/

I have a longtime interest in the crazy world that is the Beatles' compilation discography.

They've almost never got it right, ever. '1' and Love are the two most obvious (conceptual) successes imo. They fucked up the roll-out of Anthology royally. But I love Real Love and even Free as a Bird, esp if paired with the videos.

I'm not sure what to make of more remixes tbh. I think my tolerance ran out after Abbey Road (I did hear Revolver and enjoyed Taxman but couldn't get too excited otherwise, especially given how terrible the She Said She Said mix was).

they were pretty good with Tony Sheridan but after that I kind of check out

I enjoyed You'll Be Mine and Cayenne but lost interest for years until they released Plastic Beetle and Peter Blake 2000. Although I did love the movie medley.

red and blue is how i got into the beatles, via cassettes in my family's ford taurus during road trips

― is he disgruntled adrian? (voodoo chili),

^^ This. These albums were public library staples.

I love that the RS article is so badly written that it implies the new track uses a vocal isolated by a microphone in a flower pot.

sure but there are causes for concern with some of the frantic ~legacy building~ going in recent years especially - paul and ringo have basically embalmed themselves already

it feels like they want to wrap the whole thing up and put it on a pedestal so that everyone worship it in the approved way - just at the point that new generations are finally starting to say interesting things about the beatles which trouble many aspects of the beatle party line. the whole thing feels a little reactionary

I mean I know it's all for holiday shopping purpose maximization, but I like to think the Beatles camp purposely waited until after the Stones album dropped in a, "no, fuck you, WE are getting the last word".

i like "oldies station Beatles".
when i hear that stuff on the radio it makes me think of the old display case at The Colony on 50th and Broadway with all the vtg Beatlemania merch next to bobblehead dolls of The Three Stooges.

John actually had a low opinion of "And Your Bird Can Sing" ("another of my throwaways ... fancy paper around an empty box") but I love it. (Elvis Costello's a fan - it was one of a handful of covers he did on his glorious 'The Return Of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook' tour.)

He didn't have a really high opinion of "Hey Bulldog" either, believing it was "a good sounding record that means nothing" and recalling his embarrassment that the first time Yoko ever saw him at work was recording that song. I think it's fine, a fun number that would wipe the floor with any kids' song of that era (and there's even a modern day children's animation video that covers it), but to me, it sounds really slight and inconsequential next to their best-known hits.

i can kinda get lennon not caring for "and your bird can sing" because what really makes it is the guitar line, which mccartney and harrison apparently wrote together

One thing I love about "Hey Bulldog" is the early 2000s clip where they realised the "Lady Madonna" promo was actually from footage of recording this song and recut it to match.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4vbJQ-MrKo
I can't think of any earlier clip of them actually making a song (aside from "All You Need Is Love", kinda).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdrb1vFTtJI

actually that's later

I mean, I wouldn't have Your Bird Can Sing either. If I had to rank Revolver it would be in the lower half. Fortunately I don't have to.

I still cannot get over the stupidity of the new Blue Album and how they've bound themselves to the same opening tracks as 50 years ago so they can't just shuffle most of those White Album cuts onto CD1 and evened out the track counts on both discs. No one in 2023 should be expected to care. Besides which, Beatles Oldies is in many ways the more important compilation anyway but it hasn't been seen since 1987.

Lennon said all kinds of dumb shit about his beatles work in that Wenner interview, I take it with a grain of salt.

the running order of the blue album on CD is one of the reasons why this entire release got delayed by several months, apparently. when they added tracks they didn't do it in a chronological way (which is how the LP is sequenced), but then changed their mind and went back to get the CDs fixed before they were produced. it was too late and too expensive to redo the LPs.

I'd like to hear this kind of sonic clean-up on the Beatles' contemporaries whose records weren't that well recorded in the first place - the Stones, the Kinks, even someone like the Pretty Things.

woah woah woah no way dogg

I have to say I’ve always found the album design for red/blue very lazy and hastily put together and wished they had re-designed it for this reissue.

Also not having all the songs in chronological order as the first time around irks the hell out of me.

they are chronological on the CDs I believe, that's part of why the whole thing got delayed.

I liked the red and blue covers - it does put the Get Back cover to good use instead of letting it go to waste.

Peter Jackson's documentary up of the making of Now and Then:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APJAQoSCwuA

the quality of the isolated vocal is pretty amazing. I'm quite sure I'll love the finished product here, I'm very easy to please with Beatles material.

obv a missed opportunity to apply this same treatment to Free as a Bird and Real Love, though I understand why they didn't (not wanting to detract from the attention this song warrants). There are murmurs that Anthology is being looked at again so maybe as part of that. I suspect that by the time that gets finished, McCartney and Ringo may not be around anymore though

I get it, but still kinda lol at that NASA control center looking ass setup.

And talking about their bleeding edge machine-learning technology while showing what look like FabFilter EQ plugins

The Anthology footage there looks really clean, wonder if he's been working on a reissue of that? Didn't he hint at something in the works when Get Back came out?

Tho, to be fair, that gigantic screen with the waveform is kind of what I picture whenever I see a H0ffman forum type rushing to post the DR scores for the new Styx live album.

I heard Pete Best is supposedly being involved in the similarly supposed revamped Anthology project. I really hope so.

Yes, he gave some footage of them in leathers to Peter Jackson for the Now and Then video. Earliest known of the band.

https://www.thebeatles.com/read-what-peter-jackson-says-about-making-beatles-last-music-video

The Anthology footage there looks really clean, wonder if he's been working on a reissue of that? Didn't he hint at something in the works when Get Back came out?

that was the music video for Now and Then, which he directed.

As Jordan says, great advert for FabFilter Pro-Q, I guess they didn't want to show the GUI for Jackson's stem software. It sounds like the track doesn't have that slappy Jeff Lynne drum sound, thank god.

yeah Lynne hasn't been involved in it at all beyond whatever he may have helped do in the 94 sessions, which I suspect was not much during the tracking stage.

For this he receives the 'Additional producer' tag.

It's hard to say for sure, but when they played George's acoustic guitar track, it sounded like it could've had Lynne's usual sound for acoustic guitar (which he loved to pile on to a lot of his productions) - basically thin out any lower frequencies, maybe add a lot of compression, etc. Just listen to his stuff with Tom Petty, he produced some stuff with him where it was mostly just a strumming acoustic guitar. I'll guess we'll know when they release the single, but regardless, when they played John's isolated vocal, that was really fucking cool.

There's gonna be so much of this kind of thing in the future, Halfway's comment upthread I think is pretty prescient.

Especially now that the cleaning-up end of things has finally been almost completely solved, in my work every day I use two simple 'Waves' Plugins ($29 apiece) that do really quite remarkable things with noise/reverb reduction

Idk exactly what Jackson's software is, that he's clutching so tightly, but it's reasonable to assume that they've gone much further down the route of managing to correctly separate instruments with a complex set of shared frequencies.

But the next thing coming down the wire is the ability to recreate/simulate lost (or never properly captured) frequencies, it's already here in the form of a couple of things that came out this year, and they're pretty decent but still limited.

When they have that licked in a few years, however, it'll be game on and the record companies will jump on this as the latest way to make us buy the same music. We'll all be given the opportunity to listen to Robert Johnson in crystal clear Dolby Atmos and the Hoffman forums will implode.

that recent Coltrane / Dolphy album that came out this year, Evenings at the Village Gate...that's the sort of thing I would love to hear this technology applied to. not that that album didn't sound good given it's source, but image being able to really separate those instruments and balance them out with a proper mix. There are loads of live and archive recordings like this that would really benefit.

Jackson has said he wants to do the Beatles Hamburg tapes as well.

It also extends into TV/Film/Radio archives too, spoken word is much easier to work on, in this way, than music.

The Hamburg tapes would be perfect, I forgot about those - I honestly think one of the great live albums in rock could've been had if that recording was better. The main problem is the vocals are almost impossible to hear. It's going to be tougher because you're dealing with more instruments across a wider range in a room with even worse acoustics, but given how well the Lennon cassette demo worked out, I'm sure a massive improvement can be made.

re: the pete best tape, it's rumored to be this which has been out for a while now; but Jackson did say it hadn't been seen...so I don't know

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Lwh6BJGyw

Where exactly can we hear this at 2pm GMT? All the streaming services?

yep

https://open.spotify.com/track/4vziJcnB2Qyi9o4nIRUeN7?si=e8e07619efb74908