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

i swear lately on ilm there's this weird hoffman board thing where anything that doesn't sound like rumours is considered bad sounding or lo fi. so many 60s records have amazing sounding drums.

which is why we should use drum machines if Ringo isn't available

maybe its just your hearing

No, it's an opinion, and mine is as valid as yours

I can still eat corn if you mash it into a fine paste

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG3VUXBcyt0

The rumors are true!

And now,

Your hosts for the evening,

Two monkeys fucking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2Pq2cCVLpQ

While I think '80s gated drums came first - Phil Collins/"Abacab" was one of the first to really push drums to the fore - they definitely cohabitated with increasingly bigger sounding reverbed-out everything as the decade progressed. The huge marshmallow snares would sound so small with everything else overinflated.

I just get vexed that there are a bunch of songs from that era that I love (e.g. "Substitute") that are let down by really ineptly-recorded drums.

And “Substitute” is far from the worst of them. The drums on A Quick One and The Who Sell Out (with an exception or two) are abominably recorded. It sounds like there may have been a single mic within no less than 20 feet of the drums.

Shel Talmy, absolutely terrible engineer/producer, same with the early Kinks stuff that sounds like shite.

Maybe you guys should tell him so on Facepalm.

Talmy was great. His Kinks records had far more bite and presence than most of the ‘64-‘65 Beatles or Stones records, and his Who records — the My Generation album and the two singles that preceded it, all engineered by Glyn Johns — were heavier than anything previously heard.

Have to disagree, those first few Kinks records and My Generation have always sounded bad to me.

i swear lately on ilm there's this weird hoffman board thing where you leave the beatles thread for three days and there's like 400 new posts

400 posts
And it’s the same philosophy

i mean if the Kinks & My Generation “sound bad” what is yr idea of “good sounding” records

I'm going to side with those that think the early Who and Kinks records sound great. I mean not from the standpoint of technical proficiency, but their sloppiness and roughness is part of their appeal. I wouldn't want them to have glossy '70s studio polish.

exactly! the garagey sound is the bonus byproduct and what makes this stuff cool.

I always thought The Stones "I wanna be your man" sounded like an insane carcrash of sound, especially for its time

Not as much as She Said Yeah, but yeah

yeah, loved this.

What I’m saying is…. 70s drums actually sound bad

Dear lord this take is as bad as saying Paul's beard is ugly

THANK YOU

my response to that was going to be "have you heard a single r&b record from the '70s"

I was being facetious, it’s just funny that they did all this stuff to tame the drums and make them behave or whatever

Ok I have to retract myself. Mccartney beard is a thing of beauty.

I haven’t dug into Get Back yet; waiting for a day when HD Jr & I can binge it together.

In the meantime I’ve been bingeing a podcast called One Sweet Dream - their series on the breakup. It’s very long and VERY repetitive and sometimes EXTREMELY infuriating in SO many ways … but it also gets a lot right and it has rewired my thinking about the ‘68-69 period. I feel like it’s a really valuable addition to the story even though sometimes I want to leap through the speakers and shake the hosts violently.

The basic methodology is to look at the Beatles through the lens of Paul & John’s relationship - a “marriage,” as both of them characterized it many times - and observe their actions & re-listen to their words & try to understand how each of them felt & how their emotional entanglement would have driven behaviours & events. Lots to pick apart in there - both good & bad analysis - and a couple of Beatle-nerd pals & I have been enjoying kicking their ideas around, trying to tease the pepper out from the flyshit.

Their biggest flaw is the massive chip on their shoulder about Wenner & Lewisohn & the John stans; at least a quarter of each long episode is spent rehashing and tearing down the same tropes over and over rather than advancing their own arguments. Ultimately I wish someone would do a more rigourous job of pursuing their basic insights & building a nuanced and defensible narrative: that would be a real contribution to the scholarship.

Nonetheless.

"Check out this podcast that gets stuff wrong, is extremely repetitive and I want to kill the hosts."

B-b-but it’s about the lads!

XP That's like most podcasts tho.

A fun project would be to edit the series down to about 4 hours of REALLY REALLY useful and insightful conversation. If I was unemployed and didn’t need to sleep ever.

Their biggest flaw is the massive chip on their shoulder about Wenner & Lewisohn & the John stans; at least a quarter of each long episode is spent rehashing and tearing down the same tropes over and over rather than advancing their own arguments.
― war mice (hardcore dilettante), Sunday, December 5, 2021 5:05 PM (fifty-four minutes ago)

yeah, this seems to be the trend in beatles-talk these days. for a while i was reading this one beatles blog that i thought was smart and interesting, but finally bailed because it felt like every post was about this stuff and i felt i'd spent enough hours of my life reading about why the "lennon remembers" interview was wrong about everything.

it's a bitter interview coming from a bitter time, certainly. he gets several things factually wrong in it, but surprise, lennon wasn't some beatles obsessive like most freaks are 50 years later

i think Get Back does a better job than anything else of really humanizing these guys and their relationship. the breakup makes absolute sense after watching it and remembering how young they were (despite how old their facial hair made them look). the comment from paul about how they used to live together and now they don't...that's it in a nutshell. there is no massive mystery to be solved. people got older and that is that.

xpost: yeah, lennon was blowing off steam at a weird time in his life and said some absolutely absurd stuff that he probably forgot about ten minutes after the interview. it's unfortunate that it got published as a book (though it is fun to read), otherwise i assume it would be fairly obscure now.

What's the gripe with the Lennon stans for us not in the now?

Yes, exactly, what's up with that gripweed?

talking about podcasts and lennon, have you guys listened to song exploder's episode on lennon's "god"?

https://songexploder.net/john-lennon

it's pretty interesting to hear lennon talk about what kinds of songs he liked to write when he was in the beatles. it's pretty telling how he says the only songs he wrote from first-hand experience were "help" and "strawberry fields forever" and juxtaposes those with songs that were "phony"

the thing is, it seems like he rarely wanted to write very personal songs in the beatles. i'm not sure i would consider that a cop out or "selling out". the really personal stuff would fall under his "hangups", i assume, which is a shame, because more songs like "julia", "don't let me down" and "in my life" (none of which he mentions in the song exploder clip) would've probably been more interesting

anyways, i think some of that bumps heads with george's songwriting style, which would then make sense why he didn't like or at the very least didn't allow many george songs to be played in the beatles. which(!) would all makes sense, because he called "in my life" both his "first real major piece of work" and the most boring song he had written!

Lennon's apparent contempt for the whole enterprise was, in a sense, a mask. Because you can also see his obvious un-fakeable joy in a thousand places. Like all of us, he was large and contained multitudes.

No one will ever know which was the "true" Lennon, and we don't need to. He would mock us for wanting to know, because that is the essence of John-ness. I think he wanted to perplex us. To remain a mystery and confound our expectations for closure. That was his reaction to adulation.

Which was and is, of course, something he had the right to choose. It's both understandable and a little (dare I say) mean-spirited.

We also have the right to think he was kind of a dick. A gifted dick, but a dick nonetheless.

Dude was the definition of the saying "closing the barn door after the horse has bolted"
He just said shit to say shit, half the time it was either to amuse himself or because he just hated press interviews.

Most of the way through Part 1 and damn if Paul isn't being super condescending to George and Ringo. I've always wanted to defend Paul because if it weren't for his pushing we don't get Let it Be and Abbey Road. But it's interesting so far he hasn't really gone after John in the way he goes after the other two.

I wrapped it up last night, loved it even when it was repetitive, just so much fun to see that place and time with those guys. What a band. My two big takeaways were how universal Ringo's drum experience is — showing up, sitting behind the kit, waiting for the rest of the band to stop bickering and bullshitting and start playing something. And the harmonies — it's such an obvious thing, but they are the key to the whole sound, it's why the Beatles sound like the Beatles, and I just loved every time one of them was singing and the others joined in and it's just like someone flipped a switch. They sounded so good together.

<3

otm

I want to point out that even in 1995 Paul and George still harmonized well and Ringo's instincts remain formidable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLJHV2TmzyU

of course, George's "lol this fuckin guy" scowl is priceless

George giving his full "I'm only doing Anthology to secure my mansion and estate which I foolishly put up as a guarantee for Handmade Pictures. What was I thinking? My life sucks!" vibe.

damn if Paul isn't being super condescending to George and Ringo.

At least in Parts I & II, Paul was the one counting in the song to Ringo.

its been over 15 years now get over it!

Paul always counted in, though. In addition to "I Saw Her Standing There," look at any live footage from the '60s; he's doing most (and maybe all) of the count-ins.

xp