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

Was there ever an explanation from George for vetoing it ?

he just thought it was self-indulgent crap, iirc ... but hey that's what outtakes collections are for, right?

Oh sure, it's fun to listen to them chat/interact (and giggle!) but I meant musically : the Pet Sounds sessions are incredible for the outtakes, instrumental, vocals, etc.
Whereas the Anthologies are mainly... not interesting !

Barry Miles:

The tape has no rhythm, though a beat is sometimes established for a few bars by the percussion or a rhythmic pounding on the piano. There is no melody, though snatches of a tune sometimes threaten to break through. The Beatles make literally random sounds, although they sometimes respond to each other; for instance, a burst of organ notes answered by a rattle of percussion. The basic track was recorded slow so that some of the drums and organ were very deep and sonorous, like the bass notes of a cathedral organ. Much of it is echoed and it is often hard to tell if you are listening to a slowed-down cymbal or a tubular bell. John and Paul yell with massive amounts of reverb on their voices, there are Indian war cries, whistling, close-miked gasping, genuine coughing and fragments of studio conversation, ending with Paul asking, with echo, 'Can we hear it back now?' The tape was obviously overdubbed and has bursts of feedback guitar, schmaltzy cinema organ, snatches or jangling pub piano, some unpleasant electronic feedback and John yelling, 'Electricity'. There is a great deal of percussion throughout, again much of it overdubbed. The tape was made with full stereo separation, and is essentially an exercise in musical layers and textures. It most resembles The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet, the twelve-minute final track on Frank Zappa's Freak Out! album, except there is no rhythm and the music here is more fragmented, abstract and serious. The deep organ notes at the beginning of the piece set the tone as slow and contemplative.

George Martin:

'This is ridiculous, we've got to get our teeth into something more constructive.'

'What's the New Mary Jane?' and 'If You've Got Trouble' were one listen wonders as well. Basically, this band clearly would only release something if it came up to scratch.

yeah Maybe Prince. But like for S. Wonder, I'm not sure there's a lot of great things left considering the crazy amount of stuff they both released during their peak years (for themselves and for other artists).
and also it's not the same as one identified track or album.

Basically, this band clearly would only release something if it came up to scratch.

eh, sort of. "All You Need is Love" was obviously slap-dash, and there is a lot of sloppiness esp in the psych years. their final album "Let it Be" was cobbled together outtakes from an abandoned project. and both George and John spent the last few Beatle years releasing a lot of music, most of it experimental, much of it unmarketable as music.

as for Beatles vs Beach Boys, i love the Anthology, and there are some startling and genuinely surprising musical bits. i find the Pet Sounds sessions dull by comparison. the Beatles didn't mind fucking up from time to time, whereas Brian was obsessed with perfection. the former is more fun to listen to.

'All You Need Is Love' was still deemed worthy of release, and quite clearly they were right.

Let It Be ended up being released the way that it did because previous configurations of Get Back were deemed not up to scratch, so Lennon got Spector in to tidy it up. That McCartney hated the overdubs on 'The Long and Winding Road' is a moot point - the rest of the band deemed it worthy of release, at the time, in that form.

George's Electronic Sound and the early John & Yoko albums aren't Beatles releases, therefore should be treated as something else entirely.

I find trawling through hours of "session" material dull as fuck, to be honest. Give me the highlights, by all means, but I can think of nothing more boring than listening to session tapes from end-to-end, hearing someone do multiple takes of things over and over and hearing crap 20 minute jam sessions. The final product is ultimately what counts, and while the process is important, I really don't need to hear it in that level of detail. There's better things to do, like listen to someone else's finished product and hear it the way they intended you to hear it.

to each his own

(I'm sure those at the Steve Hoffman Retirement Home for Rapidly Aging Fans of Real Music will disagree with me on that)

I wonder if the closest analogue to Carnival of Light is actually Barrett's "Rhamadan" (which tbh turned out to be p incredible imo)

yeah those descriptions make me want to hear it even more.

Release COL as a really cheap download imo, then all the haters can be glad that they were only charged $0.99 for something substandard

(and yeah, I'm in the I WANNA HEAR EVERYTHING camp, including those sloppy fuck-around jams recorded in the immediate wake of Pepper)

Deacription sounds like st sanders doing "Beatles shreds"

"Only A Northern Song" is Sgt Pepper era.

Are they gonna do this with Magical Mystery Tour? That would be way more interesting imo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMMhLNGwGdQ&feature=youtu.be&t=3m13s

i love this early backing track take of "Hello Goodbye". Ringo is doing some insane drum fills at 3:13

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

To my thinking, "All You Need Is Love" is not substandard in any way. It doesn't have a bridge, but I don't feel like it needs one. It makes up for it with the intro and the coda. I think the verses and chorus are both gorgeous.

It might also be my favorite arrangement of all Beatles songs - a work of genius, really. Have to say, it took the Yellow Submarine Songtrack version to give me a clearer picture of why that is.

I can't stress enough how beautiful that mix is.

Gilles Martin : The Beatles = Steven Wilson : King Crimson

my rep for the foreseeable future

the new outtakes will be on disc 2 & 3. they are:

I totally respect and understand anybody who looks at this and goes "ugh more sad barrel-scraping" but I am ALL ABOUT this kind of thing, somehow with this band more than most others. So it goes. I find the Anthology 2 stuff super duper interesting, and often great listening in its own right, even if at the end part of you has to say "well, yeah, they chose the right take to go out, no question."

Also, and I may have said this on this thread before, but I'm of an age where the Anthologies came out exactly as I was getting into the Beatles, so me and my one Beatle friend devoured them right alongside the studio albums, really before I'd even heard the UK versions of the first few records. So in a way things like "turn up the mic on the piano, it's quite low" and "d'you want us to do it again, George? OKAY." are as much a part of how I relate to and enjoy the Beatles as, "I got blisters on my fingers!" or w/e.

"with singing in your mouth!"

^otm me too, Anthology dropped like the year i started buying CDs.

!!! "With ciggy in mouth," I've always heard it.

That Hello Goodbye alternate take is great. Ringo was at the absolute top of his game in 66-67, the secret key to all their acid recordings IMO.

"a suitable ending, that!"

"there's a frayed edge for ya!"

Kinda thinking I might deep-listen all six discs this Sunday for purposes of compiling a poll of those bits.

sminking of gin

Doc Casino, you've inspired me to listen to the Anthologies again. Really struck by how good they were -- drummerless -- right from the very beginning. If you stuck those Quarrymen kids in a studio in 1958 with a half-decent drummer, you'd probably get a hit (a cover, but a hit nonetheless).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZupFJVh2dS0

"Do it slower" "NO!"

sminking of gin

"and it did him in IN the end... poor Doc!"

I love those first few bathroom-recorded tracks with Paul & John so much, every time I hear them I love the fact that they a)exist and b) are still around for us to hear

Oh! And the No Reply demo where John just sings YOUR FACE every time - it makes me cry laughing, no matter how many times I hear it

^^^ yes. Nobody was more amused by his own studio fuckups than John was. Also thinking of his "I'll Be Back" -- "that if I rrrrran away with you . . ." And "Lie-die-de-die, die de dee, die de die" on "Yes It Is." Always, always funny to listen to.

Take one of "Yes it is" was the 'funniest' one, why they did that cobbled together take two on Anth2, I don't know.

http://i.imgur.com/owWNWc1.jpg

i nabbed this disc "Revolution" off SLSK last night. very cool stuff in good quality. includes a 23 minute "Revolution 1" which is the famous Yoko Ono tape where she recorded a diary while hanging out in the control room while John overdubs his crazy experimental punk "Right! Right! Riiiiiiight!" vocals. it's pretty fascinating, as you hear them run through a bunch of different takes, including some cool jamming. throughout there is a prominent organ drone and many of the takes have a kind of droney psych classic rock feel a la "Loaded". pretty amazing listen. they really experimented with different ways of performing these songs, some of this stuff sounds very punk/new wave. at one point Yoko and John are singing back and forth to each other while the Beatles play minimalist guitar feedback.

that's a sweet cover, never seen that picture before. John is Dead

yeah one thing that's super interesting about the beatles was that they really would put a ton of time into trying totally weirdo stuff, but then ultimately would seek to find a way to bind it all up in a relatively tight two-to-three-minute package of verses, chorus, bridge and solo. they strain that format, but the times they break it really stand out as exceptions, or got shunted off as side projects that were nothing but breaking that. i don't think it's just mccartney and martin pushing for this either, i think all of them, coming from true house-band, 45s-from-overseas rock-and-roll roots, had the self-contained song as some kind of guiding ideal, even as they found ways to fold up droning weirdness into a very digestible, very hooky, very commercial musical package, surprisingly rich with goodies even over those three-minute running times ("oh and maybe there could be an oboe coda, but let's say two to three seconds max" or whatever).

i'm sure for some this ultimately makes them seem more square than their peers, but for me it makes every song a different garden of delights practically.

That was one of Richard Meltzer's main points, I think - that in '60s rock, so much happens within the song. That, as art, the song was enough. From his '86 preface to the reprint of The Aesthetics of Rock:

Rock, when it's totally gloriously on, can go from A to Z - no sweat - instantaneously. Cock an ear to "Yes It Is" (Beatles), "Gotta Get Away" (Stones), "When the Music's Over" (Doors), "Here Comes the Night" (Them), "I See You" (Byrds), "The Red Telephone" (Love), "One of Us Must Know" (Dylan).

ok, it all does sound pretty enticing ...
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/inside-unheard-sgt-pepper-outtakes-exclusive-first-listen-w476067

"Abbey Road is a bit like a salad bowl or a teapot," producer Giles Martin, son and heir to George Martin, tells Rolling Stone. "The walls absorb music."

Fuckin' teapots, absorbing the music with their walls...

I'm American - we boil our music in a saucepan.

7. "Getting Better"
The first take is a totally different approach to the song — Paul leads on Wurtlitzer keyboard for a more aggressive attack. John gives him some suggestions on the lead vocal: "Sing it, you know, 'I gotta admit' and all that — properly, if you can sing it."

i can't wait to hear this!

"Having Fun With The Beatles In The Studio"

hum. I wasn't particularly interested but this does seem fun !
as for the stereo remix of the album, I suppose it will be roughly what they did with the Sgt Pepper tracks on Love (minus the mix with other tracks).

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02045/beatles-doctored_2045175c.jpg

A bit like this?