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

!!! "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?

re: the 5.1 mix on the DVD/BluRay in this box, does anyone on here have a 5.1 sound system?

lol i'm always scratching my head about those 5.1 mixes... seriously, how many people have those? but at least we get the downmixes. the ones posted in the Talking Heads poll thread were pretty revelatory

seriously, how many people have those?

I wonder this myself. It seems like every reissue-release-announcement thread on the Steve Hoffman forums is stuffed with "I hope it includes 5.1 mixes!" posts, so I guess enough people have them for record companies to go through the trouble and expense.

I'm always annoyed when a super-deluxe reissue is announced because it's "FIVE DISC SET!" Oh cool-"THREE DISCS OF WHICH ARE 5.1 MIXES!" dammit.

I know plenty of people with a DVD/BluRay 5.1 setup - just that most of them don't listen to music through it.

I'd be far more surprised if they announced a quadrophonic vinyl edition

probably a lot of those people also just stack all their speakers on top of each other in their shitty little apartment too

Also, listening to downmixes of 5.1 audio defeats the fucking object.

Personally, I find 5.1 a bit hit-and-miss... if the mixes make full use of all the channels and there's some creativity regarding panning and placement in the surround sound field, then it's great.

When someone just takes the two stereo channels, adds a bit of echo and sends the echo to the back two channels though, fuckin' forget it.

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).

I don't know, I'd love to hear Stevie's original demos of songs he gave to Chaka Khan, Minnie Riperton, Syreeta et al. But I've heard his will demands it all be destroyed when he dies.

If Prince had left a will, it's tempting to think he would have pulled a similar stunt.

I have a 5.1 sound system. I even own a couple of albums with 5.1 mixes, but mostly it doesn't really seem to add much. I think you could probably do something interesting with 5.1, but nobody's really bothered to try all that hard.

Super Furry Animals' Rings Around the World was recorded as a 5.1 album first and foremost, with the stereo mix being secondary - that's a great mix, so much stuff in there that's just buried on the stereo mix, and extensive use of panning. It's not even the best mix of the albums they issued in 5.1, either.

Rings Around the World 5.1 is really good. Probably the only 5.1 album I've listened to more than twice.

by most accounts Steve Wilson's 5.1 remixes are amazing, as are some of the Pink Floyd ones. Now, that tells you something about the kinds of music that probably benefits best from this approach. If I had the space and the system I'd be sure to give a fair amount of them a listen. I think Sgt. Pepper could have a pretty awesome 5.1 mix, think of the options on something like Good Morning for example.

Super Furry Animals' Rings Around the World was recorded as a 5.1 album first and foremost, with the stereo mix being secondary

As pointed out to me somewhere/by someone, really every record is surround sound first and foremost - that's how we hear music as played in the studio, from all around us - then mixed down to stereo. Stereo is a craft unto itself, like the director choosing where to point the camera.

That said, I finally saw that Ron Howard Beatles movie while I was on a flight. It was fine and familiar, but I was a little surprised/disappointed when it moved away from the touring years (as it was billed) and then sort of rushed through the studio years, en route to this dramatic beat where it's all, post-Revolver " ... but it was all a lead up to the band's masterpiece." Cue Day in the Life piano chord. And then there's some BS tag with like big white text on black stating something like "And in 2004, Rolling Stone named Sgt. Pepper the greatest album of all time." And then I sort of barfed.

the rooftop footage was cool tho

would be nice to see the entire rooftop concert uncut

yeah it's balls, no better than a History channel bio from 1999.

x-post

Well, not every record, but I see your ultimate point which is that getting all that sound to sit in two channels is an art, and I agree. The same principle applies to 5.1 also - you can be as adventurous with the mixes as you can in stereo, if not more so. That's why there are people in studios around the world that specialise solely in mixing.

was b&w footage digitally colored for that Opie Cunningham doc? I couldn't tell by watching it

There's no real rulebook with 5.1 either - with stereo, there's now established ways of, say, spreading drums across the stereo field. With 5.1, you could have the drums constantly panning clockwise - which is, of course, not how it would sound in the studio, and it's these kind of tricks that SFA had in mind when making Rings Around The World.

It was. Some of the '64 Washington DC show was colorized, but much of the audience was still black & white. They also colorized their first US press conference.

xp

yeah a bunch of colorized stuff in it. the supposedly-incredible Shea footage that was shown in cinemas for one-night-only as a supporting feature isn't coming out any time soon either, as it was *illegal* to have shown it in the first place.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/beatles-companies-sued-over-shea-stadium-concert-footage-w439681

This is nuts:

"By reason of being the producer of and having made creative contributions to the 1965 Shea Stadium performance, as well as being the employer for hire of the Beatles and the opening acts, who performed at his instance and expense, Sid Bernstein was the dominant, and hence sole, author of the copyrightable work embodied in the Master Tapes, and the sole owner of all exclusive rights therein."

"I booked you guys, so that basically means I wrote and played and sang everything."

I was wondering if there was some legal nuance to that claim that I was missing cuz yeah it reads batshit insane. also the guy is dead, so it's his estate making these claims.

I don't care if it's his Ford Cortina making these claims...

I'm okay with destroying all extant documentation of the Shea concert, if only because a teenaged Trump's alleged presence in the audience casts a pall over the whole thing for me