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

Otm.

Yes, thanks, Luna!

I mean to post this on this thread, not the poll:

The third and final part of that SATB interview with Peter Jackson is up. I haven't listened to it all yet, but this bit I've transcribed below is encouraging (the interview was recorded before Get Back was aired, and I think it's fair to say the reaction has been bigger than expected:

PETER JACKSON: What I’m hoping is that this whole edict of ‘no extended cut’ will go away. If people seem to really like this, Disney will do an extended cut. If they think they can make money from it, they’ll do it.
So even though they say now and probably rightly “Extended cuts don’t sell, there’s nobody buying them. there’s no market for them, we don’t do them”, if they get a sense, if they just get a sniff because of the reaction that they could sell a lot of extended-cut Blu-rays – you know, they would cost whatever it would cost for us to do it, which wouldn’t necessarily be hugely expensive, since all the groundwork has been done, the organisation, all the restoration has all been done, so much of that has been done, so it wouldn’t be hugely expensive to do it – if they felt that for the cost of doing that they could earn 10x as much from the Blu-ray sales then I think an extended cut would come back on the table.

I think we just at the moment, we just have to let this happen and it’ll be a Disney decision if they feel there’s a demand for it. It will literally come down to a demand. So if you’re listening to this do your bit and demand it!

http://somethingaboutthebeatles.com/224c-the-making-of-get-back-part-three-with-peter-jackson/

Lol does he mean an even longer cut of Get Back? I think Disney is right that the demand is small. If they could get 50K Beatles fans to pay £60 each for a Blu-Ray that's £3m.. And that's gross. Once you look at the cost of making the things and promoting it...

50K is a small estimate in my humbs

Old Brown Shoe is fantastic; Paul's bassline is amazing, esp. in the "when I'll grow up I'll be a singer" bits.

Maybe so. I can't find a global chart for Blu Ray unit sales but here's the US chart:
https://www.the-numbers.com/home-market/bluray-sales/2021

All the top sellers are big tentpole 'fiction' movies (with 'Beetlejuice' surprisingly at #29?)

xpost

Lol does he mean an even longer cut of Get Back?

Yeah, he originally assumed there was going to be a longer cut wanted down the road based on, y'know, Peter Jackson experience, and when he found out Disney weren't interested he upped the first cut from 6hrs to 8.5. The way he tells it, he just delivered that extra length as a fait accompli without checking with them first – and they just put it out without any comeback at all, like they hadn't noticed it was 90 mins longer than agreed. He also said that 5 min sneak preview was all his team's doing too - not something Disney's promotional team had asked for. It all sounds like Disney had a remarkably hands-off approach to the whole thing. The only thing he mentioned having to push for regarding the broadcast film was keeping the swearing in. He also said none of the Beatles (or Yoko or Olivia) vetoed anything being included.

Idly, he also moots the idea of even doing it as a 21-part series, one hour for each studio day. You'd love that, Tracer!

90 mins longer

150 mins longer, rather.

Is Blu-Ray the only model for an extended cut? Couldn't there just be a paid one off subscription for streaming a longer cut (say £15.99 or something like that)?

Answering my own question, I guess for an extended cut you couldn't realistically insist people purchasing it would need to complete watching it within 24 hours or so. But there must be suitable price point for permanent access to stream an extended cut?

Hope they're working on an immersive VR experience where you can wander around the room, sit on an amp, try on coats, fiddle with the drums a bit, bum a cig...

That does seem like the way forward xpost

The way he tells it, he just delivered that extra length as a fait accompli without checking with them first – and they just put it out without any comeback at all, like they hadn't noticed it was 90 mins longer than agreed

I've heard this too and it sounds extremely unlikely, but, print the legend I guess. It is possible there was some 'creative control' clause in the contract and Disney realised they'd have to give in anyway

It does sound unlikely on the surface, but in addition to a possible contract clause, Disney may have already put the promo wheels in motion before the final cut was delivered. At that point, they could either say that the whole thing had been cancelled; or, if they trimmed it down, word would get out that it wasn’t the “complete” film. Both of those scenarios would result in fewer subscriptions than releasing Jackson’s cut as-is. (And anyway, it being eight hours increases the likelihood of subscribers who are only watching an hour or a few minutes at a time having to re-up at the end of the month.) Disney also wants to make sure they get as many subscribers as possible before announcing the possibility of a physical release. (And if the Simpsons was shown in the correct aspect ratio, I would’ve considered keeping my subscription for maybe another month.)

And the Beatles are somewhat notorious for saying some project will never happen and then it happens. Both the white album and Abbey Road were “never” going to be remixed/given the boxed set treatment at one point.

I guess also, Peter Jackson, despite the humble "I'm just a nerdy fan doing all this stuff in my workshop" persona in these interviews, is still a big name and the relevant team at Disney might not have wanted to stand up to him, or just assumed someone else had OKed it!

Another great moment: George telling John he took his advice about songwriting: “I just stayed up til it was finished. You said it was best if you just finish it all in one go.”

I can attest to the wisdom of this. The last time I had a songwriting streak of any substance, I started & finished each song as it came, instead of saying I’d come back to it later, and so I ended up with a good handful of finished songs instead of fragments lingering for years. Problem was, it made for a bad week at work because I hardly got any sleep. Which is also why songwriters (and me in particular) should be otherwise unemployed.

beatles fans might like this, or they might hate it

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0012ms2

"Freak Zone - Freaky Beatles

In this two hour special, Stuart explores the Freaky Side of the Fab Four and uncovers a range of brilliantly weird Beatles cover versions."

If nine hours of I've Got a Feeling didn't fill you up, here's a reminder that this compilation is still available on Soundcloud.

https://i.imgur.com/eYlcgiR.jpg

And it makes a great gift too.

The White Album is the one that *really* gets minuscule shrift on the Blue compilation; only three tracks!? And two of those aren't much cop!

Stingy indeed, and like the Red compilation, the Blue compilation probably should've been expanded on the CD reissue too. They could have added several more from The White Album with plenty of room to spare on the very same disc.

Back in the cdr burning days I attempted a 4 cd Beatles comp to replace the Red/Blue comps, for sharing with friends/family who needed more than a copy of '1'. So rather than letting my taste be the guide, I tried to follow a model of "what is essential", which means yes to Long and Winding and no to Me and My Monkey, and then you get interesting questions like is Good Day Sunshine really more famous than She Said She Said or For No One or Rain or I'm Only Sleeping (unfortunately yes), which of their early covers are essential, and how much of the Abbey Road medley do you need (none, just finish with Her Majesty).

Where I landed was disc one, 62-64, 1st four lps and singles, starting from Love me Do rather than any earlier anthology stuff; d2, 65-66, ending on Strawberry Fields; d3, 67-68, Peppers/MMT/half of the white album sessions chronologically; d4, 68-69, more of the white album, let it be, abbey road; skipping their only real 1970 studio recording session I Me Mine. In effect, just over 2 years for the first disc, just under 2 for the 2nd, a year and a half for the third, and right around a year for the last, which is an interesting increase in velocity as they got ever more masterful if perhaps less culturally dominant.

With the Abbey Road melody, the last three numbers probably make sense (Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End). I'd still put in For No One though.

I haven't worked this out, but given how their career's usually divided, I can see a three CD set covering 1962-1964 on Disc 1, 1965-1967 on Disc 2 and 1968-1970 on Disc 3...you may actually have to cheat the Help! tracks on to Disc 1 though because that 'middle' period just has too many classics to cram into one disc.

xp You didn't use anything from the Anthologies or Live at the BBC? Anything on the red or blue albums that you didn't include?

Yes, maybe I did include the Golden Slumbers section now that you make me think about it, and certainly that would get some airplay on the Kansas City classic rock station I grew up in the 80s with. The only Anthology track I was tempted by was Come And Get It, it was a top 10 hit for Badfinger and the demo is so close the single that it felt like a good fit, although of course that meant the end of disc 4 was getting pretty Paul-heavy so I think I balked at that. I think the BBC albums are pretty great but I think their studio covers are really so high-quality I couldn't substitute in anything productively.

Glancing at the Red/Blue tracklist, I'm struggling to recall if I included Old Brown Shoe or not. I think probably no, I think I felt some of the White album nuggets won out there - I'm So Tired, Rocky Raccoon, Blackbird, Julia, Birthday, Dear Prudence, etc. are all much more well known.

fascinating project. your point about the relative density/dominance pulls out something i've never known firsthand: exactly how big of a deal were the Beatles in, say, '68 to '70?

like... clearly a huge deal. still having huge hits, albums a huge deal, Yellow Submarine a huge movie... but were they at "everybody watching their every creative move" status? or had it settled down a little bit since the time of Pepper's? were any influential voices officially "over" them? did any significant number of less hip Boomer teens stop following their journey as the band tilted towards the counterculture?

> I'd still put in For No One though.

Well I don't remember how this worked out actually.

I allocated about 25 minutes to Revolver + Paperback Writer, that gets about 8-10 Revolver tracks, and I think what i went with was paperback, taxman, eleanor, only sleeping, here there everywhere, yellow sub, good day sunshine, and your bird, got to get you into my life, tomorrow, to lead into strawberry fields to close out the expanded 62-66. it definitely hurt me to cut for no one, she said, and rain, but i think my mental model of "casual beatles fan" just was going to be better served by tomorrow, and your bird, and good day sunshine.

Tomorrow Never Knows, like Within You Without You and Mr Kite, I think I really struggled with whether to include it or not, but all three did kind of feel like an essential part of the beatles experience to lean into the psychedelic stuff and include at least one sitar track, even if I think maybe my parents thought that was a bit of a nagging drone.

did any significant number of less hip Boomer teens stop following their journey as the band tilted towards the counterculture?

I have friends whose boomer parents stopped liking the Beatles “after they got into drugs” (“they” being the Beatles, I should point out). But since they still sold trainloads of records, the numbers of those who got off the bus couldn’t have been very significant and/or were supplanted by older boomers who decided that “the ‘yeah yeah yeah’ guys have evolved into something more sophisticated that is now worth my time.”

My mom was 16 when Beatles were on Ed Sullivan and her and my aunt instantly became huge fans. But I haven't heard my mom listen to or even mention anything after Revolver (I was surprised she likes "Tomorrow Never Knows"; she impressed upon me how otherworldly it sounded back then. Though it wasn't quite as mind blowing as when she 1st heard Little Richard, which was the 1st rock n roll she'd ever heard). I don't know if it was so much them getting druggy as it was her getting married in 1967. To a guy who to this day has not progressed (temporally) passed the big band era in his music taste.
Been meaning to ask her if she's interested in this doc at all.

It's interesting reading some of the reviews on the Beatles at the end of the '60s. Christgau is the only major critic I know who loved every LP, and he's written about his disagreement with Greil Marcus over Abbey Road at the time of its release. Marcus didn't care for it all, but he's warmed up to parts of it now (thought not Harrison's songs - he's never liked those). John Mendelsohn also called it antiseptic or something like that and vastly preferred the rough charms of the bootlegged Get Back album, though I think he's since come around to Abbey Road. Then of course there was the huge backlash against Let It Be. Regardless, they were still popular but I get the impression for a lot of serious listeners who held them in high regard, they weren't doing their best work and were probably eclipsed by the likes of Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, the Band, Sly & the Family Stone or older competitors like the Stones who were now upping their game and hitting their peaks. (I'm more or less in the Christgau camp.)

*the only major critic then

What Marcus wrote in the latest Ask Greil:

I haven’t seen Get Back yet. Too busy watching all five seasons of Pinky Blinders and now The Landscapers. That after having been suckered in by all the glowing critical publicity for such slipknot movies as The Power of the Dog and Passing. I hope it’s as good as Todd Haynes’s Velvet Underground movie.

At the time, everyone seemed to be listening to a pretty ragged bootleg titled Get Back rather than Let It Be, which really was a horrible botch, the first sign that Phil Spector had no idea what he was doing and didn’t care. And that Abbey Road sounded fake, soulless, as if they were all playing roles instead of making songs and making music. There were just too many stupid or weak numbers and they were all over the place, from “Oh Darling!” to “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun.” There’s no point in going into “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”—which I once witnessed being sung by Jessica Mitford, which actually came off better than it did on the record: she brought a sneering aristocratic bloodlust to it. I liked “Golden Slumbers” and “The End” and they still have wit. But over the years I think “I Want You” has grown and grown, like a tree.

i was young as beatles fans go. when beatlemania hit i was 5 or 6. i followed them all the way through, but i must say their records (all of which my parents bought me) seriously started weirding me out around the white album. to a ten, eleven, twelve-year-old, some of that stuff was downright scary. i guess i knew they were a few dozen steps ahead of me, and it was intriguing to follow them down that path, but also scary.

I've read people sayting that, around 1968, the Doors or the Rolling Stones were now more exciting to them than the Beatles. One was Joan Didion, another was one of the writers in the 1982 Stranded anthology. There definitely was a feeling around The Beatles: "30 more songs, who has time for this when there are so many new groups around?"

Observations from Xgau on Abbey Road, taken from perhaps my favorite piece by him, the travelogue In Memory of the Dave Clark Five (https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-aow/dcfive.php)

Berkeley, Late October. Back to the world of distractions where everyone talks about music. My hosts are Greil Marcus, who runs the review section of Rolling Stone, and his wife, Jenny. I learn that opinion has shifted against the Beatles. Everyone is putting down Abbey Road. Strangely, I find that I no longer want to hear it. One evening I change my mind and put it on. It gives me a headache.

...

Los Angeles, Early November. An attempted reconciliation with Ellen is combined with a joint interview with Mick Jagger. The interview is tense, but it is genial compared to the reconciliation. While we wait for Jagger, who is two hours late, Ellen puts on Abbey Road, which from her Colorado fastness she has grown to love. Damned if she isn't right--flawed but fine. Because the world is round it turns her on. Charlie Watts tells us he likes it too.

This last scene appears in Stanley Booth's book about the Rolling Stones 1969 tour, where he describes Christgau as dressed like a cartoon caricature of a 50s college student.

Booth's descriptions of his interactions w/the Dean in that book are priceless.

Just looked that up, thanks.

I forgot one reason why Revolver may have been underrepresented on the Red compilation, which originally came out in April 1973: around that time Revolver was the lowest selling Beatles album. It's been too long to track down the source, but I distinctly remember seeing this chart of album sales in some library book that was published in the 1970s (I can't remember if it was on rock/pop in general or strictly the Beatles). It does makes sense though - for starters, it was released in the wake of Beatles backlash from John's comments about Christianity, with the neanderthal record burnings going on in the Bible Belt. Sandwiched between the height of Beatlemania and the massive event that was made of Sgt. Pepper, it was the closet thing to a dip in their popularity when they were still together.

I love the White Album but it's never been my very favorite Beatle album, not even for their late period. (I prefer Abbey Road.)

Looking up 1968, I can see a handful of records that I'd put over The White Album, but strangely most of them sold in poor or modest numbers at the time of their release: Astral Weeks, White Light/White Heat, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the Notorious Byrd Brothers, and probably the only two hits Beggars Banquet and Lady Soul. (off-topic, for some reason I thought it was Beggar's Banquet)

But then you have Electric Ladyland, The Village Green Preservation Society, Music from Big Pink, At Folsom Prison, Odessey & Oracle, We're Only in It for the Money, Bookends, Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake, The Dock of the Bay, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, Gris-Gris, Randy Newman's debut, Elvis's comeback special, James Brown's second Apollo album, the first Fleetwood Mac album...all in the same league. A big change from, say, 1963 or 1964 when no one in rock/pop was cutting albums nearly as good as the Beatles - except for James Brown's Live at the Apollo and Jerry Lee Lewis's neglected Star Club album, and it says a lot that they're both live albums that lean heavily on proven material.

Obviously the big caveat is that it was a singles market in 1963 and 1964

Also, Yesterday And Today was released less than two months before Revolver in the US. The kids — because collegiate potheads largely hadn’t yet caught on — spent their allowance money on the former and didn’t have anything left for this weird new record that didn’t even have “Paperback Writer” on it.

(xxp)

My mom owned every American Beatles cheapie through 1965. She doesn't own Rubber Soul or Revolver. Then she bought Pepper's and Abbey Road and a few singles in between: "Paperback Wrier," "Hey Jude."

I was reading wikis about Monkees albums the other day, and was surprised that More Of The Monkees was Billboard's Top Seller for the US in the 1967 calendar year, the first Rock record to do so. Almost everything before had been soundtracks (both film & Broadway) with the exceptions of Harry Belafonte's Calypso and Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream...

Would have certainly expected the Fabs to have hit that spot at least once, but no dice.

loving all these answers to my inquiry, thanks all.

I am, as always, drafting in C. Grisso/McCain's wake, but over the weekend learned that Headquarters was (debuted at?) Number One on the Billboard Charts until Sgt. Pepper knocked it down to Number Two the next week, and there they sat throughout the Summer of Love.

i gave xhuxk a hard time on metabook for burying the lede in his personal best of '63 through '65, where the beatles don't clock in until #32. i'm sure that trashmen album is great and everything...
https://accidentalevolution.wordpress.com/2021/09/17/150-best-albums-of-1963-64-65/

iirc no LPs debuted at #1 until the 70s --- wasn't it a big deal when Elton and Stevie pulled it off? feel like i learned that on ilx somewhere.

when i first got into the beatles around the age of 12 or so i really only knew the stuff up through rubber soul; i still remember hearing "tomorrow never knows" for the first time and finding it genuinely frightening.

greil's essay on the beatles in the big old red rolling stone history of rock book is one of my favorite pieces of writing about them. he writes beautifully about their early sound, and what it was like to first hear them on the radio, or hear them in a coffee shop. he's basically an early-beatles guy; he's always gonna prefer "don't bother me" to "here comes the sun." (i've lost track of the number of times i've seen him mention "don't bother me"!) toward the end of his essay he says something like "out of the last few years, a handful of recordings stand with anything the beatles ever did." a handful!

By not performing live both Dylan and the Beatles lost a lot of youth culture momentum in the late 60s. Lack of US touring is crucial for the Kink's decline in the US in that period, according to critics. So many festivals they all missed (Woodstock and Monterrey but many others too). Cities where they were absent when their rivals were rising.

With tracks like Helter Skelter and Revolution, they helped lay the foundation for heavy metal, but they didn't pursue that direction; their psychedelia was key in building the foundation of prog, but again they didn't really go very far down the long-form instrumental composition for late-night FM radio route. Psych itself soon turned out to be a dead end of ever more goofy bad poetry, weird noises for its own sake, and lack of proper decent musical interest. But it was psych they were good at up to the end and I think that also hurt their standing - the excesses of psychedelic music were all too apparent by the time they released Abbey Road. I think this inability after Magical Mystery Tour to pick a side in the question of "which way forward - back to rock's roots or keep doing the psychedelic experiments" hurt them compared to those who made the 'right' choice (Dylan and the Band, the Stones, CCR) or the psych-metal choice (Who, Zeppelin, Hendrix).

Meanwhile there's a paradoxical oversaturation of cheesy beatles covers in the late 60s. Instrumental covers albums of every conceivable genre. Credible R&B reimaginings but many more not-so-credible light pop covers. I think they were losing the hipsters and this played as much a part as the Honey Pies and Maxwell's Hammers.

xp IIRC, in Stranded's "Treasure Island" discography, Greil more or less included everything they did up until and including The White Album. After that, "Don't Let Me Down" was the only recording deemed worthy for inclusion.