The Beatles

Thats a beautiful thought. Kind of ruins Julia for me now, though.

http://www.openculture.com/2013/05/eric_claptons_isolated_guitar_track_from_the_classic_beatles_song_while_my_guitar_gently_weeps_1968.html

So many ilx Beatles threads, so I may have missed this being posted elsewhere (on a Clapton thread maybe).

The acoustic White Album demo tape link is nice here as well

I wish people would be more interested in picking apart recordings by bands that aren't The Beatles.

haha yeah it is pretty funny -- we were driving somewhere last Sunday, and listening to one of those breakfast with the beatles things on the radio, and the DJ was listing off all of these obscure facts/dates etc. and i was wondering if there was any other pop cultural phenomenon that allowed for such deep nerdiness.

A friend of mine recently gave me a CD set of the "Let it Be" sessions, complete with in-studio chatter, rehearsals, false starts, etc. I turned it off after five minutes and returned it to him. I don't get the fascination with listening to famous musicians tune guitars.

I understand not wanting to hear the tuning stuff, but I did like hearing John Lennon's early version of "Jealous Guy" (with some different words) on that openculture site I posted.

It's just that... after 51 years since 'Love Me Do' came out, is there really anything else that can be said about this band and their output? There's no doubt in my mind that all of us here know the entire story of their history from front-to-back: the amount of documentaries and books that have been written are already staggering. It's at the point now where if you want to know when something was recorded, what takes were used for the final masters, what the Beatles did on what day of their existence, when John Lennon curled a shit out on the toilet... I mean, it can all be found pretty easily. Even the vaults have already been more than well-mined, and a lot of the stuff that didn't make it onto the Anthologies can be found on the internet somewhere. How many more times is George Martin going to sit in a studio going through the master tapes saying "...and John introduces it by saying 'Sugarplum Fairy'" and suchlike. I suspect there's next-to-no minutiae left, and part of me is frustrated that other bands haven't inspired this level of geeky fandom in the 40+ years since the band broke up... I mean, Radiohead are pretty damn massive (regardless of how one feels about their music), but you don't see them being dissected in anywhere near the same way. Maybe the wacky fuckers in their audience will cook up a conspiracy theory or two a la 'Paul Is Dead', and maybe they keep their gigography stats mega up-to-date, but that's about it.

Don't get me wrong, folks, I like The Beatles and their output as much as anyone, but I think mining for more stuff at this stage is just incredibly fruitless. It would be even great to read something that documents their solo work with the same level of analytical detail and insight... now that would be far more interesting to me than reading about tape-loops on 'Tomorrow Never Knows' or the orchestra on 'A Day In The Life' for the billionth time.

lol @ "this doesn't sound enough like the Beatles... let's run it through an ADT!"

x-post
part of me is frustrated that other bands haven't inspired this level of geeky fandom

Just ignore the Beatlemania then. Believe me, as someone who posts on the Chitlin Circuit southern soul thread with just XChuckxx I also know about music that does not inspire geeky fandom (or at least not here on ilx). I also read a Yahoo soul thread by folks digging up obscure 60s soul minutia--every city in America seemingly had soul artists then.

and the DJ was listing off all of these obscure facts/dates etc. and i was wondering if there was any other pop cultural phenomenon that allowed for such deep nerdiness.

You have perhaps heard of this new thing, "Science fiction?"

Listen to Phil Schaap's radio show sometime. His Charlie Parker talk puts Beatles nerds to shame.

haha, that is true thos schaap things are insane. and as far as science fiction goes, that's still not on this level, I don't think... there's not nerded out discussion of ray bradbury on the cheesy classic rock station that everyone's dad listens to. it's just interesting that the average listener tolerates/expects this stuff when it comes to the beatles, but would be like PLEASE SHUT UP if it was about anything else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports

Hey, curmudgeon... don't fret, I wasn't having a go at you. I'm just a touch concerned that we've had over 40 years worth of great music since The Beatles have split up, and many absolutely fucking wonderful bands since, and hardly any of it seems to have been geeked over to the same degree... including the solo careers of The Beatles themselves! Yet, there still seems to be this incredible quest to find out more and to gain more knowledge of some '60s combo that have been finished for longer than I've been alive... there's no meat left on the bones now, surely? I mean, the records are wonderful and are going to last forever, but surely in terms of what minutiae can be squeezed from The Beatles catalogue, we're looking at a carcass now?

it's just interesting that the average listener tolerates/expects this stuff when it comes to the beatles, but would be like PLEASE SHUT UP if it was about anything else.

― tylerw, Tuesday, June 4, 2013 5:28 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is very true, very OTM!

But y'know, there shouldn't be a stigma about this sort of thing... I know for a fact that if Depeche Mode or Radiohead (for example) decided to put out a book detailing their complete recording sessions and put out an Anthology box-set of alternative versions and unused stuff, I'd be all over that shit like crazy... and it would be incredibly interesting to me because it hasn't been picked over to death!

but I think mining for more stuff at this stage is just incredibly fruitless.

not when "Carnival Of Light" still sits gathering dust.

xpost to self:

Or even Queen... I'm REALLY surprised there hasn't been a 'Queen: The Recording Sessions' book yet. How great would it be to read about the process of making Sheer Heart Attack, Queen II and A Night At The Opera in ludicrous amounts of detail?

not when "Carnival Of Light" still sits gathering dust.

― Tarfumes The Escape Goat, Tuesday, June 4, 2013 5:42 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, but by the sounds of it we're not missing much. A quarter of an hour of The Beatles pissing about?

Well, considering they were at (or near) their creative peak in the studio, had Paul's enthusiasm for AMM, Albert Ayler, and Stockhausen to guide them, and was actually created for public consumption (unlike the half-assed outtakes and studio chatter), yeah, I'd say we're missing something.

I was thinking of posting something on the "Say Something New About the Beatles" thread recently. Just that I really like the high brass on the chorus of "All You Need Is Love." Only reason I would is that I never even heard it until the Yellow Submarine Songtrack mixes were released. Now, I always listen for it.

It's really lovely.

xxpost:

I suspect it actually isn't very good, and that's one of the reasons it hasn't come out yet. But yeah, aside 'Carnival Of Light', I reckon there's hardly anything left. Besides, isn't life too short and hasn't so much great stuff happened in the last 40 years musically for folks to still be holding out for a recording of The Beatles noodling in the studio in 1967? There's a lot of stuff out there that is screaming to be researched to death.

Actually, Paul wanted it on Anthology 2 but George vetoed it, calling it "avant-garde a clue!"

Well, I suspect now with George dead it won't be very long before we get to see if he's right or not... but then what?

There's a lot of stuff out there that is screaming to be researched to death.

part of the problem is that not everything is as meticulously documented as the Beatles were. Like, I would love to see a detailed technical analysis of how peak period Parliament/Funkadelic stuff was done, but everyone was high as fuck and George is not really a reliable record-keeper

Man, that (P-Funk documentation) would be amazing to see.

haha yeah it is pretty funny -- we were driving somewhere last Sunday, and listening to one of those breakfast with the beatles things on the radio, and the DJ was listing off all of these obscure facts/dates etc. and i was wondering if there was any other pop cultural phenomenon that allowed for such deep nerdiness.

― tylerw, Tuesday, June 4, 2013 11:26 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Back when we still had regular oldies radio around here, there was a Sunday morning Elvis show done in "Breaksfast W/The Beatles" style (trivia, deep cuts, live/rare stuff). To go further, one could make a case for the work being done by The King's Dutch Fan Club (expansions of every album, complete sessions sets, Dick's Picks-esque explorations of the live vault etc.) to be pretty nerdy.

when John Lennon curled a shit out on the toilet...

If my understanding of shit is correct, the shit would come out of Lennon's ass more or less straight, and any 'curling' would be due to the shape of the bowl. So the formulation would be more like 'when John Lennon's toilet curled one of his shits...'

aaaaand the Gillian McKeith award for pedanticism goes to... :P

Its almost as if the baby boomers want to keep hearing stories of their youth.

So close to photoshopping a turd in the toilet on the cover of Mojo, but I'm at work.

maybe this will work instead.

There's still lots of stuff that has yet to come out and is pretty interesting, I think that outtake of Revolution 1 that came out a few years ago we evidence of that.

As far as why there isn't this level with other pop musicians since the Beatles, well, maybe that sort of nerd-dom originated with the Beatles and the first generation of rock critics and since the decline of the industry and the intro of the internet, democratization of information, invention of the MP3, Napster, torr3nt, AllMusic Guide, "Classic Albums" on netflix, major movies being named after song titles more and more, youtube cover versions of cover versions of cover versions, the post-VH-1 Behind the Music Classic apocalypse has made everybody a nerd about every band all at once, and this will just continue on more and more into the future.

Btw have there been any significant leaks of unbootlegged material since that Revolution outtake?

Also, you has the remix and the re-remix, which means that wildly different versions of the same song is not news anymore

Compare to that very very rare version of Penny Lane that has the piccolo trumpet right at the end (the guy died recently, reminded me of it)

I don't think the unedited version of It's All Too Much has come out yet

Seven mins? Yeah, I have that

Surely John Coltrane inspires the same level of turd-digging.

XP - Mark, officially? Was it on the Anthology (can't recall)

Yep, Trane, Bird, and Hendrix all do, but with them it was more because their incredibly vibrant streams of intense creativity were suddenly cut short. Excavations of their recordings are as much about trying to determine what they would have done had they lived as they were about "What else is there?"

xp

Beach Boys digging goes pretty deep ime

There's a lot of stuff out there that is screaming to be researched to death.

part of the problem is that not everything is as meticulously documented as the Beatles were. Like, I would love to see a detailed technical analysis of how peak period Parliament/Funkadelic stuff was done, but everyone was high as fuck and George is not really a reliable record-keeper

― Mr. Scarf Ace is Back (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 4, 2013 12:26 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wrote an entire master's thesis in an attempt to get to the bottom of this. Needless to say, talking to the principals just made things more confusing.

Turrican, I think the line you're taking here is interesting but I'm not sure the phenomenon in the case of the Beatles is so inexplicable. They were the biggest band in the world at a key moment in a lot of people's coming-of-age, at a time when media channels were somewhat more limited than they are today. A huge number of people lived through the general outlines of the story, and some subset of those people are interested in it, and some subset of those are going to be interested in it to a more minutia-seeking degree, etc. This will never be true of, say, Radiohead. It'd be interesting to know the sales numbers of, say, 33 1/3 books for various artists - seems like they'd be a kind of barometer of whether a given artist can even begin to sustain this kind of pocket industry. Most bands are lucky if they have a couple of awful glossy-photos-and-dodgy-info paperbacks in the used book section.

"Sports" is also OTM. I remember when I was a huge enthusiast of the Survivor TV show, hanging around on the web-board, really getting into speculating about upcoming developments, disputing people's claims about how Steve from this season was totally playing a Stephanie game from that other season, etc., and realizing: "Woah, this is what sports are like for lots of people - I get it now!"

i dunno, i think the thing about the beatles is that so much of the unreleased stuff is pretty high-quality. with a couple exceptions (the get back/let it be sessions, which we probably have more bootlegs of than anything, are mostly terrible), they really were firing on all cylinders for most of their recording career. if they released a whole other set of anthologies with just alternate takes of stuff i'd probably end up buying it.

It's just that... after 51 years since 'Love Me Do' came out, is there really anything else that can be said about this band and their output?

I'd never heard Paul-isolated-bass tracks until someone posted a youtube of Rain on an ILM thread a year or two ago and that was lovely, so bring it on imo. Certainly there's vast, vast amounts of painstakingly anal bookery out there, but you pretty much have to seek it out

my guess as to why there's more of it about the Beatles than most bands is because the Beatles were more popular than most bands btw

Turrican, I think the line you're taking here is interesting but I'm not sure the phenomenon in the case of the Beatles is so inexplicable.

I never said it was inexplicable, I understand perfectly why The Beatles' music and lives have become extensively researched and pored over. Yes, they were the biggest band in the world at a "key moment in a lot of people's coming-of-age", but we're several generations down the line now, and there have since been a lot of bands that have been important to a large number of people that aren't The Beatles. Maybe not to the degree of screaming, crying and general hysteria that you see in those classic early Beatles clips, but definitely big enough to be obsessed over by a large number of people.

How many volumes did Dick's Picks go?

part of the problem is that not everything is as meticulously documented as the Beatles were. Like, I would love to see a detailed technical analysis of how peak period Parliament/Funkadelic stuff was done, but everyone was high as fuck and George is not really a reliable record-keeper

― Mr. Scarf Ace is Back (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 4, 2013 12:26 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is very true... it would seem like The Beatles/George Martin/EMI were very prescient in archiving all of this stuff, and it's definitely worked in their favour in terms of keeping the 'Beatle brand' going. But for a band such as (for example) Queen, who were also on EMI and whose tracking sheets and tapes seem to be still there in the EMI vaults, I can only wonder why a detailed book hasn't been written about them. I mean, if the information is available, there'll surely always be someone interested in it.