A quibble for accuracy's sake: The Beatles had next to nothing to do, in those early days, with choosing what songs in what order went on their albums, in the UK or the US. Hardly any artists did in those days, and The Beatles, at the point talked about here, were not yet powerful enough in the music world to run ting as they saw fit. Also, UK records may have had more songs, but lps had better fidelity the less music per side. So, you choose. More songs or fewer and different songs, with better sound. Having grown up hearing these records thousands of times, I'm very excited to finally be able to hear them again -- on CD.
Critic's Notebook: Early Beatles, U.S. Style
November 16, 2004
By ALLAN KOZINN
The clamor began on this side of the Atlantic the moment
EMI released the Beatles' albums on CD in 1987. American
collectors who in their youth wore out copies of albums
with titles like "Meet the Beatles," "Something New,"
"Beatles '65" and "Yesterday and Today" were unable to find
those discs.
What EMI had done was eminently sensible. The label,
together with Apple, the Beatles' company, had decided that
on CD the Beatles recordings would follow the British
discography, using the songs, album titles, cover art and
liner notes that the group and its producer, George Martin,
assembled and approved in the 1960's. These were the
Ur-text. They were also the versions available in most of
the world.
But they were not the albums American collectors knew, and
given the size of the American market that is not an
insignificant point. It may be that the British albums
followed the history of the Beatles as most of the world -
and not least, the Beatles themselves - knew it. But for
millions of listeners in the United States, the history of
the band's music unfolded a bit differently, and when the
first CD's were released, American fans discovered albums
that bore only a vague resemblance to those they knew.
"With the Beatles," for example, uses the same cover photo
as "Meet the Beatles" - the four Beatles, in turtlenecks
and partly in shadow - but has a largely different track
list. Taking the disc out of that familiar cover, listeners
in the United States wanted to hear the energetic opening
chords of "I Want to Hold Your Hand." What they got was the
vocal introduction to "It Won't Be Long." Similarly,
"Beatles for Sale" offered a lineup close to what American
listeners knew as "Beatles '65," but without the big hits
of the time, "She's a Woman" and "I Feel Fine."
Many listeners have been dissatisfied ever since and have
filled fan magazines and Beatles-related Web sites with
pleas for the release of the albums they knew and loved.
With the release today of "The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1"
(Capitol), a set that brings together "Meet the Beatles,"
"The Beatles' Second Album," "Something New" and "Beatles
'65," all from 1964, these collectors can begin to rest
easy.
As it turns out, even collectors who were never
particularly nostalgic about the American albums and who
believe that EMI and Apple should be pursuing other
priorities - and I count myself among them - have reason to
admire this set. The label has gone the extra mile in
dealing with fan obsessiveness. It has used the Capitol
masters from the 1960's, rather than remixing the tracks or
recompiling them from the existing CD's. That was necessary
because Capitol's postproduction methods yielded a sound
quite unlike that of the British recordings.
Moreover, the set includes both the mono and stereo mixes
of each album, a move that not only restores more than 30
stereo tracks to the catalog (the early albums were
released on CD in mono only), but also preserves mixing and
editing anomalies that are unavailable elsewhere. An
example: the mono version of "I'll Cry Instead" has an
extra verse spliced in, something not found in the American
stereo or British mono and stereo versions.
I'm finding this set a guilty pleasure. Sure, I grew up
with these albums, and I played them to death, going
through several copies of each as they acquired the skips
and scratches that naturally accrue to a vinyl LP played 20
times a day on substandard equipment.
But once I discovered the British versions, in a Greenwich
Village import shop in 1968, and realized that those were
the albums the Beatles thought they were making, the
American discs began to seem bowdlerized and illegitimate.
It was easy to find the Capitol discs objectionable. They
seemed to trample on the Beatles' creative intentions, and
for all the wrong reasons. Where the British albums
typically offered 14 tracks, Capitol's offered 10 or 12. It
was also Capitol's policy to treat singles as drawing
cards: if you liked the hit, you would buy the album. The
Beatles took a different view. With only a handful of
exceptions, they adhered to a policy of keeping albums and
singles separate. For them, why should a fan who bought the
single have to buy those songs again on an LP?
Because the Beatles produced an album every six months in
those early days, as well as a few singles (and even, in
one case, a four-song EP), Capitol's policies made it
possible to release three LP's for every two released in
England. That approach persisted until 1967, when even
Capitol's executives realized that dissecting and
redistributing the songs on "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band" would be seen as an act of cultural vandalism.
Capitol had some sound issues as well. American listeners,
Capitol executives believed, liked a bit more reverb than
British producers used. Maybe they were right: disc jockeys
back then sounded as though they were broadcasting from
echo chambers, and hit records often sounded that way, too.
So Capitol's engineers added reverb to the original
recordings. They also, when only a mono recording was
available - mainly in the case of the singles - created
what they called duophonic mixes for the stereo LP's. This
involved splitting the mono signal into two channels,
boosting the bass on one and the treble on the other,
introducing a slight delay between the channels, and adding
reverb - all of which fooled the ear into hearing a
recording as stereo.
Having ignored the American discs all these years, my
memory was that these techniques yielded a horrifyingly
muddy sound. But revisiting them on CD, I found that songs
like "Roll Over Beethoven" (real stereo, with reverb
added), "She Loves You," "You Can't Do That" and "I'll Get
You" (all duophonic) actually sound more vibrant than the
British versions.
No doubt some unbidden nostalgia has been creeping in.
Tampered with though it may be, this is the sound so many
of us fell in love with in 1964. And although the albums
were cobbled together - "The Beatles' Second Album," for
example, is a stew of "With the Beatles" tracks that didn't
fit on "Meet the Beatles" and songs that had been released
on singles and on an EP - they flow in a way that has its
own logic, if only that of deeply ingrained memory.
And maybe it's time to give Capitol's production staff a
measure of belated respect and to recognize, however
heretical it may seem, that in some cases their sequences
work better than the Beatles' own. In its American
incarnation, "Rubber Soul" (an album that will presumably
be included in "The Capitol Albums, Vol. 2" along with
"Beatles VI" and "The Early Beatles") begins with "I've
Just Seen a Face," an acoustic track that starts with an
assertive, beautifully detailed, fingerpicked guitar
figure. In Britain, the song was virtually a throwaway,
lost on Side 2 of the "Help!" album, released a few months
earlier. But it thrives on "Rubber Soul," and given that
the album is largely acoustic, it makes a better opener
than the electric, bluesy "Drive My Car," which kicks off
the British version.
Still, now that the demand for the American albums is being
addressed, perhaps EMI and Apple can get down to more
pressing business. The British CD's desperately need a
sonic update, and the release of the stereo mixes of the
first four albums, as well as the mono mixes of everything
from "Help!" through the "White Album," are long overdue.
And DVD versions of "The Beatles Anthology" and "Yellow
Submarine" proved that surround-sound mixes of the band's
full catalog are likely to be revelatory as well. Just
about every important band from the 1960's and 70's has had
its catalog revamped since 1987. It's amazing that the
Beatles have let substandard CD's represent them for so
long.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/16/ar...1094ef0da5f9fa
Linear Mode
