3 posts tagged “beatles”

While I patiently awaiting my CoCo DVD Box Set, I’m happy to announce the arrival of ANOTHER Box Set that has been a LONG LONG time coming, and that would be the glorious BEATLES REMASTERED CD COLLECTION, a beautiful box set that features all 13 albums and singles from England’s premiere band!

Besides a digital remastering that FAR surpasses the original mid-eighties releases, each album comes in a glossy gatefold digipak and a slick color booklet full of pictures from each album's corrosponding timeframe. Plus, they’ve included these short little quicktime movie documentaries on each disc featuring the words of the Beatles themselves and (of course) George Martin, talking about each specific album voiced over video performances of songs from the album!  They even  collected them onto a single bonus DVD for those who want to just sit down and watch all the movies at once!

I first found out about this wonderful box set through Japanese site CD JAPAN of all places, and at the time, figured it to be a japan-only release. I really wanted it, but that 300 dollar price tag gave me pause, I must say! So I breathed a sigh of relief when I found out that they’d be releasing the Box Set in the states as well, and with a decent  price of $179.00 at Amazon, IMMEDIATELY sent in my order, this time without hesistation!

   I remember back when the Beatles first four albums (Please Please Me, With The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles For Sale) were to come out on CD, the big argument was why release an album on CD if you’re gonna release it in Mono. But since that’s how the albums were originally presented, that’s how they were done on CD.

 Though I understood this logic, it really bummed me out because I grew up listening to the stereo mixes of most of these songs from the Capitol records, especially THE BEATLES SECOND ALBUM and the awesome SOMETHING NEW, and though I bought all the mono CDs and enjoyed them dearly, in the back of my mind I always missed the kick that the stereo version had, especially in songs like the thundering drumroll at the end of “Tell Me Why” !

 But now we’ve come full circle, and each and every album has been given the remastered treatment, and though I’ve only listened to about half of them so far, what I’ve been blastin’ out over my stereo speakers has just been heaven!! From Rubber Soul to Revolver on down through the White Album and Abbey Road, the songs have just sounded stupendous!

I know my next few days will be filled with serious Beatles-listening, and it's exciting to know I've still got so many albums to check out and hear all over again as if for the first time! I can't WAIT to hear how som eof these other songs will sound, especially the upcoming MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR CD with I AM THE WALRUS , STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER and PENNY LANE! Ah, nostalgic days are here again! If anyone needs me, I'll be holed up in my room with my headphones on!

 

   Way back in 1973, there was one song on the radio that me and siblings just loved, and that was Paul McCartney and Wings’ BAND ON THE RUN. Single. We loved the catchy refrains, the three-part song changes, and the easy to understand story of a guy breaking out of jail. It was this knowledge of the story that led us to think Paul was singing “MAN on the Run,” and we would sing those lines as loud as we could whenever the song came on. My mother was quick to correct us, saying that the words were in fact, BAND on the Run, a fact that we just couldn’t believe. The song was about a guy in jail, right? And he broke out and now the cops are chasing him, right? So it had to be MAN on the run!

  A few weeks later, we were out shopping with my mother and her friend and her kids, and when we heard the song blasting out of the record shop, we felt vindicated when her friend’s kids ALSO started singing “MAN on the Run, Man on the Run!” We triumphantly ran to our mother, saying, “See! See! Even THEY say that the song goes “Man on the Run!” My mother simply stated as-a-matter-of-factly,“I don’t care WHAT they’re singing, it’s BAND on the Run.”  

  Well, as we all know, dear old Mom was totally correct, a fact that we were forced to accept when we had the chance to buy the single one night at our local Woolworth’s- and right there on the label the title of the song was printed, and it was indeed BAND on the Run! I remember us playing that single over and over again, staring at the curious Apple logo on the record as it spun around, not knowing that Paul McCartney had ever been a part of another  group called the Beatles, only that he was part of this group called Wings, and they rocked! I remember me and my brothers and a couple of friends even created little skits to “act out” to the song, singing part one in jail, part two breaking out of jail, and part three with us running around the apartment like loons, playing cops ‘n’ robbers, all the while Band on the Run blasting out of our phonograph speakers!

   We loved that darn song so much, that it was quite exciting and significant news when one day I came home from riding my bicycle, and my brother and his friend Miles called me over, and said, “Hey, listen to this song…it SUPER COOL!” Glancing at the single on the record player, I saw that they were playing the flip-side of  Band On the Run, an ominously titled song called “Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty Five”. Maybe it was the title, but right away I got the feeling of the song’s grimness (if that’s a word), and even then I got the feeling like it was part of a bigger epic work.

 Plus, the song seemed LONG, and after awhile, I started fidgeting, wondering just what it was that my brother and his friends thought I’d think was so cool. “Wait a little…it’s coming!” they assured me. The song played on and became more and more dramatic, as synthesizers droned on louder and louder along with horns blaring, till it all came crashing to an incredible crescendo… and then, as the song droned to fade-out, the strains of Band on the Run chimed in! WHAAA!!! I stared open-mouthed at the guys, and they grinned back, proud of their discovery of the “hidden” Band on the Run track! “That WAS cool!!!!” I exclaimed, putting the needle back to the beginning of the single to listen to again. There it was again! This was genius! Pure Genius! “Holy Cow,” I thought, this is the coolest discovery of all time!

 

When we’d share the secret track to cousins and friends, it seemed to be an unspoken rule that you couldn’t just skip to the end…no, for the ending to have the cherished impact as intended, the entire song had to be played, much to the boredom of many of our friends! It was because of this that I really started digging the song, listening to the song, I mean really listening, soaking up the melodramatic score while trying to understand the meaning of its cryptic lyrics.

  Not having any idea of any connection to Orwell’s 1984 (or whatever McCartney’s actually referring to), I still got the gist of the theme when Paul sang lines like “Oh, no one ever left alive in Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty Five will ever do,” or, “I didn’t think, I never dreamed that I would be around to see it all come true”, that this was a song supposedly taking place after some devastating holocaust or something where not too many people had survived.
 
 So the song gave me that uneasy feeling anyway, and when the Moog Synthesizer started underscoring the song after the first verse, the futuristic sounding instrument transformed the melody into a quasi-science fiction-ish drama soundtrack. When I would listen to the track, I’d close my eyes and picture in my mind great abandoned republics and huge, vast dead seas in strange worlds as the song unfolded, the tune was THAT rich with feeling.

 And that ending… It got to the point where it didn’t even matter that the snippet of Band on the Run was attached to the end- No matter how many times I played it, that HUGE crescendo still was the most incredible finale I’d ever heard, and it blew me away EVERY TIME!

 Well, we truly played that single to death, and there soon came a time when the 45 record just could not play anymore without jumping and skipping as soon as the needle hit the vinyl. When I really thought about it, it was a miracle that the single survived as long as it did in our destructive house. At this point the record really shoulda been tossed, but there was SO much sentimental attachment to it, we kept it anyway, storing it away in our 45 record box as we moved onto the newer singles for our collection, like Ariel by Dean Friedman, I’m Your Boogie Man” by KC & the Sunshine Band and even later classics by Paul McCartney like Let Em In and Silly Love Songs!
 
  At some point I made the very grown-up transition to buying albums instead of singles (or at least as well as), and I began to entertain the thoughts of buying some older Paul McCartney albums as well. The obvious first choice was the LP Band On the Run,as it featured the single that started it all, but I was happily surprised when I found out that Band on the Run ws the album opener, and Nineteen hundred and Eighty-Five was given the highly respectable position of album closer! I immediately bought the album (albeit a used copy, all my wallet could afford) and ran home to throw it on.

  The album was great, every song was fresh and just as groovy as the singles I already knew from them (like Jet and Helen Wheels), and when it finally got to the last song, I have to say…as soon as my ears heard that opening piano piece, I was instantly carted back to that childhood science fiction feeling I’d felt when I was a kid. It was no mistake- this was a grand, momentous song, and I was convinced that this LP was that epic drama that I’d always suspected Band on the Run and Nineteen Hundred & Eighty-Five was culled from.

  Well, that was then. Of course later I would expand my love of Paul to his work with the Beatles (yes, to an extent, I retroactively got introduced to the Beatles!) and it's now hard to imagine a time when I thought Wings was the only group he'd been in. But until his Beatles roots came into focus for me, Paul McCartney and Wings was the group of my life. From Nineteen-hundred and Eighty-Five to Junior's Farm, Listen to What The Man Said, through Silly Love Songs, and Let 'Em In, all the way to Arrow Through Me, I've loved and worshipped all of his songs. But although I've collected all the Beatles ,Wings and Solo works from Paul, the Band On The Run LP is still my among my very favorite albums from the Macca...from LP to CD, to Gold Disc and 25th Anniversary Deluxe CD, I've got 'em all! Because, you know, sentimentally, its the tops!

 

People tend to write off THE BEATLES LIVE AT THE BBC double album as nothing more than a bunch of recordings taken from a live Radio Show. Well…yeah, that’s what they ARE, but it’s more than that, too!   

   When the Beatles were clubbing and touring in their early days, most of their set consisted of covers of their favorite songs at the time, songs by Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Elvis, and others.
   By the time the Beatles were releasing albums, their OWN compositions were filling the tracks, but they always put at least a couple of songs from their club sets onto their albums, songs like SLOW DOWN, BAD BOY, ROLL OVER BEETHOVEN, BOYS, A TASTE OF HONEY, BABY, IT’S YOU, LONG TALL SALLY, and YOU REALLY GOT A HOLD ON ME.   

   On BEATLES LIVE AT THE BBC, you get to hear a whole plethora of songs they covered that never made it onto ANY of their albums. The thing about it is, these songs are performed REALLY TIGHT, and you can hear the joy in their voices as they sing- they really love these songs!
 
  There are even a couple of songs (Keep your Hands Off My Baby, I Forgot To Remember To Forget) that actually sound pre-recorded, the performance is so tight.   The cool thing about these covers is that they aren’t merely re-done, rather, they are taken and given a “Beatley” twist to them.
 
Songs like Elvis Presley’s “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry over You” has been given a Beatles “Wooooh!”, The Coasters’ “Young Blood” has John saying “What’s Your Name?” in his hilarious "simpleton" slur, and Chuck Berry’s “I Got to Find My Baby” has a real sweet Beatles riff towards the end of the song!  

  Even songs that DID make their way to Beatles Albums sound different and interesting: At this stage in the game, JOHN was still singing lead on “Honey Don’t” (which later went to Ringo on Beatles For Sale), and it is a real foot-stomper!  

   I always tell my friends that you could take the unreleased songs from the double album, and make ONE fine Beatles single album! By my estimation, the tracks to consider:

 I Got A Woman (cool George guitar picking)
Too Much Monkey Business (George rocks in the middle!)
Keep Your Hands Off My Baby (pre-recorded? Background vocals sweet!)
I’ll Be On My Way (AWESOME Lennon/McCartney song never put on album!)
Young Blood (Awesome, Fun song with George lead)
A Shot Of Rhythm and Blues
Some Other Guy (Killer song, featured on the ANTHOLOGY special)
That’s All Right (Elvis song featuring a driving Ringo beat!)
Carol (nice George guitar talk-back to John’s vocals)
Soldier of Love (a bit of “Baby It’s You” here)
Clarabella (Paul doing his “Little Richard” style vocals here)
Nothin’ Shakin
Crying, Waiting, Hoping  (cool version of Buddy Holly song)
To Know Her is to Love Her (early “This Boy” influence?)
Memphis, Tennessee (John doing Johnny Rivers!)
Lonesome Tears in my Eyes
Sweet Little Sixteen (I can’t believe this never made it to album!)
Hippy Hippy Shake I Forgot to Remember to Forget (awesome George vocal)
Ooh My Soul
I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry Over You (Elvis song turned Skiffle beat!)
I Got To Find My Baby (rockin’!)
Honey Don’t (John Vocal-kicks ass!)
Don’t Ever Change The Honeymoon Song (a real Paul-type song, nice!)

Yes, the quality here isn’t great, and in spots can be pretty thin (this is probably why they kept this from the public so long!), but these were radio broadcasts, and to hear new/unheard music by The Beatles is such a rare thing! Here are four selected tunes to check your ears out on: