For the past few years, sometime between now and
autumn, the keepers of The Beatles’ archives—Capitol Records in conjunction
with Universal Music—have announced a major release to coincide with the coming
holiday season. Last year we got the 1+
Blu-ray video collection set. The year before that was the landmark mono vinyl
box (as well as Criterion’s superb Blu-ray of A Hard Day’s Night). The year before that was a second volume of
BBC sessions, the year before that was a deluxe release of the Magical Mystery Tour film, and so on.
With so much Beatles product squirming around out there, it’s surprising that
there are still some things that deserve to get yanked out of the archives and
buffed up. Here are eight products Psychobabble wouldn’t mind seeing under the
Christmas tree in 2016.
8. The Singles & EPs Box
All of The Beatles
songs have been rereleased in various configurations, but one configuration
that has not received much attention in recent years is the 45. In the days
before The Beatles convinced the world that the pop album is a genuine piece of
art, the single was considered to be their quintessential medium. A set of all
of those terrific singles gathered in a snazzily designed carrying case would
be pretty neat, whether it was a collection of Capitol sides, Parlophone sides,
or dare I suggest mixing the bloodlines, both. Even with the vinyl resurgence,
singles are not as popular as LPs, yet groups such as The Who, Cream, and The
Turtles have all been the subjects of vinyl singles boxes in recent years. The
Beatles seem a natural addition to that list of groups. The set’s value would
be increased with the addition of all of their EPs and posthumous singles (“Got
to Get You Into My Life” b/w “Helter Skelter”, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band/With a Little Help from My Friends” b/w “A Day in the Life”, etc.).
Perhaps an even more
interesting way to repackage all the stuff we already own would be to give The
Beatles’ compilations the same treatment their U.S. albums received in 2014. The
Beatles haven’t been repackaged as often and heedlessly as, say, The Who, but
there are quite a few compilations that would stir some serious nostalgia in
longtime fans. The essential red and blue comps are the only ones that have
received the attention of The Beatles’ catalog proper, but there are also the
more compact hits packages A Collection
of Beatles Oldies and 20 Greatest
Hits (though that one may seem particularly redundant in light of 1); oddball theme sets such as Love Songs, Rock and Roll Music, and Reel
Music (a selection of the most popular songs that appeared in their five
films); and most essential of all, Rarities,
which includes a few items that still aren’t available on CD (alternate mixes
of “And I Love Her”, “I Am the Walrus”, and “Penny Lane”, for example). If Team
Beatles really wanted to get creative, it could add some of the stranger
compilations released outside the UK and U.S., such as The Essential Beatles from Australia, The World’s Best from Germany, or Por Siempre Beatles from Spain.
6. Analog Stereo LP Box
Three years after
Capitol remastered and rereleased The Beatles’ CDs to much fanfare in 2009, a
vinyl box of their stereo albums slipped out with less attention. The downside
of the set is that it utilized the same digital remasters as the CDs, amounting
to a box of unusually large, black, expensive, and easy-to-scratch CDs. Two
years later, Capitol/UMe put much more care into releasing the band’s mono
records on vinyl, exclusively using analog equipment and ending up with
superior sounding discs. Since the release of the last stereo box was so recent,
it isn’t likely that Capitol/UMe is ready to rerelease it the right way just
yet, but giving the stereo albums the same deluxe treatment afforded to the
mono ones might be something to consider in the future.
5. The Live
in ’65 Collection
The Beatles’ performance at New York’s Shea Stadium on
August 15, 1965, was a major milestone in Rock concert history. Playing to an
audience of 55,600 screaming teen maniacs, The Beatles officially made
ridiculous crowds and sprawling sports arenas normal—if terrible—ingredients of
the concert-going experience. A
1966 BBC special about the event captured the Shea show’s lunacy as The Beatles
sweated through their military jackets while goofing through versions of
“Help!” and “I’m Down”, as blown away by the mammoth audience as that audience
was blown away by The Beatles. Released in 1977, The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl was a live album of another gig
on that 1965 U.S. tour. While the constant white noise of teen screams prevents
the album from being the ideal audio experience, it would be a rather
inauthentic document of The Beatles on stage without it. A bonus-footage
appended Blu-ray of the BBC doc and a remastered copy of the Hollywood Bowl album would make a dandy
pair.
4. The Beatles at
Budokan
A year after their well-documented Shea Stadium and
Hollywood Bowl gigs, The Beatles traveled to Japan to perform at Nippon
Budokan, a martial arts arena in Tokyo. Once again, a film crew was on hand to
record the event. While The Beatles appear giddy and very in-the-moment in the
Shea Stadium footage, they are much less so at Budokan. The weariness resulting
from their unrelenting schedule is apparent in the film, as may be their
discomfort in playing a gig following a bit of protest from Japanese citizens who
considered allowing a pop band to play at a venue for traditional Japanese
sports disrespectful. However, the film is an important document of The
Beatles’ artistic development in that it shows how much they’d grown out of
being the band they were just a year ago. The performance reveals the
difficulty of performing more harmonically intricate material such as “Nowhere
Man” and “Paperback Writer” on stage, while also showing how they tried to
adapt with a really interesting electrified version of “Yesterday”. It makes me
wonder how they would have tackled things like “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry
Field Forever” had they decided to keep gigging away a little longer (actually,
they probably would have just avoided those songs just as they did everything
from Revolver). As rough as some of
these performances are, it’s still very cool to see The Beatles on stage at
their creative high point, and The
Beatles at Budokan would make a fascinating 50th anniversary Blu-ray
release.
3. The Saturday Morning Cartoons Blu-Ray Box
Sloppily animated, atrociously voiced (John sounds like the
upper class twit of the year), and containing a few episodes just as racist as Help! (expect to see buck-toothed
“Chinamen” and Indians who slumber on beds of nails), the Beatles cartoon series that aired on ABC
from 1965 to 1969 was hardly in
the same league as the delightful Yellow
Submarine even though Al Brodax and George Dunning were responsible for
both extremely dissimilar entertainments.
Yet, even with all of its serious flaws, The Beatles remains a megaton of fun and a transporting rocket of
nostalgia. Each episode is loaded with great Beatles music, and several of the
later ones even manage some really groovy pop art-inspired imagery to accompany
the songs. It would look great on Blu-ray, but I’d even settle for a DVD
upgrade of the multitudinous bootlegs already out there. Alas, that racism
issue might prevent these cartoons from ever seeing official release, and if I
were Ringo, I’d go out of my way to block it considering how he is consistently
depicted as the world’s biggest idiot. Even the other cartoon Beatles seem to
hate cartoon Ringo.
2. Anthology 4
The most significant
Beatles release since Let It Be was
1995’s Beatles Anthology. The bootleggers
finally got a run for their money with two discs of officially-sanctioned
demos, outtakes, alternate takes, and live rarities recorded between 1958 and
1964. The second and third volumes released in 1996 covered the rest of The
Beatles’ career. Yet, these three volumes did not cover everything that needs
to be covered. A few essential rarities, such as alternate versions of “Yellow
Submarine” and “Here, There, and Everywhere” and the fan-club-only holiday
classic “Christmastime (Is Here Again)” were only available on CD singles. Other
delectable oddities, such as the epic avant garde experiment “Carnival of
Light”, George Harrison’s excellent demo of “Sour Milk Sea” (a flop single for
Jackie Lomax), and the Twickenham sessions that yielded such “why weren’t these
on Anthology 3???” items as “Watching
Rainbows”, the extended “Mean Mr. Mustard” jam, and the band version of “All
Things Must Pass”, weren’t part of the Anthology campaign at all. With other
oft-bootlegged oddities like George’s “Circles” demo, a second alternate version
of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”, and the insane full-length version of “Revolution 1”
that morphed into “Revolution 9” that leaked onto the Internet several years
ago, a fourth Anthology seems not
only doable but also genuinely worthwhile.
1. Get
Back/Let It
Be Box
The most glaring hole in the catalog of currently available
Beatles items is Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary Let It Be. While every other Beatles film has been released in multiple
formats—including the critically lampooned Magical
Mystery Tour—the third feature film starring The Beatles has been
systematically brushed under the shag carpet, allegedly because Paul McCartney
bristles at its bad vibes and his own bossiness displayed in the film. Really,
though, the bad vibes are minimal, Paul hardly comes off as an asshole, and
there are some neat musical performances, most notably the famed rooftop
concert that ends the movie. Nevertheless, Let
It Be is slight by the standards of A
Hard Day’s Night, Yellow Submarine,
and even Help!, so to truly make this
the ultimate Beatles archival release, a Let
It Be Blu-ray needs to be just one piece in a broader set covering the
entire project. That would include a vinyl copy of the originally proposed Get Back album to be released in 1969
before Phil Spector dripped up the recordings with his choirs and strings and
several CDs of additional outtakes. And believe me, there’s no shortage of
those, my friend. While cutting material for the Get Back project, The Beatles jammed through some of their own oldies
but goldies (among them, “Love Me Do”, “Please Please Me”, and according to TheBeatles Bible.com, “Lovley Rita”!), favorite covers (“Be-Bop-A-Lula”, “Rainy
Day Women”, “Midnight Special”, “Hi Heel Sneakers”, “The Lonely Sea”, etc.,
etc.), future solo songs (“Hot As Sun”, “Hear Me, Lord”, “Isn’t It a Pity”,
“Every Night”, etc.), and much, much, much, much more. If Capitol/UMe treated
this project with the same attention and respect it gave to The Beach Boys’ SMiLE Sessions, it could be the
twenty-first century’s ultimate Beatles archival release!
Which unreleased item would you add to bring the tally
to number 9, number 9?
