Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band is the album that solidified The Beatles artistically,
gaining them respectability from adults who’d never before given pop music an
ounce of consideration. That was fine for the state of pop music, but it was
hard on the band as they began to splinter while making the record. With Lennon
losing much of his artistic drive in a haze of acid and domestic boredom, McCartney
took the band’s reigns, became a bit bossy, and resentments started to rise.
As the oft-told story goes, during the making of The Beatles’
follow up, each member of the group started running his own sessions more like mini-solo projects than a group effort. Yet the new album sounds like a much more communal
effort than Sgt. Pepper’s. Both
Lennon and McCartney get near-equal opportunities to show off their latest
compositions, and though Harrison would have liked to get more songs on the
vinyl, his four tracks would be the most he’d ever place on a Beatles LP (naturally,
that is mostly due to the fact that the new record was a double). Even Ringo
gets a song on. Furthermore, raw tracks such as “Helter Skelter”, “Yer Blues”,
and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” sound like they were actually recorded by a
basic, working Rock & Roll band, and you could not say that about anything
on Pepper’s. They even gave their new
album a title that implied the return of a unified front: The Beatles. Of course no one ever calls “The White Album” that.
50 years on, The
Beatles, “The White Album”, or whatever you want to call it probably stands
as the band’s most enthralling effort with the certain exception of Revolver. For the album’s anniversary,
Giles Martin has subjected it to a new stereo mix. By 1968, mono was basically
yesterday’s news and sufficient thought was given to the stereo mix of The Beatles, so a new remix isn’t as
necessary as it had been for Sgt. Pepper’s
(or as it still is for Revolver).
Nevertheless, the original mix wasn’t perfect, with weird imbalances hobbling
tracks such as “Savoy Truffle”. The balance of the new mix is more consistent.
However, Giles gets a bit cuter with his special touches this time. He pumps up the piano and bass levels on “Dear Prudence” (though bringing up the
wordless backing vocals is a magical flourish), warps the rubber-band strings
of “Wild Honey Pie” to a nearly unlistenable degree, and overdoes those weird squeaks on “Helter Skelter”, even allowing them to trod on Ringo’s howl about his blistered fingers. The new mix is best when
it generally follows the old mix, which it does for the majority of the tracks
(and incidentally, the animal affects on “Blackbird” and “Piggies” are the same
as those in the original stereo mix as opposed to the alternate ones used in
the mono).
More importantly, the album is supplemented with bonus
material for several different anniversary reissues. The biggest is a sprawling
6-CD/1-Blu-ray/1 hardback book set that includes Giles Martin’s remix, the mono
mix, a 5.1 mix, a disc of demos, and three discs of sessions. In
keeping with Psychobabble’s move in a more appropriately retro vinyl direction,
I’ll be focusing this review on the 4-LP edition of The Beatles. This box set features two double-LPs: the Giles Martin
mix (complete with the original album’s poster and four photo portraits …though
no individual numbering on the sleeve this time), and the “Esher Demos”, so
named because John, Paul, and George cut them in Esher, Surrey. The audio of
these demos is pro-quality even though the performances tend to be rough.
Despite his perfectionist rep, McCartney seems particularly unprepared, often
singing dummy lyrics where real ones will later go, revealing the demo stage as
more of a songwriting than pre-recording process. Surprisingly, Lennon seems to
take it more seriously, and his guitar/voice demos are occasionally fattened
with percussion and additional singers (“The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”
features its full sing-along chorus with Ringo as prominent on the demo as he
is on the final version). A relatively polished, delightfully swinging demo of
“Revolution” hints that its composer realized how special the song was and
how deserving of respectful treatment it was.
To clarify, describing these demos as rough is not a knock.
It is the nature of demos and what makes them so fascinating. We hear George
try out “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” way too fast and with alternate lyrics
that he smartly replaced. We hear bits of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” creep up in
an early run through of “I’m So Tired”. We hear McCartney try out a cod Jamaican
accent he wisely dispensed of when cutting the proper version of
“Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da”. We hear Lennon providing a monologue on the inspiration of
“Dear Prudence” as he vamps the song’s exquisite riff. We also hear a number of songs that did not make the “White
Album” cut, many of which would end up on Abbey
Road and the guys’ solo albums, and one—George’s supremely tuneful “Sour
Milk Sea”—that ended up on a single by Apple label-mate Jackie Lomax. In essence, “The Esher Demos” is a very
valuable document of The Beatles at work. It would have been nice if a disc
with the best of the “sessions” from the CD set were also included with the
vinyl. Nevertheless, it is positive that at least some of the oddities are
featured on vinyl rather than just CD this time, which is a trend that I hope continues
with the deluxe Beatles sets that will no doubt continue trotting down Abbey
Road in the years to come.
