Record Rant 002: The Beatles by The Beatles (or how we should treat the Beatles final years with Abbey Road and Let It Be)

I received the super deluxe edition of the Beatles White Album on both vinyl and the 7 CD edition from parents for Christmas. I immediately opened it up and put in the new mix to hear what Giles Martin and his team did to the album and then went onto the out-takes and alternate versions of tunes I had over listened to between the ages of 8 and 15. I was supremely interested in the outtakes, since this was something new of and from the Beatles since last year’s Sgt. Pepper re-release and it looks like this is going to be an annual thing in my lifetime. Since Anthology in 1995 and I discovered them at the age of 5 at a parent’s friends house, Apple and those in charge of the Beatles catalog have almost put something new out each year. There’s so much Beatle content from the actual music to DVDs, documentaries, and books that anything subsequently new is always welcomed by me. The two discs of previous unheard outtakes and alternates was what I was most interested in.

Since the Sgt. Pepper remix and anniversary, I’ve been looking at this latter half of the Beatles career differently. Previously my mind, I’ve sort of viewed it as four different phases, Pre-Beatlemania in the US, Beatlemania in the US and A Hard Day’s Night aftermath, The Studio Years culminating in Sgt. Pepper and the White Album, and the songs during the break-up of the Beatles. I had written a ten page report for my High School English class on the Beatles recording career and used those four phases to break everything up so my overwhelmed and overworked english teacher would actually read the paper. I’m not sure if she did, but she probably read the beginning and end to get an average of my work. With this new perspective within the pages of the accompanying book of this new Super Deluxe edition and more research on my own after high school, I came to the realization that there’s really three periods of the Beatles career: Beatlemania and the end of touring, Sgt. Pepper and it’s surrounding sessions and everything after India. In hindsight, I was foolish to group Sgt. Pepper with the White Album and not with Let It Be and Abbey Road when last three Beatle records were conceived and recording simultaneously.

That really doesn’t make sense, how does a band continuous makes records? Well, the didn’t tour, all they did was write songs and record from 1968 until the end of 1969 and with three principle songwriters, there was a wealth of songs. It’s hard not think if they got their shit together, took a hiatus and went back on the road, things would have ended up differently for the Beatles. The band never had a break other than some time in ’66. Having Abbey Road as their disposal to record whatever and whenever probably wasn’t healthy for the band as a whole. I know by experience that you can’t use record and record and record, and never play out, the process of writing songs recording gets stale with out the other side of performing. There’s no way the songs and the performer can grow and develop on a different level. And, things probably would have worked out a lot better for us listeners. Imagine ‘Imagine’ as a Beatles song. Honestly, I hate ‘Imagine’ and really think it would have been awesome if ‘Instant Karma’ was a Bealtes song or anything off All Things Must Pass. Ram would have been an awesome record and not a record even some McCartney fans gloss over. What the Beatles needed after the White Album was another ‘India trip’. They needed to get the fuck away from each other and do stuff on their own and realize that they needed each other to make great records.

So back to my main point… Instead of treating the final three Beatles albums as three albums, I’ve been regarding them as a period. I love it when I mention to people that ‘Lady Madonna’ was left off the White album and hey look at me like I’m crazy. How much stronger would’ve the White album been if it had ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘Old Brown Shoe’ or ‘Hey Jude’ and not relegated to spotty compilations that only mega fans get. Of course ‘Hey Jude’ is ‘Hey Jude’, but it’s deletion from the White Album turns it into the first solo McCartney tune to me as does ‘Lady Madonna’. The context that those songs are outside in compilation territory when they should be grouped in this massive period of creative freedom and explosion. Or like the way they group a bunch of painter’s great works, group it all together as one solid time. I guess you really can’t do that when it comes to something you’re packaging and selling records commercially in small doses. The White Album was released as a double album since they had so many songs, and Abbey Road had two medleys, so maybe from that point on maybe the Beatles would have released double albums or done something else?

The prism I see the Beatles now is in periods. They’re the only ones I can do that only because there the only band, other than maybe the Stones and the Kinks where the amount of musical output over a period of time one can pick out overarching artistic themes and see when they are abandoned, leading into the next. The Kinks and Ray Davies probably more so since Ray Davies wrote a ton of songs when they got banned from America, but that’s another post.