A game stab at Gimme Some Truth shows an element of promise, but neither man sounds happy with its progress and discuss moving on to “write” something else, leaving John to revisit his embryonic sketch when recording his Imagine album. The unheard material (which runs to a majestic 57 tracks on the deluxe package of the many formats available) frequently illustrates how Lennon and McCartney continued to at least attempt collaboration, exploding any myth that, by this point in the group’s lifespan, they worked only in isolation from each other. “‘Attracts me like a cauliflower…’” We should give thanks he ultimately opted to follow a different path to the vegetable similes. “Just say whatever comes into your mind,” suggests John. As he explains in the chatter caught on tape, he’d been toiling over Something for about six months, but was struggling on the precise wording of its second line. Harrison is also centre-stage on a revealing rehearsal of the song that would, to all intents and purposes, come to be regarded as the pinnacle of his Beatles-related output when knocked into final, sublime shape for Abbey Road. “That was lovely!” declares George at its conclusion, and he’s not wrong. George Harrison’s For You Blue (Take Four, it says here) barrels along on the swing of its writer’s acoustic guitar, with Lennon’s lap steel in hot pursuit, and Ringo Starr’s brushes at their loose-wristed laconic best. Likewise, where much of the Let It Be film gave the impression of ever-widening divisions in a group on a fast track to collapse, there are further illustrations of the camaraderie that still existed between the four men, if not on every day they spent holed up together. It sounds for all the world like The Beatles undergoing spontaneous self-therapy, sifting through old memories to recall why they wanted to be a band in the first place. The past is referenced again, when traditional Liverpool folk tune Maggie Mae (unceremoniously ditched and absent from the …Naked version of the album) is punctuated by a no-more-than-minute detour into Fancy Me Chances With You, a post-adolescence ditty John and Paul wrote at the height of their boyish allegiance to skiffle. It gives the sense of the tongue-in-cheek charm the band displayed in their early movies, sharing a joke with their audience but, more importantly, finding ways to amuse each other. On first listen, the title track and early hit Please Please Me would appear to share little common ground, but there’s a grin-inducing playfulness at work when we hear McCartney at the piano segue from one to the other seemingly on a whim. Johns’ early mix of Don’t Let Me Down, Dig A Pony and I’ve Got A Feeling as a run-on 11-minute suite benefits all three songs, creating a grandeur to match the subsequent Golden Slumbers medley on Abbey Road. Here, however, the archaeologist’s trowel digs significantly deeper into the studio and rehearsal sessions, highlighting hitherto missed opportunities to make the original album more satisfying. It was back in 2003 that Paul McCartney midwifed Let It Be… Naked, a new mix to, if you will, de-Spector the record and restore the stripped-down group aesthetic he’d first hoped for. In the 2014 autobiography, Sound Man, Johns offered his own succinct, matter-of-fact assessment of what happened next in the saga of Let It Be on its path to finally reaching shops: “John gave the tapes to Phil Spector, who puked all over them, turning the album into the most syrupy load of bullshit I have ever heard.”Īlthough this multi-disc overhaul, embracing new re-masters, mixes and previously unreleased rehearsal tapes follows in the relatively recent footsteps of similar treatments to The Beatles (aka ‘The White Album’) and Abbey Road, it was actually the first Fabs album to undergo a major facelift. Having already put together a rough mix at the request of the group, producer and engineer Glyn Johns was approached again, post-Abbey Road, only for his efforts to be rejected for a second time. Recorded in a climate of uncertainty, of conflicting opinions about future plans, and with various members on the verge of walking away, it’s incredible the quartet were able to, at least temporarily, put the experience behind them and reconvene to focus on songs for the infinitely more cohesive Abbey Road. To call the last long-player that The Beatles released (a month after the official split announcement) their most fractious, is something of an understatement.
0 kommentar(er)
