Category: Music

Please Please Me

Beatles - Feb 11, 1963
The Beatles, March 5, 1963 © Dezo Hoffman

For my birthday, Denro gave me the remastered stereo CD of “Please Please Me,” the first Beatles UK album. It was recorded by Norman Smith, with an assist by Richard Langham, in a single session on February 11, 1963. A quick skip-through listen on my best gear told me a lot about the decisions that were made by the remastering engineers.

One of these 80-second audio excerpts is from the new CD, the other is not. The MP3 bit rate is kicked all the way up to 320 Kbps. The player makes it easy to click back-and-forth between them. You should use a decent pair of headphones for your comparison. Which do you prefer?

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/SEP/09BabyIt’sYou.mp3]
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/SEP/10BabyIt’sYou.mp3]

The Beatles sell out

I had jury duty today but I’m not on a trial, and good thing, because the judge estimated it will last into next week. So that means I’ll be able to check out the 9.9.9 Beatles display at Best Buy. With both the mono and stereo box sets sold out from Amazon.com, I wonder how many, if any, will be available retail? Maybe all I’ll find in the store are individual stereo titles. Denro thinks the sets will be grabbed (some by store employees) and put on eBay, just like the first Nintendo Wii consoles were.

From the official Beatles web site I grabbed this excerpt of the mini-documentary for “Beatles for Sale.”

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/SEP/BeatlesforSale.flv 480 360]

Also glommed from the same place is this great snippet from their always fave appearance at the then-new, but now-demolished, Shea Stadium. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you who the guy with the glasses was, who came to a tragic end.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/SEP/BeatlesShea.flv 480 360]

Let’s hear some more of the Beatles live, from something that Capitol should release on CD in a greatly expanded version from the original LP…

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/SEP/BeatlesHollywoodBowl.mp3]

Hit and Miss Masters?

This is a promo video for the remastered Beatles CD’s that I grabbed from Amazon.com.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/SEP/BeatlesAmazon.flv 480 360]

These CD’s are sort of a stand against the grain of lossy, compressed MP3 digital audio, but they’re still limited to 16-bit/44.1 KHz CD sound. I wish there were a standard, higher quality lossless digital format for consumers.

Some fannish things that matter to me:

  • These are remasters of the original mixes (yay!), with two exceptions.
  • The stereo “HELP!” and “Rubber Soul” are George Martin’s 80’s remixes (boo!).
  • I hope the splices in “She Loves You” are smoothed over.
  • I hope the quick channel fade-out in “Day Tripper” is fixed.
  • I can almost live with the splices in “This Boy”

The first four titles were available on CD only in mono until now, because the stereo versions are said to not be true mix-downs. But that’s precisely why I want the stereo versions — they make it possible to hear exactly, in detail, how Norman Smith engineered the sessions.

I’m not happy that “HELP!” and “Rubber Soul” aren’t the original 60’s mixes. This greatly undermines the spirit of the set.

Some first impressions of individual tracks on the new Beatles CD’s are available from picky listeners who were congregated in a high-end audio showroom in the city of my birth, Evanston, Illinois.

One on, not after, 909

Wednesday is the day for the big glut of Beatles stuff. Despite the recession, Amazon is sold out of both the remastered stereo and limited edition mono CD sets.

You might think I ordered both sets before they were gone, but I didn’t. Best Buy has a good price for the stereo set, and the ad says not all stores will have the mono set.

Beatles Best Buy ad

My birthday is one after 909, but if I have to settle for the new slippers I asked for, that’s fine too.

Songs for birds and lobsters

Happy 3rd anniversary to my blog!

Here it is, forty years gone by since “Abbey Road” was released. I listened to that record start-to-end so many times I have no idea how many times it was, although it’s been quite a few years since I’ve done that. In ’79, when I bought a high quality Parlophone pressing of “Abbey Road,” it struck me how different it sounded from every previous Beatles recording. It was so smooth it was almost antiseptic. According to Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan, the difference was the introduction of a solid state console, replacing the old tubed REDD board.

Ten years after “Abbey Road” the music scene had changed a lot, thanks to the anti-Disco movement that was equal parts of angry anarchy and silly fun. Here are some examples of what I was listening to, going into and out of 1979.

From the quirky….

….to the quirkiest…

Lene Lovich Bird song (clip 1979)
Uploaded by libelule64 – Explore more music videos.
…and from the hard….

…to the hardest.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/SEP/LondonCalling.flv 480 360]

Unsigned, unsealed, and undelivered

Beatles
Photo by Albert Marrion, 17 Dec 1961

I sort of assume that everybody with more than a passing interest in the Beatles has heard the complete recording session held at Decca on New Year’s Day, 1962, but maybe you haven’t. It’s a day that lives in infamy, of course, because they didn’t get signed to a record contract. But the fact is, at that point they still sounded — and looked — like amateurs. Brian Epstein got them into suits in March, but they still needed the ear of somebody who could hear their potential. Listen and decide for yourself. Would you have heard the greatness that was missed by Decca?