The
Beatles 1962-1966
(The
'Red' Album)
+ 1967-1970
(The
'Blue' Album/Universal/Apple
Records CD Hits Set)
Sound:
B Extras: C+ Music: A-
The
Beatles, the music act that changed music in the 20th
Century and for all time more than any other in the last century, the
group that transformed music and helped build the music business into
the massive, priceless entity it is today, the one everyone wants to
be like and have the success that is the platinum standard of art and
commerce. The one whose charting and sales records are sometimes
broken, but with many left to go down and more than a few still out
of reach of the most successful artists in the industry since.
But
it is not about charting records, but music that continues to grow in
value and endure. When these new upgrades arrived, some said the
remixes should have had slightly altered covers to not look exactly
like the original album releases, but the differences might not be
that dramatic and even between older edition, Beatles and vinyl fans
will even debate how some of those sets then might have sounded
better than others, which means you could do an entire book on the
differences in the thousands of different editions worldwide of every
single Beatles release to date. No doubt some such books exist, but
a definitive one ought to be in the works.
In
the meantime, we'l get to the track here in this CD expansion of The
Beatles 1962-1966
(The
'Red' Album)
+ 1967-1970
(The
'Blue' Album)
collections.
Though new songs have been added including the new U.K. #1 hit Now
And Then
(#7 in the U.S.,) most are the same from the original early 1970s
first release of both sets. This time, the tracklist is:
Disc
1
1.
Love Me Do
2. Please Please Me
3. I Saw Her Standing There
4.
Twist And Shout
5. From Me To You
6. She Loves You
7. I Want
To Hold Your Hand
8. This Boy
9. All My Loving
10. Roll Over
Beethoven
11. You Really Got A Hold On Me
12. Can't Buy Me
Love
13. You Can't Do That
14. A Hard Day's Night
15. And I
Love Her
16. Eight Days A Week
17. I Feel Fine
18. Ticket To
Ride
19. Yesterday
Disc 2
1. Help!
2. You've Got To
Hide Your Love Away
3. We Can Work It Out
4. Day Tripper
5.
Drive My Car
6. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
7. Nowhere
Man
8. Michelle
9. In My Life
10. If I Needed Someone
11.
Girl
12. Paperback Writer
13. Eleanor Rigby
14. Yellow
Submarine
15. Taxman
16. Got To Get You Into My Life
17. I'm
Only Sleeping
18. Here, There And Everywhere
19. Tomorrow Never
Knows
Disc 3
1. Strawberry Fields Forever
2. Penny
Lane
3. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
4. With A Little
Help From My Friends
5. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
6. Within
You Without You
7. A Day In The Life
8. All You Need Is Love
9.
I Am The Walrus
10. Hello, Goodbye
11. The Fool On The Hill
12.
Magical Mystery Tour
13. Lady Madonna
14. Hey Jude
15.
Revolution
Disc 4
1. Back In The U.S.S.R.
2. Dear
Prudence
3. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
4. Ob-La-Di,
Ob-La-Da
5. Glass Onion
6. Blackbird
7. Hey Bulldog
8.
Get Back
9. Don't Let Me Down
10. The Ballad of John and
Yoko
11. Old Brown Shoe
12. Here Comes The Sun
13. Come
Together
14. Something
15. Octopus' Garden
16. Oh!
Darling
17. I Want You (She's So Heavy)
18. Let It Be
19.
Across The Universe
20. I Me Mine
21. The Long And Winding
Road
22. Now And Then
So
it is an amazing list of 75 classics and to address Now
And Then,
the song John Lennon recorded as a demo on an old audio cassette that
somehow survived to this day and the rest of the band then played on,
including an instrumental track George Harrison played on when they
could not make it work as a group record at the time before his
death. I like the record going back to hearing Lennon sing it solo,
yet another priceless vocal of a man who had many things to say and
was silenced in a murder that could have been prevented, especially
as he was still being watched by political forces who did not want
him to live into the 1980s. That's another story.
It
is an honest song and after liking a few circulating versions, to
hear it finished as a group version is more satisfying on this CD
than the several versions I heard before. Remarkable that we could
have just one last final word a half-century after ''The
End''
and especially with what has been happening in and to the world as we
post. It is no surprise most people were happy with its release.
Fortunately, all the songs continue to be played all the time,
somewhere in the world.
Listening
to the set reminded me of the now out-of-print Rolling Stones
anniversary hits set Grrrr!
that featured 50 of their greatest hits remastered. In that case,
the early tracks (best heard on the now-expensive Blu-ray Audio disc,
though vinyl fans would disagree) from their ABKCO Records days had
already been preserved, restored and remastered for the remarkable
Super Audio CD series of all their albums in full stereo, though mono
was also issued and we reviewed some of them elsewhere on this site.
The
early songs and their restorations held up very well, while the later
songs from their own Rolling Stones Records label were the big treat
and surprise, evidence that in real life when you get past the
spoofs, satires, jokes and fun that Mick Jagger is a remarkable
singer and even more than many realize. These Beatles tracks work
the opposite way, with the later tracks already impressing from the
box sets with remastered sound we have covered the last few years, so
what would the early tracks that had not received Giles Martin and
company's hard work from the original master tapes sound like?
The
PCM 2.0 16bit/44.1 kHz Stereo is mostly very impressive for the older
songs, from their first singles to Rubber
Soul
and Magical
Mystery Tour
that have yet to get their own box sets. Of course, even the
earliest songs might have some sonic limits despite the time and
money that has been rightly lavished on every single one the band's
master tapes. Love
Me Do
opens up the first CD and though it sounds decent, it has more echo
than I though it ought to have. The sound holds steady, then the
quality really starts to jump up and kick in on From
Me To You,
I Want
To Hold Your Hand
and All
My Loving.
She
Loves You,
the track where they lost the original stereo master (someone threw
it out!!?) is not included, but sounds fine on the 4K Blu-ray of A
Hard Day's Night.
Though
some people have used the term 'colorized' to describe the remasters,
versus what colorization really is (plastering always-phony, false
color on black and white images and failing 100% of the time) it goes
too far in describing any differences between the new versions here
versus the many previous releases of the songs. Plenty of
remastering is going on in music these days and for the most part,
results have pleased fans and critics alike, but remastering older
monophonic or even simple stereo songs like this is something new.
Steve Wilson has been the only man out there doing more than Giles
Martin, creating new stereo and multi-channel (anywhere from 5.1 to
12-track Dolby Atmos mixes) for legendary bands like Gentle Giant,
Yes, Tears For Fears and King Crimson. However, they are recognized
as new mixes and not replacements for the older mixes, which applies
here as well.
Because
of the limits of the CD format itself, Eleanor
Rigby
had sonic limits on its strings not an issue on the DTS tracks on the
DVD version of the animated Yellow
Submarine
movie, but the track that everyone has had issues with is I
Am The Walrus.
It
sounds fine on the Blu-ray version of The
Magical Mystery Tour
film, both sound versions, so why this got a mix that sounds like a
bunch of compression and distortion has been added is bizarre and an
extremely rare misstep in this reissue campaign of what easily is
some of the most important recorded music of all time. It even
sounds better on the Love
CD and especially DVD-Audio 5.1 mix of that classic, so what went
wrong here makes no sense. You'll just have to hear that one for
yourself.
What
Giles Martin and his great team have been doing have been what his
father George Martin and company did when the songs and albums were
originally being released, building up stereo from the original mono
masters, which lasted almost towards the entire end of the band's
run. Giles Martin has been also building them up for multi-channel
sound and especially Dolby Atmos, which (like the DTS: X and Auro3D
formats) offer roughly 12 speakers of sound with directional
capacities that can really open up the sound. This all happened
after the passing of his brilliant father. It can offer up to 12
tracks of sound or even a few more, but it gives the owners of the
catalog a new chance to further release, restore, copy and preserve
the master recordings for generations to come.
Though
these songs are here in the older CD format, you can still hear the
benefits of going back to the masters for the most part as we have
already heard even better where DVD and blu-ray was offered in
various box sets (see below) so you get a new choice on how to hear
these classics and the result is you'll hear things differently or
even things you never heard before. With this, that brings us to one
other thing to think about. Outside of Jazz or Classical titles
going back to the foundling of the record industry, Pop music,
Country music, Blues and Showtunes did not always get the same high
quality recording treatment as those genres. How does early Beatles
hold up to similar music in its field?
Bing
Crosby found a way to sing around the limited technology of the time,
making him a huge success, while Louis Armstrong was way ahead of his
time considering sonic fidelity all the way to his final recordings.
Slider did not start replacing nobs in music recording until Tom Dowd
started introducing them in the 1960s, including telling George
Martin about them. By the 1950s, magnetic recordings were in full
swing post-WWII, a format Crosby was one of the first to really
advocate for and systems using tubes that gave a warmer sound and
feeling arrived in the 1950s just in time for that decades
entertainment boom.
In
the pop/soul/rock field, which we can pinpoint to around the
mid-1950s, Elvis sounded great right off of his Sun Records, but when
he moved to RCA, the label was smart enough to make sure he got
Grade-A recording treatment. Other artists keeping up included Nat
'King' Cole, Ricky Nelson, Paul Anka, Johnny Mathis, Frankie Avalon,
Buddy Holly, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and even Pat Boone. The
individuals who would become The Beatles were listening to all of it.
The
ladies were not far behind, including Patti Page, Brenda Lee and
Connie Francis into the 1960s, as the majors took advantage of new
recording advances, though leaving some quality technology behind.
Berry Gordy took advantage of this when his Motown Records nailed
their own sound and the majors could not recreate it because they
eliminated the means of creating it and 'Smokie' Robinson still
understood that the songs still had to sound good coming out of small
speakers in cars and portable radios, the kind the individuals who
would become The Beatles were often using at the time.
Yet,
like the technology now being used to bring out more of the priceless
Beatles catalog, Smokie, Gordy and everyone else in the music
business knew there was more in their master recordings than the
public was hearing and only in recent years are many of us finally
hearing how great these studio recordings actually are. In general,
stereo sound as we know it today was starting to get really good and
relatively more naturalistic by the mid-1960s, if not widely so yet.
Movies tried something like stereo (Disney and Fantasound) in 1940,
then multi-track stereo began with This
Is Cinerama
in 1952 and The
Robe
(the first Eastmancolor and Cinemascope film) in 1953. Vinyl records
and tapes from the major record labels and hundreds of independents
followed.
So
I was trying to find recording just before or during the early
Beatles days and hits that were as vivid, effective and memorable.
The results are only three releases, mostly hits sets and all in the
ultra high resolution Super
Audio CD format: The Dave Brubeck Quartet's legendary album Time
Out
(the only disc here in 5.1,) Connie
Francis: 26 Greatest Hits
and Nat
King Cole: The King Of Sound.
We have not covered enough music from that period and to be blunt,
not enough audiophile quality material has been issued from the era,
but that also speaks to the quality of The Beatles recordings and how
they suddenly made most such music sound more dated and older, even
if they did not have the most state of the art facilities to start
out with. Talent in front of the microphone and in George Martin's
case, behind the soundboard, makes a huge difference, a lesson more
important than ever in this over-digitized recording era we live in.
That what Giles Martin and company have driven home once again with
this set.
It
is too bad this
did not get a Blu-ray Audio or Super Audio CD edition, but maybe
later.
Extras
include two nicely illustrated booklets for each set, the first half
of the booklets offering smart new essays by
journalist, music scholar and author John Harris. They are to the
point and well thought out. You also get some pictures of the band
over the years and full technical details on all the songs, including
all the lyrics. The latter is a welcome surprise I was not
expecting, as this is not a feature of most CD or album releases
these days. Then again, it is The Beatles.
For
more on The Beatles,
try our coverage of the following classic albums and films, starting
with the 4K Criterion edition of A
Hard Day's Night:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/16094/A+Hard+Day's+Night+4K+(1964/Criterion+4K+Ult
Help!
DVD
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/6273/The+Beatles+in
Magical
Mystery Tour
Blu-ray
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/11851/The+Beatles:+Magical+Mystery+Tour+(1967/Apple
Yellow
Submarine
DVD
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/11635/The+Beatles:+Yellow+Submarine+(1968/Apple/Ca
Revolver
CD box set (with links
to the box sets of Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
w/DVD, The
White Album
(aka The
Beatles,
w/Blu-ray,) Let
It Be
w/Blu-ray and Abbey
Road
w/Blu-ray)
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/16219/The+Beatles:+Revolver+-+Super+Deluxe+Edition
Let
hope we get more great remasters soon. Until then, this set will
satisfy most fans and there are vinyl versions for vinyl Beatles fans
as well.
-
Nicholas Sheffo
