Let it beat

The Beatles — a-one… two… three… four…

It is impossible to write about The Beatles without bits of oneself spilling into the pages. How you first heard Yesterday from an apple green transistor radio in a Blumentritt apartment suffused with cockroaches, rusty pipes and sadness… How your older brother came home one afternoon carrying a black vinyl with cryptic Japanese characters, and through his busted Technics turntable and mahogany Aiwa speakers you listened to four blokes play songs about love, money, rain, chains, rock n’ roll and octopuses’ garden. How you got alienated in high school for digging The Beatles and sneering away the music of the King of Pop who would undergo more plastic surgeries than Madame Auring, who would figure in more scandals than Kris Aquino, and who would eventually buy the rights to Beatle songs. (What a surreal thing it is that the guy who co-owns some of the most beautiful compositions of the past century likes to fondle little boys.) How you bought everything there is about The Beatles (posters, cassette tapes, books, magazines, T-shirts, lunchboxes, etc.) in a mall where people in Bogart pants did head-spins and caterpillars while listening to Body Rock. How anachronistic you felt by digging The Beatles in a classroom of teens, or an office of yuppies that dig flashes-in-the-pan like Debbie Gibson or Tiffany, Culture Club or Wham! (Or in more recent memory, Fred Durst or Kid Rock.)

How you made sense of breakups, failures, doubts, discoveries, drugs, deaths, loves and other things in life’s rich pageant by finding out that Lennon and McCartney have made sense of all this in song. You can’t for the life of you write something impersonal about The Beatles because your very life is lodged somewhere between the lines "There are places I remember" and "In my life… I loved you more." (Let those who champion objective rock journalism write their own goddamn brochures about The Beatles.)

Besides other writers did it better. Hunter S. Thompson once said, "The Rolling Stones want to pillage your town, but The Beatles just want to hold your hand." That line’s a classic. One of the first Beatle items I ever bought was the Jingle Beatles Songbook (P25 at that time) with that eloquent epistle about the band written by Juaniyo Arcellana: "…And as sure as the moon on a clear night when you lay yourself to rest, and your soul hums a tune that is familiar – The Beatles, The Beatles, The Beatles."

After that piece, meditations about The Beatles are tragically disposable, but since I am a sucker for lost causes I am making an attempt anyway since a new Beatle album was recently released titled "Let it Be… Naked," a reworked version of the classic 1970 record. So, a revaluation is in order.

John, Paul, George and Ringo have created for us a universe of tangerine trees, marmalade skies and a lonely hearts club band of quirky characters: Doctor Robert (makes men new and better); Eleanor Rigby (lives in a dream); Father McKenzie (writes words in a sermon that no one will hear); the Walrus (who is he as you are me and we are all together); Maxwell (bangs, bangs his silver hammer); Mean Mr. Mustard (sleeps in the park, shaves in the dark and tries to save paper); Julia (ocean child with seashell eyes); Lucy in the sky with diamonds (a girl with kaleidoscope eyes); Polythene Pam (a good-looking girl who looks like a man); Sexy Sadie (who made a fool of everyone); Prudence (like a child under daisy chain clouds); Rocky Raccoon (who checked into his room only to find Gideon’s bible); as well as losers, loners, lovers, taxmen and other nowhere men.

All of them were ushered into our living rooms by four longhaired musicians from merry England. And all those characters inhabit a pop music context that was always metamorphosing (few expected the sonic change the band undertook with "Revolver" and then later on with "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band," the best album of all time according to Rolling Stone). A pop music context that is always mind-altering and exciting to listen to.

Just like the crash of chords at the end of A Day In the Life. The guitar solo in While My Guitar Gently Weeps (even if Eric Clapton was responsible for that one). The mellotron and backward guitars in Strawberry Fields Forever. The sitars and Indian vibes in Blue Jay Way and Within You Without You. Ringo’s disembodied drums in Tomorrow Never Knows. Those wicked, wicked basslines in Something and Come Together. That perky riff in Ticket to Ride.

Not to mention the avant-garde forays in "The White Album"; the acid-in-cheek, pop psychedelia of "Magical Mystery Tour"; and even The Beatles’ boyband phase at the time of "Help."

Sure, other artists/composers have replaced The Beatles in our CD players – Jeff Buckley, Radiohead, Beck, Ryan Adams (I hope poseurs won’t mistake him for schlock rocker Bryan Adams), The Smiths, the White Stripes, Oasis (hey, Penny Lane, I had to mention your favorite band), the Flaming Lips, etc. Albums from these aforementioned musicians orbit our world these days, but it should be noted that all of them reflect the uncanny ability of The Beatles to "sing what we feel," to transform raw, emotional turmoil into sweet catharsis. Can you dig that?

The quartet from Liverpool has covered a kaleidoscope of emotions –loneliness, longing, insecurity, fatigue and love… Yeah, it’s only love and that is all but love is all you need. The Beatles has given us songs that are universal, timeless and can be recycled or saved for those bleak moments when your day breaks, your mind aches and in her eyes you see nothing.

Lennon tells us, "Let me take you down ‘cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields..." And we follow him, past the acres of his sad/happy childhood where no one was in his tree, where it was hard to be someone but it all worked out, and where living was easy with eyes closed. We all felt that alienation at one point in our lives.

And when John invites each of us to "Picture yourself in a boat on a river," we come along for the ride, hailing newspaper taxis or boarding trains with porters with looking-glass ties to take us away.

Or in more sober moments we take a tour with Lennon in "a day in the life" of Everyman, reading the news and meditating on the nature of mortality and infinity. Or take stock of all faces and places, friends and lovers in our existential gallery (In My Life). Or ruminate on those tricky concepts such as revolution, evolution, destruction, solution and Chairman Mao (Revolution). Or spew some literary gobbledygook about old flat top, toe jam football, monkey finger, walrus gumboot, spinal cracker, Coca-Cola, etc. (Come Together). Or just blurt out one’s emotions as straight to the point as possible, without artifice: "I want you, I want you so bad, baby…" or "Don’t let me down…"

It is obvious that my favorite Beatle is John, since Lennon’s songs changed my world with their sadness, discords and bluesy notes. Well, everyone has a favorite Beatle. There is John the wisecracking rebel cum sage; Paul the creator of big beautiful ballads; George the quiet, introspective one who did not demand to be heard; and Ringo the, er, drummer. But most of us acknowledge that there is strength in numbers, especially when all four guys of The Beatles got inside one room and decided to play music.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, just like the sessions for "Let it Be."

Ashort history lesson: "Let it Be" was the last Beatle album to be released (May, 1970) although the recording pre-dated the "Abbey Road" sessions. "Let it Be" is the sole post-"Revolver" album that most critics dismiss as dog’s dinner, with the fingers pointing to, the tongues wagging at, the blame being pinned on eccentric producer Phil Spector – who was called in by Lennon to salvage the Get Back documentary/album projects. There was infighting within The Beatles. The filming, the recordings were going nowhere. Lennon, ever the smart aleck, even called it "the most miserable sessions on Earth," and the finished master tapes, "the shittiest load of badly recorded shit."

When Spector entered the fray and promptly erected his patented "wall of schmaltz," "swamp of sound" to spruce up the tracks, he in effect submerged the material in schlock.

(This is most evident in Across the Universe and The Long and Winding Road. McCartney was horrified that his tender piano ballad became a lush orchestral hack job – not beautifully Beatlesque but spectacularly Spectorial. Lennon, on the other hand, was pleased with Spector’s work, even recruiting the producer to work on albums that would subsequently become "Imagine" and "Plastic Ono Band.")

Thirty years later, the surviving Beatles (including Harrison before he died), gave their nod to restore, remix and re-sequence "Let it Be" to reflect the spirit of the original sessions, which was to put the four guys in a room, let them play music and record the output without adding petty psychedelic overdubs and various studio trickery. In short, "get back" The Beatles to being a band again.

And this is what the sonic geniuses of Abbey Road Studios did with a little help from their friend technology: take out the Phil Spector production pomp; remix the album in a way that it will sound like a "live" record; and put more presence, punch and warmth to the tracks. Strip it down. Make it barebones. And let it be naked.

Here’s my take on the whole caboodle:

I like the new version of Across the Universe (with Lennon on acoustic and Harrison on tamboura, and without Spector’s ghostly choir). It is slower, more evocative than the original.

I have mixed feelings about The Long and Winding Road. In fact, I like both versions – the original track, with the strings and the backing voices affixed by Spector, as well as the restored track, which has a demo-like feel to it. The latter has McCartney singing more evocatively, so that’s a plus. But I also dig Spector’s symphonic splashes on the former.

It’s a great thing that Don’t Let Me Down (the passionate rooftop version) was rescued from B-side limbo and was included in the disc. I love Lennon’s naked imploring on that track – "Nobody ever loved me like she does, ooh she does, yes she does."

Some more caveats: Why take out Dig It and Maggie Mae? Why take out the studio chatter, most especially Lennon’s wisecrack at the end of Get Back. What John uttered at the end of The Beatles’ gig on the rooftop of the Apple Building was genius. No one should leave genius on the cutting floor.

Gone was "I’d like to say, ‘Thank you’ on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition." So was the "Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf-aids" intro to Two of Us.

Why Cut Those Out?

But it is really swell for McCartney to not let things be, and instead stir heaven, earth and the legacies of John Lennon/George Harrison for the re-release of "Let it Be" – whether this is a good gesture or not is still subject to debate. Uncut finds it brilliant; Rolling Stone ditches it. But for most of us, the bottom line is, there’ll be one more Beatle record that we can play in times of trouble and in our hour of darkness.

And oh yeah, when Ringo Starr heard the new mixes of "Let it Be" he quipped, "Not a bad band." Two are in agreement – the world and me. Jai guru de va om…

And In The End…

Rate the two versions of "Let it Be"? Phew, that’s like asking a plumber to criticize the one who put together the Nile.

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For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations e-mail iganja@hotmail.com.