A day late on the 9/9 celebration, but it's been a busy Beatles week for me. I finished up rock critic Rob Sheffield's book Dreaming The Beatles, which I can't recommend highly enough. It's not a regurgitation of biography and recording trivia, but rather a deeper dive through an obsessive fan's perspective, with a heavy dose of humor. He's a few years older than me, but still has his finger on the pulse of current music (and references it on occasion in the book), so it's a perspective I can relate to heavily. It's been out for a couple years now and you can get a used copy for under $10 at this point.
I opted not to pull the trigger on the Abbey Road 50th deluxe set. For one, I'm not as big of a fan of the album as most others, and the set isn't nearly as appetizing in terms of extras as The White Album's 50th deluxe set (the relative lack of material from the sessions is the main reason). Besides. However, I'll likely do what I did last year and keep an eye on eBay for one at a reduced price; I'm sure at some point it will come down low enough and I'll snag one.
What I did buy this week were used copies of the Anthology hardcover book and the DVD boxed set of the Anthology documentary, which cost me $10 and $20 respectively. It's nice to reap the benefits of the death of physical media. Can't wait to look through that stuff for the first time in 20 years.
I also rewatched Yellow Submarine, which I don't have too much to say about other than it's a bummer they couldn't get the actual band members to do the voices. I mean, they weren't stoked about the idea of the film in the first place, but one can only imagine how much better it would have been if their personalities were not just pale replications.
And now for the meat of the post: as many of you know, The White Album has long been my favorite by the band, and it's also my #2 album of all time, period. I don't skip anything when I listen to it, even the tracks that I find annoying (Wild Honey Pie), eye-rolling (Honey Pie), or merely subpar considering what else was recorded during the sessions (Savoy Truffle instead of Not Guilty??).
I've tampered with the tracklisting of other Beatles albums before, most notably Let It Be. But I know I speak for many of the band's fans who are frustrated that, despite the high quality of the albums, they're often missing some of the best tracks from their respective years, which were plucked to be released as singles and because of tradition, not replicated on the following LPs. This isn't something that the band did by choice; the record company wanted to keep a steady stream of material coming from their hottest property, and wouldn't let them go 6 months without releasing anything. George Martin himself regretted this move in one famous instance:
"The only reason that Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane didn't go onto the new album was a feeling that if we issued a single, it shouldn't go onto an album. That was a crazy idea, and I'm afraid I was partly responsible. It's nonsense these days, but in those days it was an aspect that we'd try to give the public value for money.
The idea of a double A side came from me and Brian, really. Brian was desperate to recover popularity, and so we wanted to make sure that we had a marvellous seller. He came to me and said, 'I must have a really great single. What have you got?' I said, 'Well, I've got three tracks – and two of them are the best tracks they've ever made. We could put the two together and make a smashing single.' We did, and it was a smashing single – but it was also a dreadful mistake. We would have sold far more and got higher up in the charts if we had issued one of those with, say, When I'm Sixty-Four on the back."
The failure to reach the top was because many chart compilers counted the double a-side as two individual releases
Anyway, it's safe to say that Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane would have improved Sgt. Pepper's considerably, and one could say the same thing about Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out and Rubber Soul, Paperback Writer/Rain and Revolver as well. The band would often wind up writing what they regarded as filler to pad out the albums when they didn't have enough material because they were donating some of their best stuff each time.
In the case of The White Album, the single sacrifices this time around were Hey Jude and Revolution. The latter did wind up making it onto the album in its original, acoustic incarnation, but the other band members convinced Lennon to record a harder version for the single release. And so, while I think the double album is phenomenal in its own right, I also happen to think that it's missing Lennon and McCartney's best respective contributions to those sessions (just as with the pre-Sgt. Pepper's singles), and can't help wondering what they would like like put back in.
Unfortunately, the idiots behind the White Album 50th neglected to do new stereo mixes for those songs, though strangely they did do it for Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane on the Pepper's 50th. That's ok though, because I just used the mono mixes and was able to draw from the White Album's as well as the ones for Past Masters.
To some people, any interruption of the original order is going to seem like blasphemy, but bear with me. I made my own rule not to remove anything to make room for it, so these are merely additions in the places I felt they worked best. Hey Jude was an easy choice for me. It's the show-stopper, the climax, the grand finale. It simply couldn't work as an opener, or buried in the middle somewhere. The problem is, there was no way I was going to have anything other than Good Night at the album's end. Luckily, this album has two halves (or four sections, if you want to go with the vinyl format).
What this means is that Julia is no longer the final song on "Disc One", or Part One. And while that may feel a little strange, I think it ties in pretty nicely. Lennon's song is a loving tribute to his deceased mother, while McCartney's song was written for John's neglected son Julian. So there's a nice through-line that takes us through the generations. Sonically, it's not as if Julia's ending has some kind of air of finality that needed to be preserved, and it's blanketed on the other end by Paul's understated I Will.
The next task was to find a place for the electric version of Revolution. It's a full-on sonic assault that to me needed a major spotlight. I wasn't going to tamper with the album's opener Back in the U.S.S.R., but once again, this album has two halves. So I put it at the beginning of "Disc Two", bumping Birthday ahead. While I enjoy Birthday, it's just a fun rocker that isn't exactly holy or "important". And the songs go well together because of the continued energy.
I wasn't done yet, because the exclusion of Harrison's Not Guilty is something that always bothered me. And only this week, I learned something I hadn't known before: George wasn't even in town when the band decided on the final tracklisting and gave it the boot. They literally did 99 takes of Not Guilty before proclaiming it finished, so I'd like to think George would have fought harder for its inclusion, even if he had to lose Savoy Truffle in the process, for example. My placement of this track (taken from Anthology 3) was slightly more arbitrary than the other two, but I wound up putting it right between Birthday and Yer Blues. Blasphemous to some, I'm sure. But I thought it would be nice to have a George song sooner on the album instead of having to wait until track 7 (where Long, Long, Long finally appears on the original). And it's part of a run of rockers that really beefs up this half of Part Two; in addition to the other songs mentioned, you have Everybody's Got Something to Hide... and Helter Skelter.
I should also add that despite adding the electric Revolution, I opted to retain the acoustic version as well. As I said, I didn't want to remove anything, and I think it's a nice aesthetic counterpoint and reprise. It's a more subdued take on the material, and yet John adding "...in" after the "you can count me out" is a nice ironic endorsement of violent protest.
One final note is that I considered adding Lennon's What's the New Mary Jane, because it was recorded a number of times and is a pretty adventurous track. But it's rather long, and I felt that it would dampen the effect of Revolution 9 because of all the weirdness and tape effects. Plus, if John felt that strongly about it, he probably would have put it on the album himself.
PART ONE (53:29)
1. Back in the USSR
2. Dear Prudence
3. Glass Onion
4. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
5. Wild Honey Pie
6. Bungalo Bill
7. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
8. Happiness is a Warm Gun
9. Martha My Dear
10. I'm So Tired
11. Blackbird
12. Piggies
13. Rocky Raccoon
14. Don't Pass Me By
15. Why Don't We Do It In The Road?
16. I Will
17. Julia
18. Hey Jude
PART TWO (53:15)
1. Revolution
2. Birthday
3. Not Guilty
4. Yer Blues
5. Mother Nature's Son
6. ...Except For Me and My Monkey
7. Sexy Sadie
8. Helter Skelter
9. Long, Long, Long
10. Revolution 1
11. Honey Pie
12. Savoy Truffle
13. Cry Baby Cry
14. Revolution 9
15. Good Night
Come at me.
) 
y anti-endorsements I don’t see the rest of them wanting to be seen as supporting.
