Your lips.  God's ears.  "From Me To You" is not one of my favorite Beatle songs.  I think this side of "Love Me Do" it's the weakest of the Beatles' singles.  Doesn't mean it's bad.  It's as breezy and catchy as it needs to be.  But it's formula, and it shows, and at this point, right after achieving their first #1 with "Please Please Me", but prior to the release yet of the LP, the band may have been feeling very gracious indeed, and this single sounds like a fan club response.  "Thank You Girl".  "If there's anything I can do...."  "With love from me to you".  There's an earnestness in the desire to keep pushing, but also a trepidation, don't want to jinx it too quick.  This single is an exhale, but with fingers crossed.

It may be an accomplishment that this anxiety isn't so evident in the confident performance itself, but manifest in other ways.  Like the discarded selection of the session, "One After 909", the old Lennon original favorite.  Lennon would much later accuse McCartney of "sabotaging" certain sessions, some kind of passive-aggressive way of vetoing ideas.  There's been a lot of speculation about exactly what he was referring to.  (The candidates include "Across the Universe", "Strawberry Fields", "Revolution", but Lennon always tended to blame McCartney for his own insecurities.)  Here, we might find a possible example, as Paul somehow lost his bass pick just prior to the "909" session, resulting in a rather sluggish effort.  And George Harrison was doing no favors with some feeble soloing.  These "One After 909" sessions, which along with the rest of the "From Me To You"/"Thank You Girl" session, has survived intact, one of the few two-track studio tapes to have done so, and it's more of an example of frustration.  "One After 909", despite having survived from Lennon's early songbook from as early as 1960, would not be a single, or even a future track for the next LP, and would only emerge as a warm nostalgic chestnut in their fading days.  But John's irritation here is remarkable.

Even though the songs themselves, "From Me To You" and "Thank You Girl", are pretty fair by objective estimate, they do go hard on the head-shaking "ooooo"s, that crucial trigger of Beatlemania frenzy.  "If there's anything I can doooo"; "and all I got to doooo".  McCartney's harmonies are still dynamic, but just wait. 

Most interesting about this session is that it is, in fact, the only Beatles single session pretty much extant from 1963 and their two-track era.  Only "I Saw Her Standing There" and "There's A Place", from the LP session, seem to have survived in their entire recording process, begining to end.  All of the other known orignal two-track studio tapes are truncated or lost or destroyed.  So with the surviving tapes of this session, we can better appreciate George Martin's production craft.  With this two-track technology -  vocals/instruments being the split - any additional overdubs would require use of an additional augmented tape.  We do have one such tape from the Please Please Me sessions which survived, showing quaint overdubs on "I Saw Her Standing There" (handclaps), "There's a Place" (extra harmonica), "Taste of Honey" (doubled vocal), "Do You Want To Know a Secret" (backing vocals).  For "From Me To You", Martin used a number of edit pieces, extra harmonica riffs on additional tapes, spliced onto the master mix.  This is pretty technical detail, but it does allow us to glimpse some tricks, some magic, for which George Martin deserves due credit, and clearly inspired further such fuss, as with his subtle varispeed keyboard additions to "Misery" and "Baby It's You". 

This may all be prelude to mourning the fact that the original two-track tapes of the next single session, "She Loves You", did not survive, as delicate-ear'd archivists have found similar evidence of such edit piece magic going on there, further supported by the young nascent engineer Geoff Emerick, in his book Here There and Everywhere, would go more into detail on that particular session.  The loss of these original two-track Beatle tapes are by far the biggest scar on the archives.  But it's even more prominent when you have, arguably, the two true Beatle seeds, the songs which were the foundation of their phenonmenon, "Twist and Shout" and "She Loves You", in the summer of 1963, that no one at EMI thought that these master tapes specifically needed to be preserved.  It boggles the goddamn mind.  And that may be why I have a unextinguishable suspicion that somebody has them tapes somewhere.  I prefer the conspiracy to the alternative desecration.

And "Twist and Shout", as if it needs to be said, is and was a "greatest hit", even though it never released as a single in Britain.  The EP under its name would remain the best selling EP for decades.  If you want to know about The Beatles, the twin-engine booster seat has "Twist and Shout" and "She Loves You" in tandem.

 

crumbsroom wrote:

For a second I thought you said "From Me To You" is one of your favorites, and I was 'we gonna have to have a little talk here'

I'm sure it's sombody's favorite, because people are crazy.

That youtube channel, Pop Goes the '60s, had people send in their top ten Beatle lists.  The host had even included "Thank You Girl" in his top ten, which....urgh.  But idiots were sending in stuff like "Cry For a Shadow" and "That Means a Lot".  I honestly don't know if they're trolling, or they think we're impressed with the deep cuts (more like obtuse cuts).  All I know is that once they tabulated everyones' lists into a master tally, "Julia" didn't even make the top 50.  So I'm just going to leave these people alone to their, I'm guessing, thoughts.

crumbsroom wrote:

It can't help but be shocking when you think of anyone wiping Beatles mastertapes at any point after their fame. It makes one think of how close we were for all of Monty Python's TV show to have fallen to a similar fate. British people, for getting such a rep for carrying the torch for the art community, sure have a tendency to be just as indifferent to the work of their creatives as Americans. But I guess this is people in charge of studios, both television and recording, and people in charge frequently don't actually give a shit of what they are actually in charge of. 

It comes from the unfortunate mentality that culture is ultimately disposable, and they fail to understand any long-term value in it.  Like "yesterday's papers".  Like how they treated silent films after the 'talkies'.  Why would anyone want to watch a TV show twice?  And true enough a lot of people feel this way.  A lot of people in the '60s treated their records horribly, not caring how they would sound in a decade, two decade's time.  A lot of people have the FOMO, and only interested in what people are currently consuming.  And we see it in these fools who have disdained physical media entirely, just like those who threw out their records when they got tape decks, and threw out their tapes when they got CDs.  It's only about the newest and brightest thing.  No long-term concern, it's just about NOW. 

Thankfully there's enough of us who do care to justify a market for reissues, even though these media companies still act kind of shocked.  Like this summer, "Wow, people are still watching Jaws".  And we keep hearing the same old crap about The Beatles, "oh, the fans are dying off and soon no one will be left to care to keep buying these box sets", and then they act all confused by the fact that a portion of the new generations of kids keep discovering them and loving them.  They were confused at the time too, always asking The Beatles, "what are you going to do after all of this is over?"  They're just losers waiting on trains.

Let me take a break from the chronology for a minute to talk about the announcement over this year's big Apple Beatles project, which apparently is a revamped version of the Anthology series.  There's a number of reasons why I'm not very impressed or excited.

The Anthology documentary series itself will be "remastered" in some kind of form, and expanded from 8 episodes (which was the latest expanded DVD version released 20 years ago) to 9 episodes.  Alright, so will that include any significant extras?  I'm hearing, "no", because it seems that this 9th episode will be dedicated to the 90s-era "reunion" of the three surviving Beatles and their reconstruction of Lennon's demos.  (This might include the additionally discarded effort for "Grow Old With Me", but, again, not really interested.)  This new version of Anthology will not be available on blu-ray anytime soon, however, as it has exclusive streaming rights with Disney.  Barring any signifcant new footage, I'm fine with my DVD set for the time being.

There will be an additional Anthology 4 2CD set to accompany the previous three volumes.  The hitch is that you'll have to buy the entire set, as number 4 will not be made available as a stand-alone.  Considering how these sets will be expensive (the vinyl will be nearly $350) this is almost certain to thrill my VPN.  What I'm hearing, so far, is that there won't be any significant upgrade to the previous three Anthology volumes, aside from newly AI remixes of the Lennon demo-based "new" songs.  While those are sure to be interesting (but hardly essential), it is a kick to the balls not to use this opportunity to clean up some of the known problems with the mixes from the previous set.  For example, why not apply Peter Jackson's technology to enhance material like the 1957 acetate, the 1960 home recordings, some of the lower fidelity live tracks?  Maybe fix some of the muddy Geoff Emerick mixes or some of the negligence from Harrison's supervised Vol. 2 (cutting the backing vocals from "Strawberry Fields" take 1; fading out the end of "You Know My Name")  There's a number of opportunities for improvement from this 30-year-old project.

But let's focus on the truly new stuff, the two discs of Vol. 4.  First of all, there's no "Carnival of Light", which feels like a troll.  After all of McCartney's excuses of really really wanting it on the previous set, but it was George who axed it, what's the excuse now?  I wonder?  Whatever, we all know it's bound to suck anyway, let's just get it over with!

When it comes to outtakes, these are usually most intriguing when you're dealing with the more technically complex and involved process, the kinds of songs with a certain evolution to their creation.  So....I have no idea why I'd give a shit to hear early takes of "Matchbox", "Every Little Thing" or "I Need You".  The version of "Money" is essentially the same but with less piano.  Since I would have much preferred a Rubber Soul box set this year (to commemorate its 60th anniversary) I am highly interested in early takes of "I've Just Seen a Face", "In My Life" and a first-time listen at the initial version of "Nowhere Man" before they scrapped it and started fresh with a remake.  I'm not sure how the listed outtakes of "Love You To (take 7)", "Strawberry Fields (take 26) or "She's Leaving Home (take 1" will be at all different from the versions already included on their respective box sets. 

There are a few true delights.  A "Baby You're a Rich Man" outtake, because it's never been entirely confirmed whether or not these raw session tapes survived (having been taped at Olympic rather than Abbey Road).  An isolation of the orchestral overdubs on "I Am the Walrus" has promise.  An early instrumental runthrough of "Hey Bulldog" is most welcome.  But again, all of the White Album, Let it Be and Abbey Road selections apear to be the same as what was already released on their box sets.  What the fuck, man?  Why would I buy all of this shit twice?  So I'm expected to fork over more than a hundred dollars (even for just the CDs) for what?  Half a dozen new tracks?

I hate to be the thief, but this is the kind of commerce that tends to keep a good man underground.  You brought it on yourself, Apple.  And fuck your Uber ads too.
 

In a victory for impoverished collectors, Apple has acquiesced to making the new Anthology Vol. 4 available as a stand-alone from the expensive box sets.  Also, this year, Apple re-released the 'Mono' LP boxset, although, I believe, these have already sold out, as they were limited to 5000 copies.  This will guarantee that these new sets, much like the 2014 originals, will stay well above the $500 price tag.

We're starting to see why the individual Beatle parties may have been less than interested in this year's Anthology re-release, because at least a couple of them will be in direct competition with Apple for the luxury boxset market this season.  Sean Lennon is releasing Power To The People, encompassing John's 1971-72 NYC era, including both of the (near*) complete One-To-One charity concerts and Sean's standard remixes of the Sometime in New York City LP.  This album somewhat notoriously does not feature John Lennon's best songwriting, and Elephant Memory is notorously not his sharpest backing band, and Lennon's muddy original production and mix could definitely be improved upon.

(* Sean Lennon has made the asinine decision to exclude any and every version of "Woman is the Nigger of the World" from this set, for reasons I presume  consist of the kind of cowardice which most inflamed John's nerves.  This track, which is admittedly only about a midgrade-quality Lennon composition with an overstuffed wannabe-Spector production, has been uncontroversially available all of these years up until now, and I've never personally known a black person who was aware of it who found it in the least bit offensive, but maybe that's a generational thing.  Because your kids are soft, stunted and helpless.)

McCartney meanwhile will be releasing a London Town box set, which again is hardly his finest work.  Most interestingly would be to see if it includes a couple of curious and delightful album-length demo tapes which Paul recorded on respective vacations between 1976-77 in the lead up to the LP.  McCartney's demos are almost always entertaining, with not only his fresh new numbers but off-the-cuff ditties and some tuneful instrumentals, all of which seem to be a little stewed in weed whimsy.  "Ooboo Juboo" is one such unreleased fan favorite from one of these demos.  McCartney's unleashed muse is far more interesting than the overly commercially calculated finished product.

.......

There's several other promising non-Beatle box sets out this season - Dylan's Through The Open Window (Bootleg Series Vol. 17, 1956-1963); Floyd's Wish You Were Here; Hendrix's Axis: Bold As Love; The Who's Who Are You; Zappa's One Size Fits All; Bowie's I Can't Give Everything Away (2002-2016); Springsteen's Nebraska; Talking Heads' More Songs About Food and Buildings; Nick Drake's Making of Five Leaves Left.

I somehow got my greedy mitts on the new Anthology 4.  So looking at the new material....

It seems weird in hindsight that "Tell Me Why" was never performed live by the band, even on a BBC session, so this outtake provides the closest equivalent to that.

"If I Fell" includes a novel 'knuckle-knock-on-strings' intro which was probably wisely discarded.

Why is a basically identical take of "Matchbox" included?  Because Ringo has to have somthing to do.

I had the lowest expectations for outtakes of "Every Little Thing" and "I Need You", among the group's least inventive efforts, but they're pretty fun.  "Every Little Thing", without timpani, might be as good as the released version.  "I Need You" is taken at a quicker pace, and the band is clearly having a good time.

"I've Just Seen a Face" has an unexpected extra rhythm guitar from Lennon, making me wonder if this also exists on the released track but mixed out.

"In My Life" and "Nowhere Man" are not terribly different from the released versions, but their raw nature makes them compelling.  The arrangement of "Nowhere Man", which was discarded for a remake, is more turgid and Paul's bass part is much less polished.

Some of the best moments of these entire sets are in listening in on the stray studio banter, and "Baby You're a Rich Man" has some requests for "cokes" and, more explicitly, "cannabis resin", which Paul notes would help for the "High Court tomorrow", referencing the Rolling Stones' legal issues at the time.  (Mick Jagger was present for this session, but suggestions that he participated in backing vocals have never been confirmed.)  Take #11 is only a few seconds of intro, while Lennon calls out Harrison's out-of-tune guitar as "a curse".  Take #12 appears to be the released version, unadorned with overdubs, and, with its extended ending coming to a collapse, seems to debunk the other rumor that Lennon at one point sings "baby you're a rich fag Jew", which would be unfortunate coming weeks before Epstein's death.

A rehearsal of "All You Need is Love" is just that, basically a run-through, with Lennon ad-libbing some unused harmony parts and George playing some rougher guitar licks.

"Fool on the Hill" is essentially an instrumental version of the released track, with some elements more pronounced, including some stray giggles, seat creaks and cocktail glass clinks.

The cello/trumpet instrumental track from "I Am the Walrus" is fascinating, but has a little leakage, probably from the studio monitors during recording.

"Hey Bulldog" is a pretty faithful instrumental rehearsal.

The Peter Jackson-aided remixes of the '95 "new" tracks, "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love", both have a greatly improved John Lennon vocal sound, as would be expected due to the quality of the recent "Now and Then".

I've only dipped slightly into the older Anthology set, which has an indecipherable set of suffixes (A,B,C, L2) which presumably denote which tracks have been updated with remixes or not.  Sadly, I can say that take #1 of "Strawberry Fileds" does not restore the beautiful backing vocals so commonly found on the bootleg versions, for equally indecipherable reasons, even more inexplicable considering how the Sgt Pepper box set release had already done this.  When over half of the new Vol. 4 is sourced directly from these recent box set editions, it's inexcusable that this Anthology re-release couldn't update its sources likewise.