Beatles’ New Album Disappointing
“Beatles Anthology I” The Beatles (Capitol Records)
The public will now find out what collectors have known for years: The Beatles didn’t make fab music all the time. They made some dreck that should have stayed buried in the vaults.
The much-hyped double CD “Beatles Anthology I” came out Tuesday, but many fans will wince at the plain-awful alternate takes of hit songs, along with inconsistent scraps of demo tapes, radio and TV shows, home recordings and just about anything else that scrapes the bottom of the barrel.
It’s a huge letdown, given the excellence of this week’s three-part “Beatles Anthology” TV documentary and the feisty energy of last year’s double CD of the Beatles’ “Live at the BBC,” featuring Fab Four cover songs of hits by idols Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins and Ray Charles.
Tuesday’s release harms the Beatles legacy rather than helps it. The songs are filled with false starts, dragging tempos, botched vocal harmonies (John Lennon and Paul McCartney are even off-key at times - a rarity for them) and a plunge into nervous laughter once the band realizes it’s blown a particular track. Most obvious examples: “A Hard Day’s Night” and “No Reply.”
Many of the 60 tracks are previously unreleased (except in bootleg form among collectors) and cover the period from 1958 - when John Lennon and Paul McCartney were in the pre-Beatles skiffle group the Quarry Men - to 1964, just before they broke big in the United States.
The new CDs include five songs from the Beatles’ failed 1962 audition tape for Decca Records, but it’s easy to see why Decca nixed them. The tracks contain a hammy version of the Coasters hit “Searchin”’ (written by Leiber & Stoller), plus two pedestrian lead vocals by George Harrison on “Three Cool Cats” and “The Sheik of Araby.” There were also two originals: McCartney’s painfully corny “Like Dreamers Do” (“waiting for your kiss, waiting for the bliss”) and Lennon’s first-ever composition, the nerdy “Hello Little Girl” (“when I see you every day, I say, ‘Hello little girl”’).
The collection starts off with the “new” Beatles song, “Free as a Bird,” the Lennon solo-era demo that the surviving Beatles fleshed out. Lennon’s vocal is murky and the song never gels. A brilliant video of it highlighted the first installment of the documentary, but the audio runs out of steam.
The new discs have some novelty items - a recording with pre-Ringo Starr drummer Pete Best (“Love Me Do,” which Best butchers by adding fancy fills), and the only recording with bassist Stu Sutcliffe (“Cayenne”). Other novelties: McCartney’s badly Latinized “Besame Mucho” (another Coasters cover) and three false starts to “Eight Days a Week.”
What are the highlights? There are a few, but they could be boiled into a short-form EP rather than two CDs. The five live tracks from a Swedish TV show in 1963 are riveting (Lennon explodes on Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got a Hold on Me”). Elsewhere, an unreleased Harrison tune, “You Know What to Do,” is sweetly engaging. And “Please Please Me” (with no harmonica on this take) is powerful. So is the switch from waltz tempo to 4/4 on “I’ll Be Back” (the time change shows how quickly the Beatles worked in the studio), and, finally, Lennon’s cover of Little Willie John’s “Leave My Kitten Alone,” which rocks.
But too much of the compilation suffers from bad sound and bad performances, explaining why these takes were rejected in the first place. Regrettably, the liner notes also come with four pages of merchandising items (the Apple Records “hemp hat” costs $25!). Maybe the rumor is true that Harrison and Starr actually need the money and McCartney gave his approval to help them. The new double CD costs $24, but that cost is way too high for what you get.
xxxx Beatles TV rating Bag the hype. “The TV event of a lifetime” wasn’t even the TV event of the month. Part I of ABC’s six-hour “Beatles Anthology” scored an 18.6 rating and 28 percent audience share from 9 to 11 p.m. Sunday in Nielsen’s 33 largest markets. By comparison, last week’s episode of NBC’s “ER” delivered a 27.8 national rating and 45 percent share. ABC estimates that more than 47 million Fab Four fans caught the special, which won the time slot. The miniseries continues tonight and Thursday from 9-11 p.m. Philadelphia Inquirer