(Apple 1988)
!!! A+ COMPILATION !!!
Initially released separately, this no-frills pair of discs is designed to simplify the Beatles' discography -- the year after their albums were standardized to the UK catalog worldwide on CD -- by gathering all of their canonical material that wasn't on the eleven proper albums, Yellow Submarine or the American Magical Mystery Tour (retrofitted into the official sequence). This is a splendid idea, well-executed (and in the original incarnation, with informative liner notes by Mark Lewisohn) and I wish other bands took the same approach to collecting their b-sides in one place. Most bands aren't the Beatles, though, and a quick look at this tracklist reveals the extent to which that's true: hardly a collection of odds and ends, this contains a great many of the band's biggest hits and most culturally ubiquitous and long-lived selections, since around half of their singles were not included on the original LPs. The only tracks that really feel as inconsequential as the average performer's "rarities" are the German-language versions of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Loves You" -- good for a laugh, at least -- and the late-period novelty throwaway "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)."
Otherwise this embodies some of the Beatles' best music of all, and none of it duplicates any of the content on the albums, so if you have those you can pick this up and very simply and easily round out the catalog. The set gathers both sides of all of the non-album singles the Beatles released in the UK during their career (not including those that Capitol compiled on Magical Mystery Tour), the scattered exclusive b-sides that accompanied an album cut, the entirety of the EP Long Tall Sally, the Beatles' one contribution to a various-artists collection (the original "charity" version of "Across the Universe"), the three songs released as singles in different mixes or takes from the albums ("Love Me Do," "Get Back" and "Let It Be"), and the errant "Bad Boy," recorded specifically for the American market and included on the deleted UK comp A Collection of Beatles Oldies.
We start off with "Love Me Do," the September 4th, 1962 version with Ringo on drums, apparently a bit of a fraught session at which Ringo struck producer George Martin as unprofessional; a remake from a week later with session player Andy White drumming and a dejected Ringo on tambourine featured on the Please Please Me album the following year. The album version with a marginally less nervous band plays better, but both recordings are striking and slightly funky. Martin preferred the single and tried to avoid accidental use of the Andy White version -- the performances are similar enough to cause confusion -- but somehow the master tape of the single is the one that got destroyed. Since the early '60s, when Parlophone resorted to using the Andy White take on represses of the 7", any release of the single version has been from a disc source, first on Capitol's Rarities (1980) then on the 1988 and 2009 remasters, each progressively higher in quality than the previous dub; but all variants are imperfect. The version with Ringo drumming never saw release in the United States until Rarities, though it made it to a Canadian 45; Vee Jay's Tollie subsidiary didn't get in on the action until 1964 and their enormously successful North American release of the song had the tambourine.
The Beatles' breakthrough UK hit "Please Please Me" is skipped because of its placement on the album of the same name along with its b-side, "Ask Me Why." Instead we move straight to that single's stale follow-up, "From Me to You" (April 1963), which suggests little of the strength of the prior hit and the LP released just a month earlier. It treads along in friendly, cheerful manner with little momentum, fixates too much on the signature harmonica, and is upstaged by its slightly less stilted b-side "Thank You Girl," a reasonably credible adolescent love song with signature "oh-ohs" that sound increasingly sexual. All that said, live performances of "From Me to You" tended to bring some real muscle into it, so perhaps the piecemeal nature of the recording session was a factor in the single's ho-hum quality. It was a smash hit in England even so, though it never quite made the leap over to America even post-Beatlemania. (Capitol never released it at all in the '60s; "Thank You Girl" made it to The Beatles' Second Album.)
Things spin around completely with the band's fourth single, maybe their quintessential recording and surely one of the greatest singles of all time, the frenzied, unbottled "She Loves You" (July 1963) which can barely spit out its amusingly senseless, chiding third-person narrative -- about a girl who you need to make up with because even though you caused her to nearly "lose her mind," she now realizes you didn't mean it -- in favor of its repeated peak-level hooks with insistent, barbaric repetitions of the title phrase and primal, unrelentingly insane woooo noises. It's as if the same moment that produced "Thank You Girl" kept going and became totally unstable and uncorked as the night wore on (and in fact, it's probably not a coincidence that this was recorded on the day the Abbey Road studio was invaded by security-breaching teenagers during a recording session); not since Little Richard had rock & roll sounded simultaneously so precisely constructed and so out of control. It has two hidden meanings: one demanding that you get up and scream with mystified bliss, the other insisting that it be played again right away once it finishes. If you ever do make it to the b-side, "I'll Get You," you find more of the same: a remarkable request for absolute devotion by our new gods.
From the bass notes of the opening through to the delirious sensuality of the chorus, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (November 1963), the song that broke the Beatles in America, sounds like it's coming from outer space. The accusations, mostly in the U.S., that the Beatles were somehow subliminally wooing their female fans to become spawns of Satan or sexual slaves or whatnot aren't far from understandable in this case: the clunking rhythm guitar track, the appalling left-field vocals, Ringo's insane percussion work, and the intensity of the "I can't hiiiiiide!" are like nothing else previously labeled rock & roll. You could listen to this repeatedly all day grasping for the full effect of its sheer entity. Many people did. Although the flip "This Boy" doesn't leave you reeling from the same kind of culture shock, it is beautiful three-part-harmony rock & roll, with an appropriately pained lead from John and a wonderful riff. This single on its own is another of the greatest ever pressed and is twice as evocative as most albums of the period.
And with that, Beatlemania overtook the globe throughout 1964, a harrowing and infinitely exciting story told in many different places in this discography; the next two Beatles singles, both A- and b-sides, were part of the A Hard Day's Night project. This is important to mention because the narrative of the Beatles' singles up through 1967 really do tell a remarkable, ever-heightening story. That story is rejoined in November here with "I Feel Fine," their strangest and most breathtakingly infectious single to date, which is saying a lot given the above. "Can't Buy Me Love" had moved to straightforward rocking, "A Hard Day's Night" introduced introspection, and that sensation of looming adulthood allows the relationship here to sound slightly less perpetually teenage than the prior chronicles of something so innocent as hand-holding prompting a violently frenetic response. An utterly incredible recording, it begins with a squeal of feedback before possibly the best rhythm-guitar riff of all time begins. This is what hero worship is all about. Ringo's nonstop cymbals and the tower of vocals reach back toward the days of Hamburg and the Cavern, days which in a sense the Beatles were probably wishing for by now. But no song released in 1962 or 1963 would have the courage and confidence of this one, which ends with the mildly apocalyptic sounds of barking in the fade. "I Feel Fine" is paired with the slightly monotonous headbanger "She's a Woman" (what a title); Paul belts it out with a debt to mid-'60s soul but it's no "I Saw Her Standing There," thanks at least partially to his amusingly vapid rhyme scheme here, but he's clearly having a great time and the band does hit upon a modest groove after a time.
"Ticket to Ride," on Help!, continued the progression into uncharted territory for the Beatles; as soon as others had time to imitate their sound and general demeanor, they would change it again, and like all of their early hits this one was light years ahead of the radio but still struck a chord with everyone listening, as though they were all hypnotized. Its accompanying "Yes It Is" (April 1965), gathered here, is a sequel of sorts to "This Boy" with its sensitive three-part harmony and John's emotionally overwhelmed crooning at the bridge; lyrically, it's in the vein of the funerary oddity "Baby's in Black" with a weirdly specific, Edgar Allan Poe-like vision of despair: the protagonist sinks into a melancholy episode whenever his partner is seen in red, which apparently was the color "she wore" when some macabre event occurred. This becomes less ridiculous both because Lennon sings his solo portion so beautifully (approximating soul without, it seems, even trying) and because his lyric is so strangely observant, with "everybody knows, I'm sure" taking John and Paul's reputation as masters of the conversational lyric into a new dimension with its evocation of how an absinthe-swilling anti-hero might respond to a world of "others" chattering about him behind his back.
Such outsiders -- always "they" -- haunt Lennon's lyrics of 1964 and 1965, peaking with "Help!", which isn't here but when you think about it is a truly audacious song to release as a single; despite its masterful popcraft, it is nothing short of the laying bare of the singer, the totally unfiltered exposure of base insecurities for an entire world to hear and take to #1. That underlines how relatively (if understandably) superficial its b-side "I'm Down" (July 1965), closing the first disc of this compilation, is. Poorly written with a kind of vaguely misogynist rage to react against John's vaguely misogynist misery on "Yes It Is," it does boast one of the hardest rocking Beatles performances in their studio career, one of those scattered moments when you hear the old all-nighters in Germany manifesting themselves again.
Disc two kicks off with the two songs that weren't quite witty or introspective enough for the simultaneously released Rubber Soul and became a double-sided smash (December 1965), though both are among the few Beatles songs for which superior contemporaneous cover versions exist, "Day Tripper" by Otis Redding (so convincing it's like he wrote it) and "We Can Work It Out" by Stevie Wonder. Nevertheless, both songs are excellent as long as you don't compare them to their close relatives on the album ("Drive My Car" and "I'm Looking Through You" respectively); "Tripper" is built on one of the Beatles' very best riffs, almost Stones-like, and "We Can Work It Out" has an exceptionally strong Paul McCartney lyric built around yet another argument with then-girlfriend Jane Asher, the same intensely tense relationship that inspired "Looking" and the later "For No One." Both songs have the usual lovingly weird interludes that are amped up and emphasized by George Martin: a wildly disorienting instrumental break on "Tripper" and a circus-like harmonium overdub on "Work It Out."
The next single, "Paperback Writer" (June 1966), is one of the few cases in which a b-side artistically overwhelms the hit altogether. Nevertheless, "Writer" is a perfect taste of the Beatles' increasingly eccentric sensibilities as of Revolver (not that they weren't always a certain kind of eccentric), with an engaging quirkiness to the Brian Wilson-influenced harmony vocals and arrangement, that still manages to function mightily as unadulterated rock & roll. With so much of the Beatles' 1966-67 work, which I often rate below most fans, what's there doesn't bother me. It's what's not there that keeps me from praising it to the skies, and I maintain that Lennon all but lost it during this period, but I often forget how fabulous Paul McCartney's work was throughout the last half of the Beatles' career. His sense of humor is criminally overlooked, much closer to Ray Davies than John Lennon, and the lyrics to "Paperback Writer" are excellent and surprisingly evocative (though I'm still bugged that he claims to be writing a novel that is "based on a novel"). The song points in the direction of his sharply satirical work on the White Album.
But in any case, the b-side "Rain" is something else entirely; with its backward loops, Byrdsian guitars and utterly phenomenal work from Ringo (only "Ticket to Ride" rivals it as his best performance), it's experimental but stronger even than works like "Tomorrow Never Knows" because it's also fun and playful, strange and individualistic without being druggy. It even serves as Lennon's dry run for "Strawberry Fields Forever" thanks to a lyric that is childlike without attempting tired whimsy, and the resignation in his vocal that sells the complexity of the offbeat emotions it captures. With its grinning, trippy, gorgeous vocals and beautifully ugly sonic guitar attacks, it's as discordant-yet-gripping as "She Said, She Said" or "I'm Only Sleeping"... and it easily tops both. To me, this is the perfect psychedelic Beatles: it's obviously a pop song but the fuck-all, anything-goes spirit makes it something bigger. The oddities aren't the star of the show, they're just a complement to a grand attraction.
At this point Past Masters totally skips an entire year in the Beatles' history, and a pivotal one; 1967 is completely absent here because the American Magical Mystery Tour, now part of the core catalog, gathered all the errant singles from that year. Therefore we miss pretty much the entirety of the band's psychedelic period -- therefore their best single of all, "Strawberry Fields Forever" c/w "Penny Lane," another double-A side -- and have a jarring leap straight from "Rain" to "Lady Madonna" (March 1968). As of "Paperback Writer"/"Rain" the Beatles were still kind of the Mop Tops, with another punishing world tour ahead of them; "Lady Madonna" finds them already over their subsequent assertion of total pop culture dominance with the Sgt. Pepper album and in a strange moment of limbo just past the excesses of their hippie period, the sobering death of Brian Epstein, the disastrous Magical Mystery Tour film project and on the cusp of their two-month exile in India at the ashram with the Maharishi. "Lady Madonna" offers the first glimpse of the back-to-basics Beatles, centered on a rollicking Elvis impersonation by Paul that gets things immediately back on track after an erratic period for the band. It's one of the band's more propulsive and instantly appealing works, evocative of Fats Domino in its boogie woogie-derived piano line; that it doesn't really move the band forward speaks to their aspirations back toward pure rock & roll, which would disrupt them again -- and less successfully -- the following year. George Harrison's b-side "The Inner Light," while pretty in a wispy sort of way, is slight enough that it's hard to imagine it was written after the infinitely more sophisticated "Within You, Without You."
"Hey Jude" (August 1968), the first single on the band's own label Apple, finds Paul McCartney once and for all laying down the rules of sensitive, perfectly judged rock balladry, and as on the White Album, he gets it just right. It's a complete turnaround from the blubbering mess of pop confections like "Hello, Goodbye." The Beatles knew better than to hide behind "Crimson & Clover" power chords -- "Hey Jude" demonstrates the band's key appeal, which is that they broke down barriers for others while lurking behind their own hold of an audience. This song made seven-minute singles an acceptable idea, but not a second of it seems wasted, even in the anthemic fadeout that occupies over half of the running time. It's pointless to claim that the song isn't touching -- a loving chide meant to pick five year-old Julian Lennon's head up in the midst of his parents' separation, but applicable somehow to the whole world in any moment of personal uncertainty -- and for my money it's leaps and bounds over "Yesterday." You just can't escape these clutches, and in its own way the blistering "Revolution" is similarly unifying. Hearing these two tracks you feel like you're a part of something; no wonder "Hey Jude" became the Beatles' biggest hit.
After the White Album -- too soon after -- the Beatles holed up for a month to record their next album, being filmed in the process, and prepare for what turned out not to be a tour or concert, replaced with the small gesture of an ostensibly impromptu performance on the roof of the Apple building in London on a cold Thursday morning in January. The sessions throughout the first month of 1969 were legendarily miserable, with interpersonal and technical problems as well as the sheer wrongheaded and badly-timed nature of the project causing major tensions. While the album was delayed for sixteen months, only finally released just after the band's official breakup in the spring of 1970, the first fruits of the sessions were unveiled in April 1969 with the "Get Back" single. This record is significant for, on both sides, carrying a co-bill on the credit: "The Beatles with Billy Preston." Their gratitude to Preston and centering of his name on the label was not undeserved; Preston makes "Get Back" a classic all by himself. His brilliant piano solo cooks in a song that, truth be told, barely qualifies as a significant composition -- or at least, a significant performance. (This indoor version of the song is eclipsed by the rooftop version heard in the film and on several later releases, which rocks much harder and boasts a stronger lead vocal.) The Beatles are Back to Basics here; down to bare instrumentation playing good old rock & roll with goofy, incompetent lyrics, vocal bravado, and that stomping beat. In contrast to the later edit on the album Let It Be, the 7" version of "Get Back" launches straight into the song without the studio chatter that kicks it off on LP, then features an extra, off-the-cuff-sounding verse by Paul at the end in lieu of the "hope we passed the audience" finale.
At any rate, this is another song completely overshadowed by its b-side, John's "Don't Let Me Down," an enormously persuasive, specific, desperate love song (unmistakably directed at Yoko Ono) and quite possibly the band's single best recording since "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane," and for certain one of Lennon's most moving songs this side of "In My Life." The sparse production and Preston's piano help make it a perfect moment, its teasing lyrics, decisive movement, and intoxicating soul flowing forth in breathtaking waves, exploding with that last climactic instrumental break, replete with the distant scream that makes it all so complete. I know that when I say I love the Beatles, this is exactly what I mean. And even this performance, while just about as good as anything the Beatles released, may be slightly lesser to the live rooftop counterpart heard in the film, with John seemingly feeling it even more and contributing beautiful wordless vocals in the final instrumental break.
Talking of Ono, the Beatles' rather audacious May 1969 single courts controversy by labeling itself "The Ballad of John and Yoko," though the song itself isn't especially divisive, enjoying a relaxed but driving groove behind its Chuck Berry-like intricate chronicle of the title couple's wild year of button-pushing protest activity and attention-whoring, presented with wit and charm. You have to admire the Beatles for sticking by this composition considering what some might consider a crowning example of Lennon's self-indulgence. All I hear is a swinging reminiscence of a wild and crazy time, and John and Paul -- the only Beatles on the track, soaring together in a kind of harmony that seemed impossible in the Get Back sessions a few months prior -- sound as enthusiastic as they ever did. Lennon continues to learn to relax as a vocalist while retaining every trace of his expressive abilities, and while this isn't a "Don't Let Me Down," it's one of the most delightful cuts in the late Beatles catalog. I also dig George's b-side, "Old Brown Shoe," with a spectacular band performance, but every time I hear it I can't ignore George's still-contemptible attitude toward the romantic partners he seems to regard as pathetic underlings, a problem that even extends to beautiful later cuts like "All Things Must Pass." The line "if I grow up I'll be a singer / wearing rings on every finger" is too good for me to dismiss the song as charmless, and the beat is relentless, but c'mon: "my love is something you can't reject"? "Who knows, baby, you may comfort me"? Not much progression since "You Like Me Too Much," it appears.
The final UK Beatles single is "Let It Be" (February 1970), a moving and powerful ballad from Paul from the Get Back sessions, which he simultaneously gave to Aretha Franklin; she took it perhaps to even better places. Interpreted by millions as either a solemn farewell to the band or a religious hymn, it mostly seems to be Paul's "Julia," a longing eulogy for the author's mother Mary McCartney, though nobody's saying the other two ideas aren't there or that they're any less personal. George Martin's mix of the song lacks Phil Spector's overdubs, but the Spector version on the LP is actually an improvement because of its more incisive guitar solo, one of Harrison's best. The b-side, "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)," is a flaky attempt at a "comedy record" that dates back to 1967 with a few '69 updates and demonstrates that, for fleeting moments, the unaffected charm was still there, though it's telling that they waited so long to find a place to bury it.
Regarding the rest of the material Past Masters covers: "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand" and "Sie Liebt Dich" are bizarre curiosities issued as a single on the EMI Odeon label in Germany in March 1964, with apparently little band enthusiasm. The songs of the Long Tall Sally EP are reviewed on this discography's EP page, but all four ("Long Tall Sally," "I Call Your Name," "Slow Down," "Matchbox") are essential Mania-period Beatles, "Name" being one of their best songs of all. "Bad Boy" was first released on the U.S. album Beatles VI and is a monstrously rocking Larry Williams cover -- yes, another one -- with a truly nasty, soaring Lennon vocal that like the unissued "Leave My Kitten Alone" reminds you of how powerful he was when engaged. ("Dizzy Miss Lizzie" was also recorded for Beatles VI but ended up on the UK Help! album because of a dearth of material the Beatles and George Martin were happy with.) The second disc is all singles except "Across the Universe," the same performance as on Let It Be minus Spector strings and choir, plus an overdub of wild bird sound effects (the song was commissioned for a charity compilation for the World Wildlife Fund) and a couple of band hangers-on (known then as "Apple Scruffs," the group of fans who haunted the steps of the studio and were also set to work putting copies of Two Virgins into brown paper sleeves to hide John and Yoko's nude bodies) lifted off the street outside the studio to badly but charmingly sing backing vocals. It's a tepid presentation of a lovely, sincere John song that deserved much better treatment, but it would take decades for a good Beatles version to see release and the definitive performance is likely not even by them but by Fiona Apple.
Past Masters stayed on the market for twenty-one years before Apple updated it in 2009. On the original '88 disc, all of the songs before "I Want to Hold Your Hand" are included in mono; Apple or EMI policy at the time dictated that two-track recordings would only be released in mono even though stereo mixes existed for "From Me to You" and "Thank You Girl"... they're awkward in stereo, but "Thank You Girl" is a lot more complete, with harmonica that never got tracked to the single. The 2009 disc restores these and also switches the two German cuts to perversely wide stereo versions, track on the left and vocals on the right, which probably isn't an improvement. (All of the Beatles' canon mono mixes were given their own separate release in 2009; this compilation's counterpart, Mono Masters, will be reviewed separately.)
What's odd about this compilation is that it couldn't be more drab and purely functional; it barely has artwork and does absolutely nothing except serve its purpose and straightforwardly present the songs in chronological order... and yet from start to finish, it is a delightful listen, an absolutely crucial complement to the thirteen core albums, and as good a greatest-hits compilation as exists for the Beatles, or really for anyone, even though a handful of hits are missing because they were on LPs. (Amazingly, there has yet to be a straightforward disc that just collects the twenty-six proper A-sides, which would also merit an A+ easily.) It is really the cornerstone of any Beatles collection, capturing the entirety of their evolution while duplicating nothing you'll find on their other important releases; it might look dull on the outside, but no fan should be caught without it.
***
[My old webpage had separate reviews of all of the Beatles' UK singles, and I've used that material from 2003 to form the main body of this otherwise new review.]
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