So today is February 9, and it’s the 50th
anniversary of The Beatles’ first appearance on Ed Sullivan, and I may have
watched it, and if not I saw the one the week after or two weeks after. I
remember, seriously. I was 7. But all that talk has got me thinking not of the
beginning of their career, but of the end. That’s the way I am.
The Beatles recorded most of what would
become Let It Be in January of 1969. It was a fiasco, and in the end they were
left with tapes featuring hundreds of hours of musical chaos that nobody wanted
to touch.
A few months later they got back together
and recorded what would become Abbey Road. This was released in the fall of
1969 and took its rightful place in the canon of Beatles masterworks.
In January of 1970, George Harrison went
back to the studio to put some finishing touches on one of the songs recorded
the previous year. Then the whole mess was given over to Phil Spector to sort
out and render presentable. This is an over-simplification of a complicated
history. There was a promo version of the soon-to-be-released album, called Get
Back, which I heard on the radio as a “CFRW Exclusive,” and which had the
pre-Spectorized versions of some of the songs, but what ultimately hit the
stores was an album called Let It Be, named for the song that became the first
(of two) hit singles from the LP, though the single version was somewhat
different from the album version. (That’s important; if you don’t know why,
you probably shouldn't be reading this.)
The album came packed in a box, with a big
book, which accompanied the film, also called Let It Be, that was released to
cinemas at the same time as the LP, but by the time I got around to buying the
album, which was in August of 1970, not a single copy of the book version was
to be had, and I had to settle for the LP, sans book, but with a red apple
label. (The film didn't do very well, and it’s on YouTube if you’re curious. I
was.)
It was the last Beatles album. I emphasize
that because I've read so many latter day discographies that put Let It Be
before Abbey Road. They do this, presumably, because the tracks for Let it Be
were recorded earlier than the tracks for Abbey Road. This may be so, but that
doesn't make Abbey Road the last Beatles album, the poetic correctness of ending
that album with The End notwithstanding.
Abbey Road was well ingrained in our minds before
Let It Be made its public appearance, the neural pathways of our brains
permanently altered by the bang bang of Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. This is
important information for all the no-brains who insist that Let It Be came
before Abbey Road.
But the most important part of this story
is that I bought the album in Minneapolis. I was 13. My hair was short, much
shorter than I wanted it to be. It did not feel right to be buying a Beatle
album with such short hair, but there was nothing to be done about that. I had
to buy it anyway, and I scoured the downtown area for a copy with the book, unsuccessfully.
I bought the copy without the book, with the red Apple label. I was familiar
with most of the songs from the CFRW exclusive, which I had surreptitiously
taped on my Sanyo portable cassette recorder, but they had not played Dig It,
Maggie Mae, One After 909, Across The Universe, or Two Of Us, though I had
heard Two Of Us on the promo that the featured on Ed Sullivan earlier in the
year, the last such appearance of the group on the show, on which Paul looked
as if he hadn’t slept (or washed his hair) for a month.
I want to know who’s playing bass.
And The Long And Winding Road, which became
The Beatles’ final hit single, sounded quite different from the version I’d
heard, having all those strings and angelic voices added by Maestro Spector.
Paul was, reportedly, incensed. Paul, though, not surprisingly, has had the
last laugh. He has redone the song, changing the arrangement each time, and never
quite scaling it back down to basics, on Wings Over America, Give My Regards To
Broad Street, Tripping The Live Fantastic, Good Evening New York City, and Back
In The USA, just in case we didn't get the point.
And then there was Let It Be Naked, consisting of remastered takes of the tracks from Let It Be, at the behest of Sir
Paul, without M. Spector’s overdubs, released in 2003, and which seemed to take
the world not exactly by storm.
If you want to hear The Long And Winding Road the way I heard it
back in early 1970 coming from the promo copy of Get Back on the radio, listen to the version on
Anthology 3; that’s it.
So let’s hear it for Let It Be, the last
Beatles album...
