November 6, 2003

Getting Back to Essentials, Beatles Refuse to Let It Be

f all the Beatles recordings, none has a history as fraught as "Let It Be," and on Nov. 18 Capitol Records will add another wrinkle to the story, with the release of "Let It Be . . . Naked."

One thing listening to the new album makes clear is that it won't end the debate — a perennial among Beatles fans since the original "Let It Be" album was released in 1970 — about how the album was meant to sound. There is, it turns out, both good news and bad. In purely sonic terms, "Let It Be . . . Naked" is a real treat. Remixed from the original multitrack session tapes, these performances have a warmth and fullness that makes the sound on the original album seem flat and squashed. The most notable difference, and the one that occasioned the remix in the first place, is that the lush choirs and orchestrations that Phil Spector larded onto the songs "Let It Be," "The Long and Winding Road" and "Across the Universe" have been shorn away, leaving the unadorned performances that the band originally meant to release.

There are other assets. The acoustic guitars on "For You Blue," "Two of Us" and "Across the Universe" have a lovely bloom. And when the band goes electric, in "Get Back," "Dig a Pony" and "I've Got a Feeling," the sound is clean and sharp.

The drawbacks have a good deal to do with the differences between this album and the versions of "Let It Be" to which listeners have become accustomed. But they go deeper than that. They raise a more purely historical question: What kind of album did the Beatles have in mind when they recorded this material? To these ears, it wasn't "Let It Be . . . Naked."

A bit of history. During the "White Album" sessions in 1968, tensions within the group were beginning to run high, and much of that two-disc album is a compilation of individual projects. Each of the Beatles ran his own session for his own songs, and they called one another in only as needed.

John Lennon in particular was beginning to pull away from the group, having become more interested in collaborating with his new love, Yoko Ono. George Harrison had other interests, from Indian music to collaborations with Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, both of whom, he observed, had a respect for his musicianship that he didn't feel in his own band. Ringo Starr had quit the Beatles briefly during the "White Album" sessions, at least partly because he discovered that Paul McCartney had redone some of his drum parts. Only Mr. McCartney — now Sir Paul — was thoroughly keen on immediately getting back to work after that album was released.

One thing the Beatles agreed on was that a new direction was needed — or, really, an old one. Since "Rubber Soul," in 1965, their studio work had become increasingly complex, and involved building songs by recording the basic guitar and drum tracks first, then overdubbing the bass, solos, vocals and other instruments. What they proposed for "Let It Be" was going back to the process they had used in the sessions for their first album, "Please Please Me," in 1963: playing their music live in the studio, with the tapes running.

At that time, though, the Beatles were still playing concerts (they retired from the stage in 1966), and had a polished repertory to record. But beginning in late 1964, they tended to bring unfinished ideas into the studio, using the sessions to turn them into completed songs. "Let It Be" would incorporate this process in an unusual way. The sessions were filmed for a proposed television special, and as originally envisioned the rehearsals would make up the first part of the show, with a one-off live performance of the new material as its conclusion.

It was to be, as trumpeted in the advertisements for "Get Back," the first single from the sessions, "The Beatles as Nature Intended." And in a way, that's what it was, although the concert ended up taking place on the roof of Apple, the Beatles' offices and recording studio on Savile Row, and the television special was released as a feature film instead. What also happened was that the bickering started anew; this time Harrison quit for a while.

When the sessions ended, neither the Beatles nor their producer, George Martin, could face wading through the tapes to assemble an album. That task fell to Glynn Johns, who assembled an album drawn from the sessions' finished recordings, and originally to be called "Get Back." Included in his version were pre- and postperformance quips, meant to convey the off-the-cuff nature of the sessions.

Mr. Johns ended up making three versions of the "Get Back" album, none of which received unanimous approval from the group members, who were busy fighting among themselves. Meanwhile the film was finished, and with Lennon's and Harrison's approval — although not, it seems, Sir Paul's — Mr. Spector was brought in to make a finished soundtrack album. He added the choirs and orchestrations to a handful of tracks. When it turned out that Lennon's "Across the Universe" and Harrison's "I Me Mine" were to be included in the film, an unreleased 1968 recording of "Across the Universe" was exhumed from the files and given the Spector treatment, which included slowing down the recording and burying it in sonic mush, and the group was brought in to record "I Me Mine" afresh.

That recording lasted less than two minutes, but Mr. Spector extended it by repeating some of its verses. He also brought members of the group in for guitar and drum overdubs, effectively getting them to violate their own "no overdubs" and "no editing" rule for this project. He did retain the between-songs chatter and left other songs alone.

When Apple announced its plan earlier this year to bring out a restored, un-Spectorized version of the "Let It Be" album, collectors assumed the new version would be one of the "Get Back" albums prepared by Mr. Johns. But "Let It Be . . . Naked" sweeps away all this history, the Johns versions as well as the Spector mixes.

Instead of suggesting an informal session in which the Beatles play their new songs, chat and run through oldies, "Let It Be . . . Naked" treats the album as if it were "Rubber Soul," or"Please Please Me." Gone are the count-ins and comments, the oldies and jams. Instead each song begins and ends cold, a finished, polished production.

That can be disconcerting. "Get Back," for example, lacks the coda that had been edited onto the version released as a single, and in losing the applause (it was a rooftop take) and the postperformance comments, the song fades abruptly. Nor has the "no editing" rule been restored. "I Me Mine" is extended here as well, and some songs — most notably "Let It Be" — involve editing between multiple takes.

Given all that, it's difficult to think of this new version as the belated, definitive version of "Let It Be." It isn't, in fact, "Let It Be . . . Naked" at all, but "Let It Be" with a fig leaf.