Like many who straddle the line between Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, I have childhood memories of hearing The Beatles’ music, but didn’t buy my first album until after they had broken up. My first Beatles purchases—and for many years, the only albums of theirs I owned, other than the mandatory Sgt. Pepper’s—were the red and the blue albums: 1962-1966 and 1967-1970.

Greatest hits albums had of course become industry standard by the early ’70s, but like the act they celebrated, this pair of collections broke the mold back in 1973. A double-LP greatest hits package was a novelty in itself—but two double LPs? That’s crazy talk.

Unless you were The Beatles, that is: a group that entered the scene in 1962 as the world’s first popstar band and exited in 1970 as counter-culture art heroes, a quartet that set out to entertain the masses and ended up changing the world—the musical one, at a minimum.

In truth, four LPs was barely enough to skim the surface of what John Lennon, Paul McCartney. George Harrison and Ringo Starr achieved together, but damn if the compilers of the originals didn’t do a pretty fine job of collecting the highest of the high points. Almost all of the truly monumental songs from the lads’ eight years as a recording unit are present on the original 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 albums.

Almost.

Which gets directly to one of the main points of this release, a 50th anniversary CD reissue of the 1962-1966 double album. There are three notable differences between the original 1993 CD release and this 2023 reissue:

1. The Liner Notes: John Harris’ 2023 liner notes essay is a masterclass in this sort of thing, summing up beautifully the trajectory and velocity of both the music and the group making it, while hitting all the right notes in terms of how The Beatles and the culture influenced one another during this impossibly significant and fertile period.

2. The Recordings: The original 1962-1966 LP featured a mish-mash of mono and stereo recordings. The subsequent 1993 CD issue featured mono versions of the first four tracks, with the remainder represented in stereo. Here, each and every recording appears in stereo, remixed and remastered by Giles Martin, son of the original producer Sir George Martin. The results—distinct separation between elements and scrubbed-with-a-toothbrush sound—deliver clarity so noticeable that at times these almost feel like different recordings… wonderful recordings, but noticeably different from what long-time listeners’ ears anticipate.

3. The Tracklist: The original 1993 CD version mirrored the original LP release, with 26 songs. As we all know, though, CDs can hold substantially more music than vinyl LPs, and this reissue takes advantage of that reality by adding 12 more songs to 1962-1966, six on each disc.

The core tracklist is one chart-topping, ground-breaking, pulse-accelerating hit after another, from the easygoing blues-and-harmony of “Love Me Do,” through the headlong, thrilling “She Loves You” and “Can’t Buy Me Love,” to early experiments like the rousing “A Hard Day’s Night” (opening with the most famous sustained chord in rock history) and “I Feel Fine” (opening with the first intentional use of feedback in popular music), and Paul’s masterpiece-born-in-a-dream “Yesterday.”

Disc two is somehow even more impressive as John’s songs get more personal (“Help,” “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away,” “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” “Nowhere Man,” and the explicitly autobiographical “In My Life”), while Paul reaches new heights (“We Can Work It Out,” “Drive My Car,” “Paperback Writer,” Eleanor Rigby”) and Ringo finally gets a decent original to sing (“Yellow Submarine”).

On disc one, the 2023 reissue adds three songs from the boys’ early catalog of originals. The raucous “I Saw Her Standing There” (a #14 hit as the US B-side to “I Want To Hold Your Hand”) was a glaring omission from the original; gentle ballad “This Boy” (the UK B-side to “I Want To Hold Your Hand”) features the guys doing their best Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers impression, with superb harmonies; and punchy, snappy “You Can’t Do That” is among their more notable early album tracks.

Equally welcome are the addition of three covers from the group’s early cover-heavy repertoire: their eager embrace of Smokey Robinson’s r&b classic “You Really Got A Hold On Me”; their pure-giddy-fun run at Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”; and their iconic late-at-night-and-John’s-voice-is-shredded take on the Isley Brothers hit “Twist And Shout.”

On disc two, the 2023 reissue adds the jangly, sparkling “If I Needed Someone” from Rubber Soul, a nod to George, whose songs were completely absent from the original red album. The other five additions come at the end of disc two, where they tack on fully a third of Revolver (as one should): George’s “Taxman,” Paul’s “Got To Get You Into My Life” and “Here, There And Everywhere,” and John’s “I’m Only Sleeping” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” (It remains a shame that “Tomorrow” didn’t make the original version of the album, given how its experimentalism went on to inspire entire genres of music.)

It should not surprise anyone that a writer whose fantasy baseball team was proudly named the “Whining Traditionalist Yahoos” still has a sentimental attachment to the original LP version of this album, complete with its untouched mono versions. Those will always feel like the definitive recordings of these Beatles classics, but this lovingly presented, vibrantly remixed, and appropriately augmented reissue should nonetheless please fans of all ages and musical persuasions.

*

[Author’s note: This review benefited from my recent read of The Beatles 1962-1966: Every Album, Every Song by Alberto Bravin and Andrew Wild, an enthusiastic, witty, meticulously researched and presented track-by-track analysis of the band’s early years. Highly recommended!]

Rating: A-

User Rating: Not Yet Rated

Comments