U.S. Revolver?

why do we need them ?

 

That Capitol didn't add any singles to Revolver undercuts the notion that Capitol was constantly meddling in that respect. Of course, some people would feel ripped off if Capitol had released the entire Parlophone Revolver with three tracks that they had already paid for. As it is, the Capitol Revolver is a standard 11 track album, similar to other Capitol Beatles albums.

 

So your enjoyment of these albums at the time and for many years was in no way tarnished by your current perspective?

 

Here's an analogy. A less-than-perfect one, but, in any event here it is:

Say you bought a new car. You loved the way it looked and handled, and you drove it to some really great places, which you enjoyed, and from which you took away beuatiful memories that would last you for the rest of your days. Then, one day, you learned that the car dealer in the next town would have sold you the same model car, but with a better engine and interior, air conditioning and stereo, for the same money you paid for your stripped down model. You realize that the dealer from whom you bought your car had really ripped you off. From that point onward, even though the beautiful memories of your travels, and even your enjoyment of the car itself, would remain unchanged, your view of that car would forever afterward be tainted by the knowledge that you were screwed when you bought it, and your travels might well have been even more enjoyable if you has been able to own the better model.

Okay, I expect to be roundly ridiculed by this analogy, the Beatles albums are not purely a commodity like a car, but it does begin to explain how I feel about the American albums.

 

But didn't you buy the 'better' version of the car a couple times again because it wasn't cost-prohibitive to do so - without even needing to get rid of the original 'ripoff' vehicle that you have the sentimental attachment to? And it still runs; you still take it out for drives to get that certain old feel. The original crooked dealer? Ah, to hack with them. And then you bought another one and even bought the reissue of the ripoff vehicle again, only in a compact version.

Sounds like someone is enjoying the fruits of a consumer smorgasbord a few times over!

 

A case of "less is less".

 

The Italian version blows away the US and UK versions.

 

Well, I did qualify my post by saying it was a less than perfect analogy . In the decades following my discovery and purchase of the British versions I only pulled my originals out once - in February of 2014, for a brief tour down "memory lane" on the 50th anniversary of their arival here. Otherwise I have little use for those albums on either a sonic or artistic level. I absolutely don't hate them, I just don't waste my time listening to them.

 

-That "Collection" was a compilation, not an official "new album".

-Didn't Something New contain "something old" too?

I think they just had the minimum of 11 tracks needed for an album, and there was no old album material to catch up with.

 

Again, Capitol left the album intact aside from the tracks that they had already released on a massively popular album that many people already owned.

 

No, first and only time on a '60s Capitol LP for all tracks.

 

Compared to the United Artists soundtrack album for A Hard Day's Night, yes, absolutely. And to the vast number of buyers it didn't matter that Something New was on a different label; there were a number of tracks that overlapped between the two albums.

 

Yes, of course, who could forget the greatest Capitol Beatles album of them all:



I remember the enjoyment we had listening to all the great new Beatles songs on it. To this day, who isn't awe-struck by the artistic integrity and respect for fans this Capitol masterwork represented?

 

Who said that The Beatles were opposed to it?

 

With a double album with 11 minute sides, Crapitol is giving you a bang for your buck.
Sometimes you wish The Beatles got the respect like the Kinks got from Reprise, the covers were altered but the UK albums remained intact.

 

I've said that before, as well- how many people who first heard Y & T in 1966 were like, "Wait a minute! This album's a total hodgepodge- you've got songs from three different sets of album sessions here!" Answer: none. Undoubtedly they put the damn record on, and just sat down and dug it for what it was. IMO if anything makes Y & T a "hodgepodge" it's the massive sonic difference between the Norman Smith-recorded Help! and Rubber Soul tracks and the Geoff Emerick-recorded Revolver tracks.

I'm not gonna lie: when I first heard Revolver -the U.S. version, cassette, Christmas of 1987- I was eleven years old and couldn't differentiate a Lennon song from a McCartney song from a Harrisong if my life depended on it It was all just The Beatles to me.

As do I...the dry UK mixes just don't sound "right" to me when it comes to those songs, probably because I heard the reverb-drenched US mixes long before I heard the UK mixes...

To be fair, not all of the Beatles' American albums were Dave Dexter's projects. By 1966 Bill Miller was in charge of "producing" the American albums, so Yesterday And Today and Revolver have his stamp on them, not Dexter's. I think some Beatles fans, even fifty plus years later, still sorta give Dave Dexter a bad rap simply because he dared to make public the fact that he didn't like the group. So what? No law states that everybody has to be a Beatles fan...they were simply another assignment his higher ups and Capitol gave him. Did he always exercise the best artistic (for lack of a better term) judgement when it came to The Beatles' records? Probably not, but it's not like George Martin was always 100% on the ball either.

 

At first they were largely unaware of what was going on. As their relationship with the company progressed they came to realize the extent of what was being done by Capitol. Their growing concern for their albums being artistic statements versus mere collections of songs, and their corresponding displeasure with Capitol's practices, became clear when it came time to renew their distribution deal with the company. Never again would Capitol be allowed to slice songs off the group's albums or alter their sound quality. If they were pleased with, or even indifferent to, what Capitol had been doing its likely they would not have insisted that the slicing, dicing and overall manipulation of their albums stop.

Remember that even after the new restrictions had been in place for more than a year, George Harrison had to force Capitol to literally stop the presses before manufacturing of the white album began and re-do the over-compressed masters for the album.

Who knows the continuing bastardizations we might have seen here in the US? A couple of songs pinched from Sgt Pepper and thrown onto a "Beatles '67" LP? The white album split into two separate releases, the first with Lady Madonna and The Inner Light on it, perhaps in glorious Duophonic because the suits in Hollywood would have been too lazy to ask EMI for true stereo mixes? The second half of the white album released as "Beatles 11" with a collage of random photos on the cover?

 

Except for Misery, There's a Place, Sie Leibt Dich, A Hard Day's Night, Can't Buy Me Love, I Should Have Known Better, I'm Down, Paperback Writer and Rain.

Sure, some were 'out of date' in 1966, but 4 of them strangely suddenly weren't out of date in 1970 when a further compilation album was needed.

 

Yes, but I don't think it was out of respect for the original album (which had been maimed without those three tracks anyway), they just didn't have material from older albums to use. They had the 11 tracks they needed and they had the latest number 1 single (Eleanor Rigby/ Yellow Submarine) included. If they hadn't released that single, I'm sure Capitol would have added Paperback Writer/Rain and cut out one or two songs. It's what they usually did.

Well, you said that the first and only "rip-off" by Capitol was The Early Beatles, and that's the same case: old songs published by another label. So, if you are coherent with your idea of a rip-off, Something New and Hey Jude would be included.

 

Exactly. No one who heard those records knew or cared. The fact that the Beatles chose different running orders for those albums does not imbue the tunes with larger structural qualities. They are standalone pop tunes, and innumerable track lineups could have worked.

 

Yes, but you could only get away with a hodgepodge like Y and T because it was the Beatles. As you suggest, a monkey could have selected the songs and the order and it still would have been an enjoyable album.

 

There are more than 479 million possible combinations of 12 tunes, regardless of artist. Consider varying album lengths and the inclusion or exclusion of singles, and that number rises again. Some of those millions of sequences might work better with certain listeners than others. But ultimately, it doesn't matter, because there is no larger compositional structure. They are standalone tunes.

 

Agreed, but what set the Beatles apart, especially in that time frame, was that virtually all the songs were good.

 

I said "old album material". Only the songs from Please Please Me and AHDN apply to that, and they had been published by other labels anyway.

Yes, but I think we can agree that Hey Jude was more of a compilation album of loose ends, while Revolver was "the new album by the Beatles", so including material that old (and already published) would have been too strange even for Capitol.

 

Most of the tunes on their own terms were "good," by 1960s teen pop standards, but most of the albums did not gel for me because of the stylistic variety. There were always songs I wanted to skip, not because I inherently disliked the song, but because I did not want to hear it in that context. I like "Here There and Everywhere" - mostly by other artists - but having it on the same album as "Tomorrow Never Knows" does not work for me. This is why I feel that Revolver was more of a hodgepodge than Y&T.

When I listened to the Beatles, I made my own compilations to go for consistency of mood. With the Rubber Soul/Y&T/Revolver-era tracks, I grouped most of the John and George Revolver tracks with similarly harder-edged stuff like Paperback Writer, Think For Yourself, and Day Tripper. I don't have the tapes anymore so I don't remember the exact contents or running orders. But those running orders worked for me better than most of the released versions, US or UK.