Beatles Anthology Revisited – new 28 hour podcast *

A re-up would be so awesome, as I, too, missed this by mere days........

Many thanx to all!

 

Beatles Songs Covered By Others And Songs The Beatles Covered


re-up

 

Spooky... At the very moment this thread reappeared I was copying part 1 onto CDs for a friend.

 

May I ask for some info on the expanded edition, and where one might acquire this edition?

 

Might I inquire how to burn each episode on to a single cd? Each episode is longer than a cd can hold (even in MP3 format). I'd love to burn the set to cd. Any suggestions?

Also, episode 1 and 17 won't upload to the cloud (I use iTunes iCloud music). So I upload all my albums to cloud so I can stream on my iPhone or ipad. Episode 1 and 17 won't upload. Was wondering if anyone else was having this issue or any possible solutions.

 

Speed them up a little?

 

Never got these. Are they avail anywhere now? Thx

 

Yes, five posts above yours.

 

I ordered it from a bookstore in England. I think if you go to e-bay or Amazon you'll be able to find one (they're not cheap). As far as content, I can't compare to the single volume edition as I have not read that. But for a Beatle junkie like me I couldn't get enough, so it was a natural. The first 100 pages or so were a slow read as the Beatles' extended genealogies were covered. But after that it quickly picked up steam and was hard to put down. I found that reading the footnotes as I went along was a must too.

 

Sounds like a must have. I wonder if it's available digitally somewhere.

 

I just ordered a copy of the extended edition. $115 shipped to US. I'm VERY excited.

 

I am re-upping now.

 

This version of the "2016 Complete Edition" is slightly different than the version linked last week. You can find that version here. (Thanks to mavisgold.)

Because of a request on another board, here is the version of this series where each episode is split into tracks, instead of each episode being one big file. The tracks more or less correspond to each topic covered.

Aside from the episodes being split into tracks, this version has exactly the same content as the one from last week.

Episodes 1-5 FLAC, episodes split into individual tracks
Episodes 6-10 FLAC, episodes split into individual tracks
Episodes 11-15 FLAC, episodes split into individual tracks
Episodes 16-18 FLAC, episodes split into individual tracks

If you've already downloaded last week's and don't care to grab them again, but you still want the notes about the track-by-track content, then download the notes here:

Notes on series with list of individual tracks

All links expire April 19, 2017.

 

@anthology_revisited - are you the person behind these documentaries? If so, thank you SO much!

 

I second that!

 

I got my copy of the Extended Edition of the Lewisohn book from BookDepository.com.

 

Really great listen. Just finished the original version and am already on episode 2 of the revised version.

 

So the press has discovered this podcast. Here's an article on Pitchfork calling the podcast "a new kind of historical fanzine":

This 28-Hour Beatles Podcast Is a New Kind of Historical Fanzine | Pitchfork

Oops, I just noticed this piece a few months ago. It's circulating on twitter as if it's new but I guess that means people continue to discover the podcast. Sorry for the false alarm.

 

This series is an excellent collection. I dl'd the 2016 version and it's FAB!
It's very interesting listening to all of these interviews in context to the music they were working on in the time period. It's almost like living through it (only a fast forward version) but still very good.

I enjoyed the George Harrison sung version of "It Don't Come Easy" and then it segues seamlessly into the Ringo vocal of "It Don't Come Easy". Really cool.
That was just on instance - there's so many more interesting things about the set - just too numerous to list.

The Lennon death was very hard hitting for me. It was like it was happening again - it was very somber listening.

For me there's a hint of sadness in a way as the post Beatles stuff just featured the guys sort of aimlessly wandering around without each other trying to make heads or tails of their lives (as they make their own music).
It was interesting to hear the mania of the people around The Beatles as you hear a lot of stupid questions aimed asked of The Beatles during their time and stupid questions post break-up.

Just a really well put together project! I have another hour to go of the last episode (18) and it'll be sorta sad hearing this thing end. I've enjoyed listening to the series at work as one episode played after the other. It has really carried me through the doldrums of work this past week and even this week too.

Thank you to whoever put this together - it's been a real treat!! Great job!

 

I like the revised 2016 version better, particularly the last two episodes which previously relied too much on just music. I agree with the Pitchfork quote above. Since this is called Anthology, the playing of entire songs might be better if it's always a different version of what is legitimately released. Anyone listening these knows those versions more than their families. They aren't needed for the story. Clips of them, sure, but not whole songs. I commend whoever did these and am glad there are less things that accidentally get repeated. You can lose yourself within 28 hours of editing. The only thing I'm aware of is a Ringo quote about "when the track's exciting, we put in 100%". I heard it during Two Of Us which struck me as odd. It didn't fit. It's also during The End which does make sense to me.There were a couple of edits I made to the 2015 version and two of those are in the 2016 version. What I changed in this version is I still took out the Cassius Clay poem almost entirely. ("I am the greatest! By Cassius Clay!" The rest I took out> You know what's going on with just this). The only other thing I changed was the end of the August 1965 episode. There is a quick bit of speaking at the end of every episode. This one has over 2 minutes of the closing credits of Help. It broke that flow. I swopped it out with the intermission from the movie ("End of part one. Intermission. End of intermission. Part Two.").

Another editing choice that I couldn't understand was why play part of a song then play the whole thing a couple of minutes later. A Day In The Life is where I noticed this. The last third gets played then the whole song gets played. It's not needed. One edit I loved but I figure lots of people didn't was the feedback of John, John (Let's Hope For Peace). That goes on for maybe a minute and a half or two minutes. While I love that sound, I feel it was not a good choice to play the whole thing. What I said to myself during times like this is "I get it! Move on!" I also thought episode 17's date should've been whenever Tug Of War was released in 1982. The last episode starts with the Price's Trust which happened in 1987. The last episode is much better than it was although the audio theme of flipping channels gets repetitive but I completely understand it's used to make a lot of quick edits to just mention particular things. The last two episodes I can feel how their career became talking about their career. It feels stifling. That's not a comment on the podcast but an observation of what I hear. It's all about the media getting what they want them to say. I feel sorry they have to repeat themselves until they die. For a band that was new and pushed things forward afterwards it became rote and unsatisfying. I really hear it in all the post Anthology releases that get touched upon. Same sentiment, different album. They are just doing their job. You can hear they don't want to talk about it yet again. Sometimes you can hear it in their voices that they are into it but most times not. That's my impression anyway. I figure this whole thing will keep getting revised until the last Beatle dies. By then the whole thing is will really tight and even better paced. Having said all of that, I really love this. I'm really glad it exists. Many many thanks to all who created it.

 

Thanks for the feedback. There are reasons behind most of this, believe it or not:

This was consciously done for pacing. I found that without musical breaks, you tend to tune out of a wall of spoken words after a while, so I broke it up a bit with some music. It's mostly the A-sides to their singles, with a few B-sides and an occasional album track thrown in. Good point about maybe using alternate versions, though.

Aw, I thought I got them all. Good catch. The reason for the quote during "Two Of Us" is that it comes from a radio special about "Let It Be Naked" at the time of that album's release. I agree it's pretty generic, but I kept it there because I thought it was unique to the radio special and Ringo was talking specifically about that song. The quote from Ringo talking about "Let It Be Naked" in Episode 18 comes from the same radio special, so the special definitely contained some unique material. I didn't realize some of Ringo's audio had been taken from somewhere else.

I think I shortened it a little for the 2016 release, or I meant to. The reason I kept it as long as it is, is that he says something about the year, and I wanted to give context of when it was recorded. (He changed his name to Muhammad Ali just a few weeks after the Beatles met him.)

The main reason that one's longer than the rest is because that's the shortest episode and there's really not much else I could think of to add to that episode without getting repetetive. I did consider moving part of the episode before it to the beginning of this episode (the episode before it is quite long), but that would mean splitting 1964 over three episodes, which I didn't want to do. The recording of "Beatles For Sale" is almost immediately followed by the recording of "Help!" and I found the transition between talk about the two albums within one episode too jarring.

The other reason is that I like it, and I thought it was a nice surprise to have one "different" ending from the rest. Actually, there's two different endings--the other is Episode 18 where the closing credit music doesn't have any "thank you"s.

Yeah, a lot of that kind of thing wasn't done by choice. A lot of the interviews come from radio shows and video material where the song is partially played beneath the interview. So I could either do some fancy audio elimination, which usually doesn't work very well and the interview sounds warped with weird audio artifacts (though I did do it in some places, usually because the song played underneath would have been completely out of context). Or, I could integrate that existing background audio into this format. I know that "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" both suffer from this, too, among other parts. This goes back to your point about "Why use complete performances?" but if you edit them out, you can see how it sometimes leads to odd transitions from one topic to the next.

You're right that Episode 17 actually does carry on until 1982, with the release of "Here Today". But if you notice, Episode 18 starts off talking about Eric Clapton's wedding, which occurred in 1979. So there's overlap between the end of Episode 17 and the beginning of Episode 18. This was because it's used as a stand-in for Ringo's own wedding, which occurred in 1981, and was the last time the "Threetles" played together before the Anthology. However, as far as I could find, there isn't any audio of any of them talking about the reunion at Ringo's wedding, so I used the Clapton thing instead. Even if I had found audio about the Threetles reunion at Ringo's wedding, it still would have led to an overlap, but I thought it was important to tie "All Those Years Ago" and "Here Today" to John's death, and then start fresh with pre-Anthology "Threetle" reunions afterward. Hence, the dating isn't exactly right for those two episodes. I guess I could could have dated them from 1982, but it still would have been wrong.

Also, this is the very reason why the original 2015 release had John's death covered at the beginning of Episode 18, so I didn't have to deal with this weird date issue. But once I began to add more material to those two episodes, it made much more sense to end Episode 17 the way it ends.

Exactly. It's partly to show the passage of time, because there's big gaps in that episode, going from 1981-82 to 1987 to 1992, and so on. There are many years where nothing really happened. Also, to emphasize the commericalism. I did try to limit the "flipping channels" to just the portions where they're talking about the latest "new release" of Beatles stuff from 1987 and after.

Exactly. Aside from "Anthology", they've basically been promoters for the stuff they did back in the 60s ever since John died. I think Nick Mason from Pink Floyd said something like, "I've been in the business of recycling ever since Pink Floyd broke up," which is just as true for the Beatles.

Actually, probably not. People are welcome to tighten it up however they want, but I'm done with it for a long while. If you release too many revisions, people lose track of what's the latest. I think this is about as good as it's going to get, despite the flaws that remain. Maybe after Paul, Ringo, and Pete pass away, I'll do one last revision, utlizing whatever upgrades and new material surfaces, but I hope that's decades in the future.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. Again, thanks for the feedback, and all the kind words!

 

Thank you for taking it as constructive. I appreciate that very much and understand the choices you made better because of it. And thank you again for doing the podcast.

 

I hate to ask - any chance of another re-up? I missed the last one.

 

I second this

 

Thirded (split into tracks with notes) ...