Dave Dexter, Capitol and the Beatles

Here's something else ... listening to the Capitol mixes after being involved in this thread. Where a lot of people find them brash and trebly and compressed sounding, to my ears they sound crisp and jangly. Of course I didn't have any clue about crisp and jangly back in the 1960s when I was listening to those records in elementary school. The thing is, I'm basically a jangle pop fiend as far as my preference in rock music, Peter Buck is my favorite guitar player ever. So while there may be some "memories" involved when it comes to the Capitol mixes, my not ruling a few of them out as abominations also could involve my personal preferences as far as other artists and that particular genre.

All of our opinions on everything are colored by our own personal prisms.

 

In what way? It includes songs from the film, plus excerpts from the score, all packaged in a nice gatefold with photos from the film. Very typical for a soundtrack album from the period. I should add that my LP accumulation is primarily film scores, so that is how I approach the album. My only disappointment is that it does not contain more of Ken Thorne's spy underscore. They could have dropped "In the Tyrol" for one or more of the "She's a Woman" or "Can't Buy Me Love" variations. I would also have liked a longer edit of the opening spy music. It is very brief on the album, but it goes on for significantly longer in the film.

 

That's all well and good, but it seems to be like a bit of bravado to say "an album that might never have existed" [were it not for me]. The Beatles did release an album called Help! in England, and surely there would have been some version of that released in the USA with 11 tracks and probably some stray single tracks added... And surely, it would have sold at least 1.5 million if there were less "orchestral filler" and more Beatles on it...

But I'm sure that's how Dave remembers it..

 

See this is what I am talking about in looking at things that happened 50+ years ago through 2019 eyes — and, in particular, with a "rock is the default" mind-set. Soundtrack albums back then DID typically have excerpts from the film scores. Witness the United Artists' Hard Day's Night.

I think there's this retroactive assumption that because this was THE BEATLES, they were special and shouldn't have been subjected to the "way things were" back then. One more time, unless you owned your own record company, you didn't get to set the terms of what happened, regardless of whether you were making hordes of teenagers scream and wet their knickers. I'm not judging whether that was right or wrong, just saying that it was.

 

I'll concede this ... the duophonic You Can't Do That on Second Album is horrible. (Just listened to it in the car, had to run to the bank.)

 

Please don't do that, don't change the discussion to respond to claims that haven't been done. I haven't defended the 87 remixes. I just said they are not comparable to cutting out songs and adding others from another record.

 

Yes. As I said a few pages ago, Beatles fans seem to be unable or unwilling to place their heroes into larger socio-cultural contexts.

 

It would have been nice for an album issued as "mono" to actually have the true mono mixes.
It would have been nice for all the Beatles tracks -- only seven of them -- to be in true stereo on the "stereo" issue of the LP (nice job with "Ticket to Ride," there Capitol).

Yeah, I know... "but we loved that LP in the '60s, and Capitol was doing nothing that any other..." yes... Yes... yes.

 

OK, my copies of the LP were stereo, so I did not realize this. My stereo copies sounded fine.

However, while I generally do not like stereo folds used for mono albums, it certainly was not a rare practice. You can't blame Dave Dexter for inventing stereo folds.

 

I'm lost. What's the airplane hangar story?

 

Hangar.

 

fixed

 

But this is THE BEATLES!!!

 

Dexter and the Capitol albums are easy targets for a witch-hunt. Some things never go out of style. As Sinatra sang, 'It's witchcraft...'

 

Actually, I am arguing what we think is inferior product available for purchase in 2019.

It's no different than the endless threads about, "Oh the flat transfer of xxxx on the 1987 CD is so much better than the 1995 brick-walled remaster! But the remaster from the box set in 2000 has the much better low end. Has anyone heard 5.1 mix? Is it worth it for me to replace my 2010 Japanese CD of the remix?"

 

Can I blame Dave Dexter for not using available mono mixes that were a phone call away?

 

No more or no less than you can blame hundreds of other producers who similarly worked with what they had when facing a deadline.

If the Beatles had been American and their tapes were sent to the UK, probably all of their UK mono LPs would have been folds of the stereo. This was a much more common practice in the UK when issuing international music.

I first heard my stereo copy of Help! on my Dad's mono hi-fi, and it sounded fine, especially the instrumentals. So I guess the folding worked, more or less, in this case.

 

Thanks a lot... I can't un-see that now.

 

Yes, yes you can.

 

It's interesting that the Beatle mixes for Help! actually did work out so that the stereo summed reasonably well on the fold.

 

No one has said that the Beatles were exempt from the times and "shouldn't have subjected to the ways things were back then." In 2019, we just like calling the US product "bull****" first and then setting it in context second.

For some reason, if anyone did this with "The Beatles and Frank Ifield Live on Stage" VJ LP -- Just said, "This LP is bull****" -- there would be no argument, because there is probably not one original Beatles fan from the '60s that has a nostalgic feeling for that LP.

 

No one noticed that kind of stuff at the time. We were just happy to have a new album. In many ways, we were better off then.

 

Actually no, the vocals are much louder in relation to the music. The balance is off. I think that may have been one of the reasons why George Martin decided to mix the stereo Rubber Soul as if it was a twin track recording, so that Capitol wouldn't ruin the mono album (which was more important to them at the time).