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    Posted Monday, September 07, 2009 11:42 AM

    The Beatles Are Back. On CD. Again. Should We Really Give Them (More of) Our Money?

    Andrew Romano


    By Andrew Romano

    Everyone knows it as the day John F. Kennedy was shot. But Nov. 22, 1963, marks a less morbid turning point in history as well. As the president touched down in Dallas, a cheeky pop group called the Beatles was releasing the record that would become its American breakthrough, With the Beatles, across the Atlantic in England. Two months and one aggressive marketing campaign later, the boys would arrive on U.S. shores─and, via Ed Sullivan, U.S. airwaves─to jolt the nation out of mourning.

    When fans gush about the Beatles being the Best Band Ever, they typically gush about a few things in particular. The songs. The singing. The style. Even the slightly ridiculous hair. But the most distinctive of the group’s many gifts may have been its sense of timing. The recording of Sgt. Pepper began as early as November 1966, but the LP itself didn’t land in stores until June 1, 1967: opening day, it just so happens, of the Summer of Love, a season it would instantly and forever define. The last album they recorded, Abbey Road, materialized about a month after Woodstock (August 1969) and about two months before Altamont (December)    ─the exact moment, in other words, when the '60s were ending. And so on. To say that the Beatles anticipated, absorbed, and altered the culture in ways that no other band has equaled, or will ever equal, isn’t hyperbole. They wouldn’t have existed without their times, nor their times without them. That’s what sets them apart.

    Which is why the latest round of Beatles releases─the complete original catalog, newly remastered in both stereo and mono    ─is so uncharacteristic: it’s completely out of sync with the zeitgeist. On Wednesday, stereo mixes of all 13 of the band's U.K. albums (plus the Past Masters discs, which collect all their non-album songs) will reappear in tastefully redesigned retro packaging─think period photos and cardboard gatefold sleeves─complete with contextual notes and recording information. A pair of $250-plus boxed sets ships the same day: one for all the stereo CDs and the other, limited-edition collection for the 12 discs that exist in mono.

    Sounds great, right? It is. But sadly, consuming your music in compact-disc form is getting to be like wearing Zubaz or requesting a Rachel cut at the salon─rather 1995. Forgotten Discmen languish beneath dirty socks in the corners of darkened closets; cracked jewel cases litter the lonely city streets. What’s taking their place, as you may have heard, are these fleet little files called MP3s and the shiny, podlike devices that play them. According to a survey conducted last month by NPD Group's MusicWatch division, digital music's market share has nearly doubled, to 35 percent, since 2007    ─meaning that MP3s are likely to outsell CDs by the end of next year. Releasing a major record (or 25) on plastic only─while still refusing to sell your songs on, say, iTunes─seems more than a little dated, which is a label the Beatles have always managed, somehow, to avoid.

    And yet, in spite of all this, I'm pretty sure the remastered records    ─the same old music, after all─will sell like flaming hotcakes slathered in molten lava. Skeptical? Check out Amazon's bestseller list, where the individual CD reissues now occupy 13 of the top 20 slots. The mono and stereo sets sold out a month ago.

    To figure out why exactly this is, I've spent much of the past week listening and relistening to the new discs    ─in stereo and mono, on hi-fi speakers and fancy headphones, even in a rental car. And what I suspect after immersing myself in the Beatles' canon for seven straight days is that the undeniable appeal of the remasters might have more to do with us─and our changing relationship to music─than with John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

    The Beatles, of course, still deserve a huge share of the credit. Their body of work, beamed in from a distant, almost incomprehensible era when the best music was also the most popular, is an alchemical blend of craftsmanship, innovation, tension, and verve that still sounds as modern and thrilling as on the day it was recorded. The adenoidal, pleading bridge of "Anna (Go to Him)"; the stinging 12-string of "You Can't Do That"; the sly tit-tit-tits of "Girl"; the slippery snare work of "Fixing a Hole"; the spectral organ of "Long, Long, Long"; even the violent whimsy of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." It's all here, and it's all as glorious as ever. This music will always be worth paying for.

    That said, most of us─especially the ones reading, or writing, reviews like this    ─have already paid for the Beatles on CD; the original editions have sold tens of millions of copies since coming out in 1987. So the fact that the new remasters sound far better than their predecessors obviously accounts for part of the appeal. In the mid-'80s, remastering technology was still in its infancy, and Abbey Road engineers had little choice but to digitize the analog masters without much equalization or restoration. The results quickly became antiquated. But while other top groups remastered their records every few years to keep pace with the latest advances (and rake in a few bucks)─the Rolling Stones, for example, have rereleased Let It Bleed three times since 1986─the Beatles always resisted. Until 2004, that is. Unable to overlook the inadequate sound of the original CDs any longer, a team of longtime Beatles engineers began working track by track from pristine Abbey Road masters to minimize technical glitches─electrical clicks, microphone pops, excessive sibilance, bad edits─while expanding the dynamic range and polishing up the details.

    The overall effect, immediately obvious when you slip one of the remastered discs into a decent stereo, is like scraping a layer of grime from the Sistine Chapel. Abbey Road's remasterers resisted the common urge to scrub every extraneous noise, inflate the overall volume, or remix the tracks, leaving us, as a result, with the truest representation yet of how these songs were supposed to sound. The descending piano hook on "Misery" suddenly sparkles and reverberates. Hummed vocal harmonies, previously inaudible, materialize on the third verse of "What Goes On." "Taxman" 's spiraling guitar solo sounds even more savage than before. And the closing piano chord of "A Day in the Life"    ─an E struck by eight hands on three different pianos─finally feels as monolithic as the group originally intended, fully saturating the mix and fading out, after nearly a minute, amid the rustling of papers and squeaking of studio furniture. Throughout, the bottom end is warmer and clearer than on the brittle 1987 editions, and the singing is airier, crisper, more present. As Paul McCartney himself has said, the remasters "are more like what we heard coming out of the speakers as we made the records. It's like being in the studio again." And thanks to the mono set, most of the LPs are finally available in the mixes the Beatles themselves considered definitive. (Stereo was a niche market until 1968 or so.) Even without new music, we are getting something new─and expertly executed─for our money.

    Still, let's be honest: only audiophiles and obsessives care that much about sound quality. Rather, the vast majority of remastered discs will sell to ordinary fans forking over hundreds of dollars to update their libraries even though they weren't particularly dissatisfied with the old Beatles CDs. The reason, I think, is that the remasters represent an opportunity    ─perhaps a final, fleeting opportunity─to recapture a way of absorbing popular music that has faded with the rise of MP3s. When I was a budding Beatlemaniac back in the late 1980s, I would rush home from school, slip a cassette tape of Please Please Me into the boombox, and sit, enraptured, as "I Saw Her Standing There" gave way to "Chains" and "Misery" and "Ask Me Why" before screeching to a halt with the last exuberant yawp of "Twist and Shout." Now I simply set my iPod to shuffle, descend into the subway, and smile when the occasional Beatles track comes up in the rotation. Most people my age (27) or older have undergone a similar evolution, transitioning since 2000 or so from the committed, contextual experience of vinyl, cassette, or even CD to the randomized, fragmented, and often distracted flow of MP3 files. The single has replaced the album as pop music's basic unit of measure, reclaiming its pre-Beatles primacy.

    In many ways, this is a positive development: thanks to the Internet, more people have more access to more music, more quickly, than ever before, and the balance of power in the industry has shifted from the record companies to the fans. But something's been lost as well. What the Beatles remasters provide, along with hours and hours of stunning music, is a time warp back to the turntable, or the boombox, or the Discman. Knowing that these familiar songs have been lovingly rejuvenated, you strive to hear them, for the first time in years, as if they're new. You shun the skip button, waiting for each track to reach its natural ending, lest you miss some long-buried detail. You rediscover the satisfying geometry of a proper, unshuffled running order    ─what carefully sequenced songs can reveal as they push and pull and scrape up against each other. You experience each LP as a single, self-contained statement, and judge its relationship to other albums accordingly. And you can imagine, delusional as it may be, that the whole networked, niche-ified planet is once again listening to the same songs you are.

    Other critics have written that the Beatles remasters mark "the last gasp of the CD era." They're undoubtedly right. But what people will be paying for, starting Wednesday, isn't compact discs. It's the feeling, however ephemeral, that our ever-expanding world has shrunk to its old, comforting size. In an uncertain age, that sense of shared culture is worth at least a few bucks at the record store. Even if we have to put down our iPods to recapture it.
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    Member Comments

    Posted By: jfwerner (September 17, 2009 at 12:20 AM)

    CD's aren't dead and neither is vinyl.  I argue that it is the MP3 format that is dead.  In fact vinyl is seeing a resurgance, and many artists are now releasing albums in the vinyl format. Any true music lover can tell you that MP3s are a lousy format and offer extremely poor sound quality. Even the supposed new HD itunes format that apple is pushing, is still nowhere near the quality of a 1988 era CD or Vinyl record. This is not opinion, it is fact.  Sure, digital music is the way of the future, but that future will not include MP3.  It's sort of like the advent of the cassette tape.  It was a step forward in convenience, but a huge step back sonically from vinyl, and now it's a completely dead format. Vinyl is still alive and kicking. The same will happen with the MP3.  As computer hard disc space becomes cheaper and cheaper, it becomes much more attractive to store and listen to true lossless audio.  Right now the only reliable source of lossless audio is via CD and Vinyl. To get it on your computer or portable media player,  you must literally buy the CD and burn it in a lossless format like WAV. Itunes and every major online music dowload service DOES NOT offer lossless audio. The huge sucess of the beatles rerelease proves there is a market for audiophille quality music, and until companies like Apple realize they need to offer some type of lossless format, the CD and VInyl record will not go away completely.      

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    Posted By: slowhead (September 16, 2009 at 11:56 PM)

    I'm 54, and loved the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Dead, the Who...C'mon, pisapiag, widen your horizons. To make it a competition is far too limiting -- there were vast differences in all of these bands, exceptional in their way. Did the Beatles, with George Martin, create the widest field of musical style of all of those bands? Without a doubt. Was Zeppelin massively exciting and ripped the fabric of the gentle music? Absolutely. But the Stones had the same (and earlier) foundation of blues that Zep did. The real crucible: find out what those musicians thought of each other. The answer: Great respect, and realization that music is wide enough for all. The article above is poignant and striving toward a truth, though it's hard to put into words. I was never into the whole "fab four" nonsense -- it was the music, and later the philosophy, to me. The truth: Music is a river that flows without end. Long live rock.

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    Posted By: pisapiag (September 10, 2009 at 10:00 AM)

    I am 54 and I never really cared for the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones for that matter. I always found them too wimpy for my taste and personnality. Never bought one single album. LED ZEPPELIN, on the other hand... YEAH! I can't wait for them to do the same remastering job with their old stuff.

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