Roll Over, Brian Epstein: The Beatles Get Mashed
George Martin with Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in 1967.
THE latest Beatles collection, “Love” (Capitol), isn’t a retrospective: it’s a recombination. After the innumerable reissues, archival gleanings and rescued live recordings that have made the Beatles catalog an endlessly milked cash cow for EMI Records and the Beatles’ own Apple Corps, the “Love” CD and its surround-sound DVD mix, both due for release on Tuesday, are different. Instead of simply collecting Beatles tracks, “Love” actively manipulates them.
It’s an authorized one, approved by the Beatles and their families and made by George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, and Giles Martin, his son. They assembled this music for the Cirque du Soleil production “Love,” now running in Las Vegas. The tone is admiring verging on reverent.
Mash-ups can mock their sources; “Love” emphatically does not. Nor does it venture outside the Beatles’ own catalog. All the music is from the Beatles, 1963-70, except for a new string arrangement by George Martin, which is overdubbed onto the bittersweet, acoustic-guitar version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” that appeared on “Anthology 3,” part of the “Anthology” series of alternate takes.
For people who have been hearing Beatles albums since they were first released, “Love” is a memory test, a jolt to the ingrained experience of the music. Did it always sound that way? Wasn’t that guitar solo in a different song? All mash-ups do that to some extent, but the déjà entendu effect is exponentially stronger with material like Beatles songs that millions of listeners have memorized from end to end. The effect, as it was with the “Anthology” albums, is not to devalue or dethrone the well-known versions, but to illuminate them.
Giles Martin said in an interview that he was tempted to have the album packaging read, “No original Beatles recordings were harmed in the making of these tracks.” It’s a nervous joke. By reshuffling Beatles nuggets even this much, the Martins have breached the hermetic domain in which the Beatles have tried to keep their music.
The Beatles’ EMI recordings aren’t available on iTunes, and Apple Corps turns down most requests to use the Beatles’ catalog in other contexts. When Danger Mouse made “The Grey Album,” his razzle-dazzle combination of the raps from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with microsliced samples from “The Beatles” (a k a “The White Album”) in 2004, he immediately got a cease-and-desist letter from EMI Records, which instead could have capitalized on a new surge of interest in a 1968 oldie. (The album circulated anyway as a widespread free download.)
Like any other recordings the Beatles’ songs have been fodder for unauthorized mash-ups. But officially, they have been treated like sacred texts, to be kept inviolate. “Love” doesn’t open the door to Beatles recycling (which was going on anyway) as much as it recognizes the inevitable.
“Love” was made for Cirque du Soleil, which, astonishingly, persuaded the surviving Beatles and family members not only to let Beatles songs be used as the soundtrack for a big Las Vegas production but also to allow them to be rejiggered. Cirque du Soleil’s needs clearly affected the programming of the album — of course the Beatles’ circus song, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” is included — but “Love” was also a good pretext to sift through the tapes one more time.
The Martins searched the Beatles catalog for coincidences of key and tempo, for bits of songs that could be turned into connectors or musical puns. Vocals from “Nowhere Man” drift in above the keyboard and cello of “Blue Jay Way”; the guitar introduction to “Blackbird” leads into “Yesterday” instead.
It’s an album of connoisseurship, revealing the inspired details tucked into so many Beatles songs. (Paul McCartney’s bass line in “Something” emerges, with the rhythm guitar track removed, as a true countermelody.) It’s a sonic close-up too.
Because “Love” was made from early generations of the Beatles’ original, unprocessed studio master tapes, the timbres of voices, fingers on strings and drumsticks on skins are more immediate than they have been on other digitized Beatles releases. Which ought to raise the pressure on EMI to release better remastered CD’s of the original Beatles albums.
Some of the juxtapositions are revealing, pointing to threads that run through the Beatles’ music. “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Within You Without You” were both in the same key, so the rhythm track of the first can fit the melody of the second. But both were also Beatles songs that matched mystical reflections to the drone of Indian raga. Other combinations are merely clever, a matter of trivial coincidence. A few are cutesy and annoying.
The “Love” version of “Strawberry Fields Forever” imagines the song being constructed: first John Lennon singing it by himself with acoustic guitar, then the other band members joining in one by one as a rhythm section, then layers of backup voices, of electric guitars, of horns and electronics, but with Lennon’s voice always vulnerable at the core. It’s touching and fascinating, like a time-lapse version of the Beatles at work. And then, unfortunately, the production goes off the rails, piling on bits of other, unnecessary songs.
“Love” isn’t the last word on the Beatles catalog — or at least it shouldn’t be. There’s far more material in the group’s archives than a single collection can encompass, especially if the point is not only preservation but extrapolation. The Beatles in their heyday held their music to extraordinarily high standards, but they weren’t rigid or exclusionary about what went into it, whether it was Bach or the Beach Boys.
They were playing in every sense of the word — even doing their own premonitory mash-ups in songs like “Revolution No. 9” and “I Am the Walrus” — and with “Love,” some of that old playfulness returns. Back in the 1960s the Beatles were pop’s vanguard; now, in this guarded way, they have joined the cut-and-paste present. Their originals stand up, but it wouldn’t hurt their legacy one bit to let some outsiders play with them too.
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