You are not cohering again. The rooftop concert was done when they were literally falling apart as a band. Ever see the movie?
You seem to be pushing forward, come what may, logic or illogic, that the fact that they made a studio created album has something to do with their musical integrity as a band and the quality of the work produced. Most people would say good for them, they retired from touring and are expressing their genius. In fact they said it loudly then and for the last 50 years. Only someone addicted to internet opinionating would take it as a weakness in their career.
This is a great time to be having this discussion by the way. The box set is out now. It has a lot of playing by the beatles, together, prior to overdubs. They didn’t become musical monks. They just had big ideas. I am loving hearing it and realizing that it isn’t a competition between beatles songs of different eras. It’s all great melodic beatles music coming from the same minds a few months apart. Some wound up on this LP and some wound up on others.
You’ve probably just read a lot of rockcrit opinions about people using the studio as a crutch since then, after them, and articles describing it as a studio album, and now you’re going to track that trail back to the beatles regardless of sense. “Hey I can have an opinion too!”
If you don’t understand the difference between using the studio as a crutch and using it to create a masterpiece, what kind of coherence are you aiming at?
I would argue one can be a “band,” but not be a live band. If you want to make the distinction between live band and studio band, that’s fine. I personally don’t care much about that distinction. XTC post Andy Partridge’s breakdown were still a band to me, even if they were almost completely studio-only.
Well, I’m not certain how those albums were recorded, but if you are entirely a mutli-track affair and are intentionally creating music that you cannot reproduce a reasonable facsimile of outside of a recording studio, then you’ve intentionally left the idea of being a “band” behind in my mind. You can make music that qualifies you as a band again after you’ve done your studio masterpiece, the Beatles certainly did, but Sgt. Pepper’s isn’t that. I’d say there’s not a hard line where it breaks, but there’s a definite gradient from being as tight as a James Brown show band, and being a band that sounds good on record but stinks live, to being something that is entirely a studio creation.
Hell, McCartney knew there was a difference, and tried to get them back to playing like a band for what became the Let It Be sessions. He screwed up by not giving them any privacy through having a film crew around, and Harrison pretty much saved it by bringing a fifth member in to make the chemistry work as long as it could.
Yep, don’t care. They did play as a band then, did not on the recording that is the subject of the thread.
Nope, I’ve both been a hired gun other’s recordings, been in several bands that have recorded, and have run the console myself. I’ve pretty sure I’ve been given more studio time than you’ll ever pay for. I’ve also clearly stated that it’s not a difference in quality, but a difference in the type of skill exhibited.
When come back, bring facts about something. Otherwise you might as well be trying to say things about my mom, which the quoted text pretty much is.
Don’t get me started on the uberpretentious deliberately off-key male singers that currently infest most band lineups. In their case their lack of any vocal training (or fancy electronic means of covering up said lack) they wear like a badge of honor. I’d rather hear a screech monkey up at the mike than them.
If they had still been playing live, they could have played the Sgt Pepper songs live. They wouldn’t have had the same arrangements as the recorded versions, but that’s a feature, not a bug, of live performance.
I’m not sure about that. As observed earlier, the work necessary to get simpler songs into working order for what was an intended live performance pretty much was enough to break the band up. Again, performing in the studio and being able to play a song live are different skills. Just because you can perform well at one doesn’t mean you’ll do well at the other.
Also, Martin and McCartney are on record saying they were intending to make a record that couldn’t be played live, the record would be the performance. If they could play it live; then it was a bug, not a feature.
What is the thesis you are pushing again? That different skills are in play? OK. What facts are you in need of to further this or dispute this, from me? Just trying to follow.
And what is your conclusion, again? Sgt Pepper is overrated because it was a studio created LP? Like a lot of Beatles LPs and hundreds of thousands of LPs since then?
Are you saying they couldn’t have played it live? We already covered that pages ago. They could have done it better than anyone ever could.
That they couldn’t have is just headline hype. From your CV you know better than that.
I’m not pushing any thesis. I’m observing that the methods of making recordings are very different. I doubt anyone who’s participated in both would disagree.
In one, you work together until the songs are hashed out, and you can play them at something resembling the drop of a hat. You may take a few takes to get it just right on the recording, but everyone knows how to play the bones of the song before you roll the tape. On that recording, the people playing can react to what each other does, they can change the feel of the song spontaneously, and in extreme cases such as Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, they can improvise an ending that ends up being a completely different song.
In the extreme version of the other method, someone lays down a part, it might not even be the complete song, but it often is a basic track of the rhythm instruments that you can easily loop, or slice+dice into something else if necessary. Someone else comes in and lays down the next part and so on. Later, if you don’t like a part and it’s on it’s own track, you can wish it away or have someone record something else entirely different over it. Or, you can just be like Prince and do the whole record yourself.
Now, again, there’s a gradient of what’s done in practice. Vocals are often overdubbed on modern records that are otherwise recorded live, guitar solos too. There was a slightly crazy habit in the 80’s of making an entire record by the first method as scratch tracks, and then basically recording a second record by re-recording each those tracks one by one to clean them up. Any method of making you a record can get you a good record. But the more you overdub, the more important the person running the controls becomes in the process, the less spontaneous the recording is, and it generally translates into how it sounds. The first is undeniably the work of a “band” in my mind. The second in the extreme is not, and the more you approach it the more you’ve left the work of a “band” into being a creation purely of the studio. I like lots of records made both ways, but they sound different, and require a different set of skills to make.
As to how you can refute it? I dunno, that would be your problem. It’s plain as day to me, so you’re going to have a hard time.
This is a tangent based of an off hand remark that you don’t seem to get. Sgt. Peppers is a perfectly fine studio creation. It being held up as a singular accomplishment based on how it was conceived as record of songs you couldn’t play live would make it overrated. There were records you couldn’t play live before and since. Les Paul is the easiest example of this.
I’m saying you don’t know, I don’t know, no-one knows if they could reproduce that record live without some kind of prepared playback. Since they intended it to be a record that you couldn’t, I would doubt they ever truly tried.
Who said that they “intended it to be a record that you couldn’t” play live? Sounds more like an offhand observation, based on the place they had just got to in their career, (Exhausted and worried about shit) or some rock critics clipping that you are taking all the way to the moon. This seems to be the bee in your bonnet, right?
“It being held up as a singular accomplishment based on how it was conceived as record of songs you couldn’t play live would make it overrated.”: This is utterly incoherent. But this must be your point.
No, Les Paul is not relevant. An LP is not overrated because the band did great work, using different methods. Quite the opposite, would be the sensible thing to say. But go ahead. Here’s some more rope.
Just a side note…one of my absolute favorite moments in Pepper (and in any Beatles album really) is at the beginning of the reprise. As Paul counts in, you can hear John, half off-mic, sounding like he’s getting away with something, saying “Bye!” Brings a smile to my face every time I hear it.
Well everybody said it was the first “concept” album. Concept of what, Schizophrenia? You’re right they didn’t have to tour, but then they were already infighting and broke up as a band a couple years later. They were a good live band and could have played their old hits, except they had no concept of amplification. They really dropped the ball on that. In those days touring bands used the PA system as the main source of amplification, I’m not sure when or who changed the trend but around that time good sound kits were put together, and they could have roasted all the tweeners eardrums to get them to STFU.
Good lord, it’s like you know nothing about the band. Paul said “The record is our performance.” and Martin said “It was going to be a record … [with songs that] couldn’t be performed live: they were designed to be studio productions and that was the difference.”
I really can’t imagine a Beatles fan not knowing this. This is such an amazingly large blind spot that I find quite hard to believe, honestly.
As to the rest of your blather, it’s obvious you still don’t get the difference. Like the rest of your ignorance on the subject, that’s not my problem anymore.
Alan Alda has a “Playlist” column in today’s Wall St. Journal in which he shares the following sentimental recollection:
“When I was 31, I bought the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” just after the album came out in June 1967. The more I listened to it, the more the album felt like a collection of really sharp show tunes”.
Alan Alda is such a tool.
*His favorite song from the album is “She’s Leaving Home”.
Listening to an archive interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. Ringo is discussing music with Terry Gross. He says that crowd noise was awful because it kept them from playing like a band. And that was around Rubber Soul, when he says the music and writing was getting so interesting to play.
Then he says he really likes the White Album because “we went back to being a band again.” Terry asks him what he means, and he says they played as a band and werent focused on horns and other tracks. They focused on the groove again.
So, clearly Ringo thought of Sgt Peppers as different.
Looks like you won’t or can’t clarify any incoherent statements you have made.
Place yourself in their position for just a minute and realize that they were tired, disgusted and sick of not being able to play live shows when they said all this. They weren’t committing to any ascetic recording practice, or writing a canonical text to establish who they were as artists, so that you could pontificate 50 years later, in saying this. They were just doing a different thing for a bit. You’re placing more importance on their feelings than I am and I’m the fan of it.
It’s clear you haven’t listened to the new box set, discs 2 and 3. It’s some of their best playing, and music. Where does that leave your ridiculous argument? I’d say high and dry.
The LP is the most emotionally “felt” of any they ever made. It wasn’t worried about being hip for one thing, in 1967(?!) It was confident to say the least.
The themes on it are much more solid than people are admitting. It’s about loneliness, and public celebration, among other concerns. (By the band who had just spent 3 years conquering the worlds young audiences in strange new rites of celebration) This is not obscure or hard to fathom. I guess cynical received wisdom is easier than perspective.
There is more “blood” flowing in it from start to finish than any other of their LPs and maybe of any LP at all ever. In fact if you were to name another LP with an explicit “concept”, or a “story”, I would venture that it would be far less meaningful, far less felt, and far less good than SPLHCB. That’s what subtlety will do for you.
On research I note that the Beatles LPs were never well represented by live performance versions way before Pepper.
Rubber soul, US version, had no songs played live, the UK version had two but one was a US single and the other was the only Harrison song ever played by the Beatles on stage.
Revolver had no songs performed live at all.
Previous to that it looks like 2 or maybe 3 songs made it into the show at most from these LPs.
The Beatles were making their albums without regard to live performance from the very start. The first one made in a day was not all stage material. Given that they had just stopped touring, Pepper seems like the flowering of this practice by people who had more time, and wanted to use it well.
Well, you can’t say the Beatles and I didn’t try to explain to you what this record was about. I mean, they did state it in plain English, and I provided it to you in a quote. That you don’t seem to understand it at this point would say more about yourself than I.