Seconded. But Bringing It All Back Home is his best work. (Can you really consider an album released four or five years in to a forty five year career “Middle Work?”)
Early Beatles was the boy band of the era. Witness the movies, on par with “Spice Girls the Movie”. They’re really no different from Take That, Five or Backstreet Boys. Catchy tunes, some covers, screaming teen girls.
Like other folk have said, I’m not going to change anybodys mind about liking the Beatles, and I’ve said my piece in other threads. Its the ‘You can’t not like them!’ attitude of most fans that gets me. I do not like them, there you go. I don’t see why people don’t like Led Zep, The Kinks, et al, but I don’t feel the need to cram it down folks throats everytime someone even mentions them.
And I apologize if my cocksucking metaphor upset/offended anyone in the One hit wonder thread. It was not meant as an insult, but as a metaphor. YMMV.
A couple thoughts from someone who owns practically all the Beatles stuff, sometimes twice to get the monaural and stereo versions of the British mixes (now THAT’s obsessive):
To me, an almost perfect reinforcement of Aeschines stance is the Anthology 2 mix of “Good Morning, Good Morning.” That’s the sound of the band, minus all the overdubs and sound effects, just playing the basic track in the studio (the exception being Lennon’s lead vocal, which was an overdub). And it’s a powerful quartet performance, to my ears better than the version which ultimately appeared on Pepper. I’m sure that lyrically it’s not anything Aeschines would care for, and I understand why. But to me, musically, it reinforces what he’s talking about…as I read it, the Beatles were more powerful when they were more direct in their interaction with the audience, not removed to the airless environment studio and clustered with overdubs upon overdubs.
As regards the albums, you almost have to hear them in their original context: vinyl, on a period system. I admit that although I enjoyed Pepper, I didn’t actually “get” it until I heard an original Parlophone pressing on a mid-fi system from the era. The stereo mix wasn’t as cut-and-dried, and seemed more “natural” and less hard-edged somehow; it wasn’t so hard about where the left and right were. On my normal home stereo on CD, it was a much more antiseptic experience, IMO.
(As an aside, I recommend hearing the early Who, Hendrix or Motown artists in a like fashion, with the high end rolled off a bit, the way they probably would have heard the music in the studio as it was recorded…I always wondered why the remastered CDs of music by these artists always sounded a little shrill in the high end to me, and it was probably because the monitors of the era couldn’t really reproduce what was actually going to tape, so the engineers/producers would jack up the treble to compensate for the apparent deficiency. Problem is, no one in the remastering stages has thought to compensate the other way when CDs are issued now. This is just my pet theory, BTW.)
The other thing to bear in mind with the albums is that, according to Mark Lewisohn’s books about the Beatles in the studio (with information taken from actual session logs and tapes, as well as interviews), the Beatles themselves generally only stuck around for the mono mixes of the albums through at least Pepper…they didn’t actively do much with the stereo as a rule. George Martin and Geoff Emerick have said that they did the stereo mix of that one in something like a day and a half (compared to a constant process of mono mixing while the album was being recorded), which means, consequently, that Martin and Emerick got some things wrong. Basically, if you want to hear the albums the way the Beatles intended, you have to hear the mono. The albums might seem a little more dynamic without the more diffuse, less thought-out mix characteristic of early stereo.
Not that this additional info will change anyone’s mind, or that I’m intending it to do so, but at least it brings more to think about to the table. In my instance, the monaural versions are worth exploring for everything from Help! through The Beatles, because they feel “livelier.” Your mileage may vary, of course.
Mixes can be difficult. Many songs from the 60s sound odd on modern equipment because they were mixed for the limited fidelity of AM radios in cars. Some Hendrix CDs include the single mixes.
It’s because I started listening to him when I was in college, just before Self Portrait came out, and I’ve been stuck in time ever since. And I still try to convince myself the religious albums don’t exist. 