Arguably, “Let It Be” was a low point for John Lennon’s contributions… he had two full songs for the recording: “I Dig A Pony” and “Don’t Let Me Down”. The first was forgettable, and the second was pretty good. He also had a half-song “Everybody Had a Hard Year” which formed the bridge of McCartney’s “I’ve Got a Feeling”.
In compensation for the lack of new songs, “One After 909” (pre-Beatles) and “Across The Universe” (recorded the previous year) were included in the album. As well, there were jams and studio sing-alongs (“Dig It” and “Maggie May”).
So, I don’t understand the decision by Phil Spector to omit DLMD from his version.
There was nothing wrong with the material on tape, as evidenced by the single version produced by Glyn Johns and George Martin, as well as the 2003 version on “Let It Be… Naked”
Most artists would kill to have such a “low point.” I Dig a Pony is a brilliant, albeit usually overlooked piece of awesome rock music, as is Don’t Let Me Down. And I’ve Got a Feeling is arguably as good a collaboration on one song as any Lennon and McCartney ever worked on. Just my Humble Opinion, of course.
As for why that psychopath Phil Specter left DLMD off his version–I haven’t a clue (except for the aforementioned psychopathy). He was involved in worse actions that he needs to explain.
This is pure speculation: Phil Spector was never into earthiness - a raw, unbridled, bluesy, plea with a sluggish beat. It just wasn’t a song where the Phil Spector approach could create anything.
I don’t think so. The track selection for Let it Be was made before Hey, Jude was considered, I think. Let it Be just took forever in production. Hey, Jude was just a way to collect all the stuff that had never been on albums, so its inclusion of “Don’t Let Me Down” was just a reflection of it being a leftover.
I purchased the Phil Spector “complete LPs” CD box set issued last? year, from Amazon UK, 'cause I have a particular weakness for 1960s girl-group rock, the more obscure the better, and 'cause of Spector’s could-do-no-wrong rep as a producer (versus as a human being).
Man, most of the new-to-me tracks are godawful, and I’ve yet to hear one that I think would have been a hit on AM radio, had it been released as a single.
Motown has a ton of tracks from the '60s that never charted but might have. Spector, not so much …
A lot of Beatles tracks that first appeared as single A or B sides (and sometimes, in the early days on EPs) never made it onto their canonical albums (as opposed to “collections”), and this includes many of their best, and best known, songs. “Rain”, “I’ll Get You”, “This Boy”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “All you Need is Love”, “Baby You’re a Rich Man”, “Lady Madonna”, “We Can Work it Out”: none of these were on any of the original, canonical Beatles albums. There was nothing unusual in this in an era when singles were far more important than LPs anyway, and there seems to be little rhyme or reason behind which single tracks made it onto an album and which did not.
I think it is true, also, that “Don’t Let Me Down” would stick out like a sore thumb on the Spector version of Let it Be, though mainly just by being so much better than almost everything else on the record (with the exception, maybe, of Get Back). Perhaps even Spector had the sense to realize that pouring thick syrup over Don’t Let Me Down could do nothing but ruin it.
Wow! I could hardly disagree more with that. In my opinion those are two of the worst tracks The Beatles ever released, and the worst of Let It Be (which is saying something), although the Lennon-written bridge does briefly lift I’ve Got a Feeling out of absolute direness.
Aw, man. “I’ve Got a Feeling” is one of my favorite Beatles tracks. I suppose in some theoretical sense I could understand bring indifferent to it, but one of the worst tracks ever? I don’t get it . Fuckin rocks, that one. “Hey Bulldog” off Yellow Submarine similarly gets ignored, and I’ve never understood why.
I know the story behind this!! I feel like Horshack jumping up and down waving his had for Kotter to call on him.
It goes back to the early days when Brian Epstein and George Martin were working out contractual things for the Beatles. Remember, Epstein was a neophyte as a pop/rock band manager and Martin didn’t have much experience with rock bands either. And they both considered themselves to be Gentlemen. And they (probably more Epstein) didn’t think it would be fair to the fans to make them pay for a song twice; once on the single and then again on the LP. So, they agreed that songs released on singles would NOT released on LP. Until you got to “Hey Jude”. This deal was between Epstein and Martin (acting for Parlophone, a div of EMI). Capitol records, who later had distribution for the Beatles in the US, wasn’t part of this agreement. Though I’ll add that some singles were ‘held back’ by Capitol until “Hey Jude”. And part of this was the soundtrack for “A Hard Day’s Night” was United Artists, not Parlophone/Capitol, so it took a while for them to deal with the rights for some songs from there.
So between this, and the UK custom of releasing 14 songs on an LP album and the US custom of releasing 10 or 11 songs on an LP, there were a lot more US albums than UK ones. And most singles were also on US LPs.
There was a general feeling in the record industries that since Britons had less disposable income than Americans, they would proportionally buy more singles. On those occasions when they bought or received an album as a gift, they feel cheated buying the same song twice. Americans would feel cheated if they bought an album and the hit song was not on it.
The differing number of songs has to do with how song royalties are calculated. Great Britain uses per album and America per song. The feeling is with cost plus accounting at several different stages, more songs mean higher prices and diminished sales.
When and by whom? Allen Klein was running the Beatles at this point, not Phil Spector. Spector did not start working on the album until March 1970, one month after the Hey Jude album had been released. Hey Jude was an Allen Klein project all the way.
Let it Be evolved out of the project originally called Get Back, produced by Glyn Johns, which when it was initially readied for release back in the spring of 1969 was to include “Don’t Let Me Down” - see here for details.
Theoretically Spector could have remixed “Don’t Let Me Down” for inclusion on the Let it Be album, but he never did. Frankly, I think it would fit better there than on the Hey Judealbum. After all, the song is prominently featured in the Let it Be movie in the rooftop performance sequence. And there were other non-album tracks that could have been used on Hey Jude in its place, such as “The Inner Light.”
However, it would have been unprecedented at that time to put a Beatle song on a Capitol album for a second time - even a different version of the song. That had never been done before. I have to believe either Klein said not to use “Don’t Let Me Down,” or Spector under the influence of Klein “decided” it would be superfluous to re-use it.
Well maybe there is a grain of truth in this somewhere, but it can’t be right as you tell it, simply because quite a lot of the early singles were on the (original British) albums. Their first two singles with Martin were Love Me Do and Please Please Me, and both of them, and both their B sides, were all on the Please Please Me album. So were lots of other singles on albums. A Hard Day’s Night, for instance, was issued both as a single and an album track. On the other hand, as I have already pointed out, lots of other single tracks (whether A or B sides) were not on any album.
I don’t know what you think changed with Hey Jude, either. The Hey Jude album is not a canonical album, it is a collection that was never issued at all in Britain. Hey Jude the song is another example of a single track that was never on any of the original canonical albums. In fact, the pattern of releasing some songs as singles only (sometimes as single B sides only), and some as both singles (A or B) and album tracks, with no very obvious rhyme or reason to it, continued throughout their career as a band (or group, as people actually called them at the time). Their last canonical single, last whilst still together, has Let it Be on the A side (on the eponymous album, albeit in a slightly different version) and You Know My Name (Look Up the Number) (not on an album) on the B.
Don’t even get me started on their EPs, still quite an important format in their early career. Suffice it to say that they show the same sort of lack of pattern. Some consisted of album tracks, sometimes from more than one album, and some (most notably the Long Tall Sally EP) did not.
American releases, especially of their earlier stuff, complicate the matter still further, but I have not been talking about them. The lack of any consistency regarding whether or not singles were also issued as album tracks is perfectly apparent just in the British releases.
I am pretty sure that in the early part of The Beatles’ career, singles greatly outsold albums on both sides of the Atlantic. Also, as pointed out in my previous post, single hits such as Love Me Do, Please Please Me, and A Hard Days Night, were on the original British albums, so fans did run risk of paying twice for the same song.
The thing is that albums were not really very important in pop until (largely through the high quality of much of their album-only material) The Beatles made them so. But even they did not make it so right away. It still took several years for albums to become more important, and better selling, than singles. In the early ‘60s, pop albums (again, on both sides of the Atlantic) basically consisted of one or a few songs that had already been hits as singles, plus a bunch of filler. What made The Beatles’ albums different, at first, was simply that the band had so much good material that much of their ‘filler’ was as good as the stuff on their singles. Thus, fairly soon, fans who bought the singles came to recognize that they they needed the albums too (even if it did mean paying twice for some songs).
Damn, I was hoping I wasn’t wrong about that. Well, those two are the only exceptions, right? And kind of understandable because they were part of the actual soundtrack of the Yellow Submarine movie.
Well, whatever, it is still a compilation of previously issued songs, not an original, canonical album, and it still does not mark any change in the non-pattern of whether or not singles tracks were also included on albums.
The soundtrack album for A Hard Day’s Night was not a Parlophone project. The only reason United Artists signed the Beatles for AHDN was they wanted the rights to the soundtrack album. They had no idea the film would be any good. So the deal between Epstein and Martin (for Parlophone) didn’t come into play.
So what have you got to say about the Please Please Me album, which was the first one produced by Martin and had four tracks he also produced and issued as singles?
With the Beatles and Beatles for Sale do not have any tracks from (original British) singles on them, but EP’s were issued containing songs from both albums, again leading to the possibility that fans might pay for the same song twice. (And Beatles EPs charted, in the singles charts, in Britain in those days).
I suppose that you could argue that the fact that Help! has Help! on it is again because it was part of a movie deal, but you can’t say that about Revolver, which contains Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine, songs also issued in Britain as a double A-sided single. They were produced by Martin, and Epstein was still around (as, of course, he also was for Please Please Me).
Sorry, but your story just does not fit the facts, even if we treat the movie related albums as exceptions. If Epstein and Martin had any such agreement, they did not stick to it, either at the start of their relationship, or later on.
I think this thread should have been titled, “Boy am I glad that Phil Spector didn’t ruin ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ with his heavy-handed wall of sound crap.”
