I kinda like Spider Robinson’s theory.
I bought most of the Beatles Remastered Disks in ought-nine. Really listened closely with some good speakers, then headphones. Ripped them Losslessly, but also as high-bitrate AAC files. Listened again.
My conclusion: those guys were good. I heard stuff I hadn’t before, like fun little percussive tricks from Ringo (I’d never been able to hear him going nuts on bongos, like on the deeper cuts on the Help! soundtrack). And it’s hard for me to believe that George mastered so many different styles of guitar playing. I took to filing the remasters separately from my other CDs and referring to them as the George Is A Genius disks.
I’ve seen claims that George, John, and Paul are all underrated (by some) as guitarists.
Makes a lot more sense than having this chick fjording for the pine. 
[quote=“D18, post:1, topic:820497”]
[li] I have to go back and listen again, but I was surprised in the first several albums how much the drums were buried in the mix. I hadn’t noticed that about 60s music in general, and want to explore it further[/li][/QUOTE]
Burying the drums was so standard in early rock that I keep getting surprised by the few songs that move the drums up front. Cream did it earlier than most.
Don’t forget that songs had to be mixed to sound good on transistor radios. Worse, you had to listen to transistor radios through an ear bud. One single ear bud. Hardly anything was mixed for stereo and it wouldn’t matter since all AM radio was mono. Songs were designed to feature vocals, with guitars in the background, and drums off in a missile silo somewhere.
I’ve made this same argument to my kids, but using the much more common “bad car radio, pulling in a faraway AM station with a cheap antenna.”
My kids: “Okay, that explains the tinny EQ… Oh! So, wait, is THAT why so many original mixes are mono? NOW it makes sense…”
No, you didn’t.
Some people nowadays are very proud of their IKEA furniture believe it or not.
HAHAHA That’s great!
I went through my 20s thinking that Phil Lesh and Jack Casady were out in San Francisco revolutionizing rock bass guitar. The I went back and listened CLOSELY to my Beatles records and realized that Paul was the monster musician in the vanguard.
Very few people know that Paul wrote “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” to commemorate several murders he had done personally in previous months. Another example of his jolly good humor, which would appear later in “A Wonderful Christmas Time.”
Also, Paul is dead. There are clues. Want me to run through them for you?
No Reply is sort of creepy. Stalker, peeping tom. But a good fun song to play and sing. Just like Brown Sugar by that other band.
Have you ever heard the “No Reply” outtakes on the Anthology? They’re hilarious.
You were hand in hand/With another man/YOUR FACE!
Yes, please. Start a new thread where those of us who were intrigued by it at the time can find all the clues in one spot.
And we can blow the minds of those young’uns.
Sigh. When you wanted to play your rock station and not force your parents to have to listen to outrageous noise like the Beatles you had to use an ear bud. Better?
Though I had a crystal radio set I built that didn’t have a speaker and could only be heard through an ear bud. It only got one station. Fortunately that was the top 40 station. My first transistor radio was a big step up!
Ugh. I was joking. All that typing would make my fingers fall off.
Most of the “clues” would be on the “Paul is Dead” Wikipedia site. And there must be hundreds of websites devoted to that particular bit of historic weirdness.
(My older sister was attending college in Michigan in the fall of 1969, not far from U of M in Ann Arbor, where the whole thing started. It was ALL the kids were talking about)
I tuned in to the The Beatles channel on SiriusXM and fortuitously caught the top songs on their listener survey of 100 best Beatles songs. One of them was the Abbey Road melody, one of my personal favorites.
Nobody else could have pulled that off. Individually, the lyrics are inane, the melodies slight, the ideas nonexistent. Gee, John punned on George’s “Here Comes the Sun” with “Here Comes the Sun King.” George should have slugged him.
It all works. The production is glorious, every note golden, every bar backed and filled and blending in to fit where it shouldn’t. The progression from the quietude of “Sun King” to the tearing riffs of “The End” unites the dross of nails and wood to build a towering edifice. It’s a concept album better than Sgt. Pepper’s. Out of nothing.
And those idiots left George Martin. Forget Yoko Ono. You know who broke up the band? John Lennon, the one who told Martin he didn’t want any of his “production shit.” And then turned to Phil Spector[!] to produce Let it Be.
George should have slugged him.
Was it a 6 transistor, or did you go all the way and get a 9?
One, plus a Fleming valve.
I like the title track to sergeant pepper but can’t get p ast Ringo’s singing on a little help from my friend s.
[quote=“D18, post:1, topic:820497”]
[li] Whoa - misogyny. Plenty of misogyny, eh? Like do the Stones ever once sing about killing women? (That’s a genuine question.)[/li][/QUOTE]
Well, there’s this little ditty that’s very clearly about killing women: Midnight Rambler
“Listen to it again. ‘Garblegarblegarble’ or ‘Paul is dead and we replaced him with Klaus Voormann’ You be the judge.”