09/09/09 - The Biggest Day Ever?

September 9, 2009, will be one of the most important days in Beatles history. It's fitting that the date will so accurately reflect John Lennon's fascination with the number nine. On this date, two very important releases will be coming out.

1) The Beatles' Rock Band video game
2) The Beatles' entire remastered catalogue

The first release is something many of you are aware of, no doubt. Harmonix and MTV Games and EMI and anyone else who could get a hand in the cookie jar have been plugging this one since last October. While the Beatles' song canon is deep and varied, I still am having a difficult time coming up with songs that lend themselves well to the video game format (but more on that in a different post).

The bigger news for me (if you know me personally you'll recall me having mentioned this as long ago as 2001; I even did a post on this a few months back) is the remastering of the Beatles catalogue. Quick primer: The Beatles' music was committed to tape in the 1960s (duh) and transferred to the CD format in 1987. No actual improvements or error corrections were made at that time; instead, the music was simply copied over and released without taking advantage of the improvements the CD format could offer. This was the eighties, after all, and we were taping stuff off the radio then (radio? what's that? taping?), so no one noticed.

[Spoiler Alert: Incredibly nerdy section coming]

Since then, the CD format has become the primary means of distributing music, and is now already being supplanted by digital music sales online. During the last two plus decades, audio technology has come so far that today's better CDs are almost indistinguishable from the studio tapes. Some CDs even sound as good as live. Remastering technologies have allowed the murkiest recordings from the past to be heard in newly-clarified sound, such as The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. The improvements in dynamics and fidelity from old tapes can be revelatory. Yet the Beatles have been noticably absent from artists receiving this restoration.

In 1999, the Yellow Submarine movie was re-released (I think), and they took the opportunity to update the Yellow Submarine album from 1968, which has always been the lamest of Beatles albums (three great cuts, two previously released cuts, one startlingly mediocre piece of filler, and six unrelated orchestral pieces). The remastered mixes of those six Beatles songs, plus the other nine excellent ones in the movie, were decent improvements sonically. 1, which arrived in 2000, is still the biggest selling CD of this decade (about 30 million sold), but the mastering was mostly noted for simply making everything louder. Overcompression and the "loudness war", as it is known in music circles, have been a main concern of remastering projects for a time now (interesting animation on the Wikipedia page). 2003's Let It Be... Naked was a vast sonic improvement over Phil Spector's production in 1970's Let It Be, and 2007's Cirque de Soleil soundscape LOVE was, on the other hand, amazing. The sonic clarity and crispness of the instruments on each managed to make even the most overplayed of songs ("Let It Be", "Yesterday") sound fresh and relevant. Pieces of songs that I had never heard before suddenly came to the forefront, such as the plucked violins on "Something". They'd been there the whole time, they were just muddled in the mix.

[End nerdy section]
[Commence dorky section.]

If you're still reading this, I'm stunned.

To make a very, very long story a little bit shorter, this remastering has been far too long in the ordering. There are a host of problems with the Beatles CD mastering, including material recorded in mono and artificially split into stereo as an afterthought, choppy editing, and the occasional lousy mix of all vocals on the right and all instruments on the left. I've only heard half of the Beatles albums on vinyl, and none recently, but the sound presented was often warmer and a more cohesive whole. In particular, Ringo's drums and George's harmonies, where applicable, often get shortchanged in the CD mixes. For a band that put so much creativity into their craft, these second-rate recordings are unfortunate.

Now comes news that the end of a four-year project is in sight and, much to my approval, Giles Martin (son of Beatles producer George Martin and co-producer of the excellent LOVE) is in charge of the proceedings. His work on LOVE was not only creative and imaginary, but remarkably faithful to The Beatles and their music. He managed to greatly improve the mixes, creating a cleaner sound. It is not easy to make material that was often shoddily recorded five decades ago sound as if it was performed yesterday, but he accomplished it. I can think of no better person for the job, unless Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were co-producing as well (Steely Dan's studio mastering is damn good).

Does this mean I'll have to shell out for the box set? It will no doubt cost an exorbitant amount, but this is my favorite band. My concern is spending all that dough to find out that the songs are just more compressed and louder than they are on 1. On the flip side, buying just a few isn't going to cut it.

Santa Claus?