Don’t let me down (Load)
Pop…crack…whisper…sisssss…sisss…sissss “Hey…hey…hey…hey” BANG!! “Jude, don’t make it mean. Take a sad song…” Some of you may have no idea where I’m going with this clumsy, onomatopoeia-filled introduction. But for many, you know exactly what these sounds of yesterday are. So, before we go any further, let’s take our digital generation readers through a detailed analysis of what was really going on in the first 20 words of this article.
Long Island, New York 1982:
I sat Indian-style in my parents’ living room and sifted through a cardboard Coke box loaded with a vertical stack of “Beatlely” goodness. I’m talking about records. Not that of a Guinness book entry or filed tax document, but vinyl LP recordings. long representation. These are what George Harrison called “33 and 1/3” and Aerosmith praised as their “big record 10-inch”. They were striated, matted, and black. Each one was equipped with a perfect dartboard where the paper label was glued to the lacquer. This record I had had an orange label with bold tan text that read “Capitol.” This color scheme was indicative of later Capitol editions of the Beatles’ recordings. I was part of the first post-Beatles generation, and by the mid-to-late 1970s, Capitol releases of Beatles records were already in the double digits when it came to lot numbers. He only had two terrific albums that were labeled “first pressing.” These beauties featured Capitol’s signature jet-black background, silver text, and a rainbow-colored magic circle on the outer perimeter of the label. One would think that these gems would have been under lock and key.
No. However, they were under something… my butt. When he was a kid, he had a weird habit of sitting on the stack of unused records while he listened to one. This particular record that he had taken out of the inner album sleeve was called Hey Jude. I handled it the way we all handled records back then. It was suspended between the palms of my hands; as one would say “it’s that big” while using their hands as a visual aid. I moved the record closer to the phonograph turntable and placed it on top of the gummy pancake… B-side up. As the cylindrical disc spun at 33.33333 revolutions per minute, I lowered the stylus arm to the initial groove and sat back to the comforting sounds of: Pop…crack…whisp…sisssss…sisss. .. whistle “Hey…hey…hey…hey”. Wow, the album was already skipping. It was time to get up and take a swing at the player’s deck.
POP!!
“Jude, don’t make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better.” There we are.
What you just read was a daily activity in the early days of this Beatles fanatic. That was in 1982. For now, let’s jump ahead 28 years and delve into an unannounced rock history lesson. For younger Beatles fans, you may still be revisiting the earlier dated words that make up my vivid memory and wondering about this or that. Although the biggest question mark you may have drawn is: “What the hell is the Hey Jude album?” Yes, I grew up in the great age of records, the intense album art with its Zelda-esque hidden messages and Stereo Hi-Fidelity. Unfortunately, however, I also grew up in an era of great continental divide between Parlophone in the UK and Capitol in the US. As strange as the Hey Jude album may seem to you, it is as strange as Beatles For Sale was to me. Let’s face it, we are all creatures of habit and take comfort in what we grew up with. My mom’s meatloaf was awful compared to my wife’s creation of the classic American dish, but I still miss it. It also means that the comfort put on the A Hard Day’s Night album was alphabetized with instrumental tracks, that “Help!” It opened with a James Bond intro, and my “Revolver” was 3 songs out of 14 tracks. The latter is a product of the release of “Yesterday….and Today” 2 months earlier so that money-hungry Capitol could quickly sell 27 minutes of “new” music to an unsuspecting American public.
But when I was 8, I didn’t know, nor would I have cared, that the 1970 “Hey Jude” album consisted of miserly Allen Klein’s hand-selected songs from 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968 and 1969; a blasphemy for any Beatles purist. All I knew was that this album was JACKED with great music. How could anyone not be excited to see the formation of the album? While I didn’t care then, I do care now. I can’t stand the fact that I grew up with albums where the Beatles themselves had no idea what the album titles were or what songs were on them. The American albums that I loved so much were a complete mystery to my heroes and something they detested. Hear John Lennon perform “Baby’s In Black” at the first Shea Stadium show. He goes on to mistakenly say with obvious passive aggression that he’s “out of the Beatles Six or something… I don’t know. I don’t have it.” Of course, “everyone” knows it was released on “Beatles ’65,” even if John didn’t. The Beatles hated not having control over their American releases. John in particular was upset about this.
“We used to say, ‘Why can’t we put 14 [songs] in America, you know? Because we sequenced the albums the way we thought they should sound and put a lot of work into the sequence as well. And we almost don’t care what happened in the United States because it was always different, they didn’t let us get 14, they said there was some rule or something against it. Well, whatever it is, you know? So we almost didn’t care what happened to the albums in America until we started to come more and realized…they had outtakes and mumbles at first, which used to drive us crazy.”
This was the alteration, or the slaughter some would say, that Capitol Records would make of the established UK Beatles albums for the US market. It wasn’t until the advent of compact discs that American fans were clear on things. In 1987, the entire British catalogue, and only the British one, was published on the new digital media that were changing the way of listening to music. This included all 12 studio albums the way God intended them to be, and two A-side and B-side collections. For budding fans of the mid-’80s, it was almost a guarantee that they’d start off on the right foot. Yet for me and many others, we were stranded like countless zombies to sift through the debris of Capitol Records’ greed. Where was The Second Album? What happened to the Beatles? And why the hell was “Drive My Car” on Rubber Soul? What had they done? It was as if they took the entire pre-1967 library, threw it into the air, and let the songs fall where they fell. Little did most of us know, but Parlophone had done us all a favor and FINALLY put us “Yanks” the way it really was, and always should have been. Yes, this new technology that was overused like vinyl provided the best Beatles history lesson of all. So here we are, some 23 years after those iridescent reflective plastic 120mm records sucked up the entire Beatles catalog and brought it back to us in the correct, intended order. Except now, they themselves have been all but eradicated by the latest “electronic noise” in the form of digital music and its many delivery methods. What I once had in 4 soda cartons can now be stored in something the size of half a Pop-Tart. While the advancement of technology is frustrating for those who get used to a certain form, it does something significant for a group from the last century like the Beatles. It introduces them to the next generation of fans using the medium of their choice.
The choice among these fans is the iPod; a music device that has allowed them to carry 3,500 songs in their back pocket. On November 16, 2010, Apple Computers, with its groundbreaking iPod, announced that it would finally release the entire Beatles catalog for download through its iTunes store. Once again, it’s time to “Meet the Beatles.” There is no doubt that this move will positively increase the iconic group’s young fanbase and ensure that the Beatles remain in the public eye. Unfortunately, that’s where I feel the positives will end. My biggest concern is the possibility of fans losing understanding and appreciation of the band’s entire albums as a complete work of art. As we all know, the miracle of iTunes is all about logging in and choosing songs by familiarity of title and likeness. Someone hears Come Together on the radio, logs into iTunes, and downloads it. What this kind of music trade does is leave the other 16 songs that make up the incomparable “Abbey Road” in its 99-cent wake. When I was a kid, if you wanted to Come Together, you had to bring Something, Mean Mr. Mustard, and his lesbian sister Pam with you. Even though I was raised with the “wrong” records, they were still albums, albeit randomly compiled. And while the waning era of the compact disc legitimately presented the music of the Beatles in neat and organized song packages; this latest technology may crush 23 years of Beatles album straightness for this next generation. While the Beatles may have fallen for the iTunes gravy bandwagon, there are some big names who still refuse. Most of them are sharing and defending my aforementioned concern. For example, the hard-hitting Australian classics, “AC/DC.” When asked ‘why’? Here’s what lead guitarist and founding member Angus Young had to say.
“We don’t make singles, we make albums,” says Angus. “If we were on iTunes, we know that a certain percentage of people would only download two or three songs from the album, and we don’t think that represents us musically.”
Even country sellout Garth Brooks is concerned about the integrity of the album. “Until we get variable pricing, until we get only album downloads, then iTunes is not a true retailer for my stuff, and you won’t see my stuff…” Brooks said.
So where does this leave us Beatles fans now that the mighty have fallen? I myself accept the association with Apple and, well, Apple has accepted. I think such a move is almost inevitable and maybe even career suicide for some acts. However, no amount of payola can excuse the importance of the album. This will have to be farmed and hammered at home for the iTunes freaks. It will be up to lifelong fans like myself, my mentor brother, and my best friend to not only nurture and nurture these new Beatle offspring, but to ensure that they come into full bloom when they mature armed with the full understanding that the tree is made of its individual branches. The promise of this vibrant plumage lies solely in its functional appreciation of full albums and not in the intricate compilation of “playlists” created while picking fruit close at hand in the Apple superstore. Capitol already did this to us by shoving the wrong singles and compilations down our throats and we all know how bare the sheer orchard of Beatles albums left. Unlike Capitol listeners, iTunes users will have a choice. Unfortunately, it is the luxury of this choice that can be the undoing of the holy album.