Bad Beatles Renaissance: Past Masters, Vol 2

The years after the Beatles broke up were filled with new album releases (kind of like Tupac, but with less new material): retrospectives and compilations of obscure and hard-to-find material. This made for a pretty broad swath of music given the Beatles' tendency to not release singles on albums and the fact that the early Beatles albums released in the U.S. were a bizarre mish-mash of songs from their U.K. releases.

So, when the catalog was "canonized" for CD, the group opted to put out CD's of their U.K. albums and then put everything that was left over into a two volume set called Past Masters, which was originally released as two separate volumes but is combined into a double-album for the remasters. Most of the collection is non-album singles and their B-sides, so in that respect, PM could almost work as a hits/rarities retrospective. But it doesn't really, because the songs are arranged chronologically rather than sorted into "hits" and "rarities", and huge gaps of their hits, even their singles, exist on albums and have not been included. Nor does the chronology give you a particularly good picture of the Beatles' progression as musicians. If that's what you're after, pick up 1 instead.

Volume 2 (I'm arbitrarily starting with Volume 2, by the way, Volume 1 is its own host of problems and will get its own post) opens with the one-two punch of Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out, a double-A-side released between the Help! and Rubber Soul albums. These songs mark a pretty firm step for the Beatles. They'd gone from being period hit-makers to the creators of some truly timeless music, but they hadn't quite jumped into the acid-rock phase of their later career. The trend continues with the next track, Paperback Writer, which has the distinction of being the first Beatles single that isn't a love song. It also is the first song to really show off Paul's bass chops.

But Kurt, you promised us suck! Where's the suck?

The suck begins with Rain, the B-side off Paperback Writer, which is a solidly mediocre craft. At least it's well-recorded. Rain is followed by Lady Madonna, which is one of the most perfect songs I've ever heard, and it's B-side The Inner Light. TIL provides us with one of those moments that's going to show up more and more as the Beatles age. I call it a "What the fuck, George?" moment, which happens when Harrison's influence by Eastern music weighs so heavily on the composition that it overshadows the fact that HE'S A FUCKING BEATLE!

TIL is full of sitar tritones and spiritualism. Lyrics include such gems as "without going out of your door, you can know all things on earth" and such, some of which directly quote the Tao Te Ching (although, I can't help but thinking that maybe George was predicting the Internet and Wikipedia). But it's weak and it's out of place.

Next we get the timeless, the lengthy, the incredible Hey Jude, and while it may be perhaps the most perfect song ever written, it features another golden moment in, one we'll be seeing more of, a moment I like to call "John being a dick". This happens at 2:58, when Paul misses a chord and shouts "Fucking hell". Something like this would normally have been taken out, but John insisted that it be kept in, mixed quietly so no one would really be able to hear it. It comes out pretty well in the remasters, if you're looking for it.

The B-side to Hey Jude was Revolution (not to be confused with Revolution 1 or Revolution 9 from The White Album), and I was going to save this rant for The White Album, but I think I'll do it now. The song Revolution is not the least bit revolutionary. Paul didn't like it--he thought it was too political and didn't think that was appropriate for The Beatles (which is not to say that Paul was above politics--see his far more subtle Back In The U.S.S.R.). But John was undeterred and wrote a supposedly-political song called "Revolution" whose chorus is "Don't you know it's going to be alright?" That's correct, a song called "Revolution" is an endorsement of the status quo. If anything, the song is counter-revolutionary, going so far as to say that if you endorse Mao, you'll never get laid. Moreover, this version of the song (which is far faster and grungier than the album cut) features John saying that "if you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me..." followed by him saying both "out" and "in", because ostensibly he couldn't really make up his mind. John, we love you, we miss you, but you were full of shit sometimes.

Next we get Get Back and Don't Let Me Down from the sessions for what would eventually become Let It Be. The single version of Get Back includes a coda that was excised from the album mix. Don't Let Me Down is a wrenching, heartfelt love song that only suffers from not being particularly well-written. John was still phoning-it-in these days.

Next we get The Ballad of John and Yoko which is a good song, if a slightly obnoxious one (made more so when you see her seated with the band on the single's jacket), and it's B-Side Old Brown Shoe, a Harrison contribution. OBS is a good-but-not-great song that was badly, badly recorded. The vocals are thin and quiet and the transitions are fairly weak. Next we get a sped-up version of Across the Universe that Lennon had donated to a charity album--this version was slowed down and overdubbed to give him more contributions to Let It Be.

Finally, we get the single version of Let It Be, which features quieter orchestration and a different (read as "better") guitar solo than the album version, and its B-Side: a truly, truly awful tune called You Know My Name (Look Up The Number). It's four-and-a-half minutes of the group trying to be funny and failing pretty grandly at it. They took it so not-seriously, that it's the only song of theirs since She Loves You to only have a mono mix. This is true barrel-scraping, perhaps the worst song they've ever recorded. Apart from Revolution 9, that is.

Now I understand that B-Sides are B-Sides, so this album contains mostly music that was either dubbed "too good to put on an album" or "not good enough for an album, but we hate to throw it away completely". That's fine and understandable, but I promised you suck and I hate to leave anything unexamined. I'm not criticizing it for the fact that it is simple a collection of songs and lacks anything that might be confused with "album cohesion". And keep in mind that this is just the second disc of the Past Masters set.

The first disc is far worse.

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