The first two albums I ever bought for myself--purchased on the same Saturday afternoon in the records department of the original Goldblatts department store on Chicago Avenue--were Beatles albums. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road, to be specific. There weren't the first albums I ever owned--that distinction likely resides with one of the many K-Tel albums that commuted from the discount bin at Woolworth's to my Christmas stocking on a annual basis. (And that made for some oddly shaped stockings, let me tell you.) And they certainly weren't the last Beatles albums I ever purchase. At one time or another, just about every one of the Fab Four's discs have found their way into my music collection--an eclectic selection where you can find James Brown next to Tito Puente, the Rolling Stones beside Patsy Cline, Traci Lords sandwiched between Jimmy Scott and Johnny Cash--in one format or another: Vinyl, CD, even eight-track.
One Beatles album that never made the grade, though, was Let It Be.
I don't think the omission was intentional or conscious. It's not like wandered into Laurie's Planet of Sound, picked up a well-worn LP and dropped it from my hands as if singed by brimstone. It's not worth all that drama. I guess it has more to do with the lack of weight Let It Be, the last release of new music from the group, has when compared with other Beatles efforts. Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road...those were albums. Let It Be, a project cobbled together by producer Phil Spector from the remnants of contentious recording sessions intended to produce a rough-edged, back-to-the-basics album, is more of a collection of unrelated songs, with no more significance in the bigger picture of the Beatles' catalog than, say, Hey Jude or Yellow Submarine (both of which made my collection, but only because they'd been given as gifts).
Let It Be remains a point of controversy amongst music fans, who argue its merits or lack thereof. Did Spector salvage an abandoned project, or did he marr classic pop songs with his formerly successful "Wall of Sound" production style? Was John Lennon right to praise Spector's efforts? Was Paul McCartney justified in being outraged at the way Spector treated his tunes, most especially "The Long and Winding Road"? Did the Beatles go out with a bang, a whimper or merely a "meh"?
I always fell on the side of "less is more" and thought Spector had overdone some of the songs--"Across the Universe" is a simple, spiritual Lennon tune smothered in strings and heavenly chorus (though it must be pointed out that Lennon himself loved what Spector did with the song), and "Let It Be" was tweaked from its single version with added guitars and an amped-up solo that breaks the solemn mood McCartney carefully constructed. (Then again who am I to critique Spector's production skills? I own several musical instruments--including an acoustic guitar, several harmonicas (all inherited from Grandma) and a kazoo purchased for me by Red Secretary from a Cracker Barrel in Stevensville, MI--none of which I can play.)
The result, contrary to the promise on the album cover of "the warmth and freshness of a live performance, as reproduced for disc by Phil Spector," is a scizophrenic effort with studio chatter (mostly Lennon snarking, sometimes mean-spiritedly), which was part of the original concept of engineer Glyn Johns, bookending songs that sound anything but live.
And now, decades later, the debate, long since relegated to background buzz, has been dialed up to eleven again with the release of Let It Be...Naked.
The intent of Naked, it would appear, it to strip away all of the layers Spector added to take the songs back as close to their original forms as possible. All of the studio chatter is gone now, as are two song fragments--"Dig It" and "Maggie Mae"--that were little more than elevated studio chatter themselves. One song recorded during the sessions but not included in the film, "Don't Let Me Down," has been added into the mix, and the remaining songs have been reordered and digitally remastered.
But have the producers of Naked succeeded? Partially. But they've also partially vindicated Spector's production as well.
To be sure, the digital scrubbing these songs have received has made them sound more intimate and warm, especially the songs recorded on the rooftop of Apple Studios in January 1969--the last public performance the Beatles would ever give. "Get Back," which now leads off the album, sounds like the Fab Four are playing in a small club--maybe the Double Door, where I saw Cheap Trick a few years back and where the Rolling Stones once jammed--rather than a polished studio version, which is what Spector used for the original album, despite the impression created by sandwiching it between Lennon comments, including his famous "I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition." (Some critics of Naked have complained about the omission of this comment--and, to be fair, the song does sound truncated now--but the Beatles recorded three takes of "Get Back" on that cold January day, with the first being a warmup and the last being played amid attempt by police to control the rapidly gathering crowd, so take two is probably the one that was cleaned up for Naked; to include Lennon's snark would have created just as false a version as Spector had.)
"I've Got a Feeling," "Dig a Pony" and "The One After 909" all sound more immediate, too, playing almost like the boys are actually having fun. Even so, it becomes obvious that there wasn't that much of Spector's influence to strip from these songs--his production amounted to little more than knob-twiddling on a number (possibly even a majority) of tracks on Let It Be.
"Across the Universe" benefits hugely from the Naked approach, lifting the orchestra and chorus and returning it to the simple hymn it was intended to be. And George Harrison's "I Me Mine" sounds fantastic, too, without the strings and things Spector layered it with. Curiously, though, the producers of Naked chose to retain Spector's edit of the song--which cleverly pads out the length of the song by repeating lyric passages--rather than using any of the original, unedited takes, none of which run much past a minute and a half.
It's the "big songs," though--"The Long and Winding Road" and the title song--that have received the most attention from critics, both over the years and now.
The version of "Let It Be" that appears on the album has always irritated me like the sound of a dentist's drill on rotten enamel, mostly because a perfectly lovely version of the song (written about McCartney's mother) came out in single form two months before the album was released. Spector's additions seemed needless, messing with a song that didn't need his "help." The version on Naked goes back beyond the single cut, which is certainly an improvement over Spector's monkey business, but not necessarily an improvement on the single. And maybe it wasn't intended to be--if the idea of Naked is to remove as much evidence of post-production as possible, the version of "Let It Be" certainly achieves that, if it now sounds underproduced compared to the two later versions.
No song on the original Let It Be had more attention lavished on it by Spector than "The Long and Winding Road," which became a full orchestral production number under Spector's direction--and, consequently, a staple on easy-listening radio stations ever since. Perhaps I've been conditioned by those decades of play to be used to Spector's bombastic version, but the stripped-down take on Naked sounds not merely underproduced, but like a demo--a rough one at that. It's neat to hear McCartney's piano work and Ringo's delicate support on drums, but the song sounds too slight without more work. Spector may have overdone it by a long shot, but he had the right idea: "The Long and Winding Road" needed work to qualify as a listenable song, much less single material, and this Naked version just doesn't get there.
So is Let It Be likely to be subplanted as the "official" version by Let It Be...Naked? Not really. Naked is an interesting alternate version, but not much more. It isn't Johns' Get Back, nor is it absolutely free of Spector's influence. It's a hybrid of those two, obviously leaning more heavily toward the former, and it gives the listener an idea of what it was like to listen to the Beatles record one of their least-satisfying albums. (A second disc included with Naked, titled "Fly on the Wall," adds little to this experience--the second disc would have been better spent with rough takes of other songs played and/or recorded during those sessions, or it should have been left off entirely.)
And neither side of the argument can ever be entirely satisfied, no matter what Apple or the surviving Beatles--Ringo, whose work on Let It Be is highlighted to even greater effect on Naked, and Paul, who has been accused by many critics of orchestrating Naked to finally get it the way he wanted it--do. Me? I've still got all my other Beatles albums to keep me happy, and I don't need to get into a pissing match with anybody over an album most critics agree is, at best, a lesser, shambling, patchwork thing compared to what had come before: music that reshaped the industry--and listeners--for good.
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