Let It Be...Naked [VINYL]

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I love the music, but can't get through this album and couldn't before I joined here and knew about noise reduction. I mean, what is this album supposed to be exactly – a version of the original album just without the Spectorization?

Having said that, here I go, ignoring my own advice; the Let It Be sessions (which are just that), in whatever released form. Across the Universe" – a remix of the original version recorded on 4 February 1968, without speed/pitch alteration, sound effects, piano, maracas and backing vocals; with echo effects unique to this version. The Tripping the Live Fantastic version is especially bad in terms of bombastic phony keyboards, and alone has earned my undying and eternal hatred of Wix Wickens. Suggested alternate title: Get Back: The Let It Be Sessions, with the (originally intended) "updated" Please Please Me cover -eventually used on the "1967-1970" compilation (The Blue Album), which was Lennon's idea.So hopefully at some point in your life you’ve heard “The Ecstasy of Gold” from Ennio Morricone’s unsurpassed soundtrack to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which is without question the greatest piece of movie soundtrack music ever composed. The special featured: a 50-minute documentary of the original Get Back/ Let It Be sessions, including interviews with all four Beatles; [ citation needed] an uninterrupted broadcast of the new Let It Be. Naked "stripped the original album of both John's sense of humour and Phil Spector's wacky, and at least slightly tongue-in-cheek, grandiosity".

I would rather have left the latter snippets alone (especially Maggie, an old skiffle-y song about a LIverpool prostitute), but generally, having Don't Let Me Down included is the real bonus here, and its presence more than justifies the re-release/rejig of the album. It's the other versions of it that too often to me sound too drab, old-fashioned, and too intentionally or self-servingly off the cuff, in a way that is more undermining than it is supporting, imo. Now that I have finally got round to listening to the 2003 re-mastered version of LIBN I am pleased with the result.To me it's the closest and only totally professional iteration or representation of the material from start to finish imo. When the album came out, the first thing that hit me was that song sounded the least like the one I heard at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. No offence is intended to Phil Spector; his sound is perfect for The Crystals and Ike and Tina but not for the Beatles. However, amidst the turmoil of the band’s breakup, the album was re-produced by Phil Spector before its 1970 release and it did not represent the raw and unadorned set The Beatles had in mind. There are too many original versions of the songs to be an alternate album, too many alternate versions to just be a de-Spectorized version of the original album, and too many fixes, patches, and mashups to the the kind of “warts and all” release the Beatles had in mind in the first place.

A second innovative approach was added when it was decided to film the rehearsals; allowing viewers to trace the development of each song from its first rough run through to the final polished version. The rest of the songs, shorn of Spector's decorative flourishes, confirm that although the Beatles were having occasional difficulty speaking to each other during these sessions, there was no problem about playing together. of course, for a couple of songs we already had some outstanding remixes on Let It Be…Naked – which was a complete misfire in so many ways, but did have exceptional sound quality. He is also determined that they should break away from their insular recording career and appear before the public again. Much of this ado has been about what might have been (coulda, shoulda, woulda) which IMO has no place in a review, which serves best by being about what's there, and not what should or might have been.Morricone channelled his muse and wrote that music while watching film of a guy running around a graveyard. Skip anything they removed Phil Spector’s arrangements from – even if you don’t like Spector’s orchestrations (and I do), better de-Spectorized versions of all of these songs already exist on Anthology 2 and 3. The 22-minute bonus disc contains song excerpts and dialogue from the many hours of tape which accumulated during the Let It Be sessions. The fact that these are as recorded in the studio, untampered with and without overdubbing simply confirms that this is nothing short of a near masterpiece. And our theme for the day is “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”, because that’s what I think about when I think of The Beatles’ 2003 release Let It Be…Naked.

Paul let’s out a glorious, exhilarating whoop after the instrumental breakdown as the band comes back in, and I do miss that on the LIBN take(s). There were several early versions of some Abbey Road songs and what what would later emerge as solo material from J, P and G (Jealous Guy, Back Seat Of My Car, Junk, All Things Must Pass). So much so that I held a cassette player up to the television while the film played so I’d have that version to listen to (I was 14). But for some weird reason the producers decided the world needed another version, so we got yet another version with a solo from George Harrison patched in from someplace else. Because the producers didn’t just give us a de-Spectorized version of “Across the Universe”, it’s de-Paul-George-and-Ringoized version too, for who knows what reason.Above all, the removal of the "wall of sound " production techniques lifts a murky cloud off the whole album. This makes for a much tighter tracklisting, especially with the opener being 'get Back' closing with 'Let it Be'. Naked consists largely of newly mixed versions of the Let It Be tracks while omitting the excerpts of incidental studio chatter and most of Spector's embellishments.