I recently watched an advert for two of The Beatles compilations now universally called by everyone as ‘The Red Album’ and ‘The Blue Album’. These were originally released back in 1973 after the group had broken up. The TV advert promised last year’s digital re-mastering and all at a ‘knockdown’ price.
I grew up buying Beatles’ singles as they came out and hit the charts. Some of the best singles were never on (vinyl) albums and I soon realised that some of the best tracks were never released as singles (except in the USA ironically). So my first ever vinyl album purchase was in ’66, Revolver, bought in a little record shop in Padstow, Cornwall. The shop is long gone I’m afraid (it was just down the back street where Rick Stein now has his cake shop). But I was now hooked and I bought all their earlier albums either new or second hand and then came the next album ‘Sgt Pepper’ , followed by ‘The White Album’ , ‘Abbey Road’ and finally the original version of ‘Let it Be’ – magic.
But I have to admit that the first release of ‘The Red Album’ passed me by in 1973.
Similarly odd releases of the back catalogue on 8-track and compact cassettes also passed me by (remember these formats?).
Fast forward to the ’80s and Compact Disks – brilliant, I could now listen to all my favourite music without clicks and pops. But, wait a minute the first CDs were simply badly mastered analogue recordings often from copies of the (vinyl record) master tapes and worst of all they universally sounded thin and reedy. These were marked as Analogue/Analogue/Digital (AAD) or in English they were from the original master tapes for the vinyl albums and then digitised for the media without further adjustment.
Then The Beatles’ albums started to be released on CDs and I was lucky enough to visiting the USA for my job at this time and I picked up many of the newly issued CDs there.
Then came more ‘new’ albums on CD; ‘Live at the BBC’ and the three Anthology double CDs which had lots of outtakes and early mixes. Plus yet another compilation called simply ‘1’ that I also missed.
Now here we are in the 21stcentury and ‘Love’ was released. This was the first digitally re-mastered CD with songs re-mixed and sometimes edited by George Martin (and his son) for the Cirque Du Soleil show in Las Vegas of the same name.
In 2009, we were offered complete sets of all the albums now digitally re-mastered from the original master tapes, in either Mono or Stereo and even as a version on a memory stick. My eyes still water at the prices that these sets were originally offered at. Jump forward to 2010 we can now buy albums or individual tracks off the other Apple’s iTunes store.
So why not take up the offer on ‘The Red Album’?
Think back to Agent Z (Tommy Lee Jones) in ‘Men in Black’ when he complained about just how many times was he supposed to buy ‘The White Album’ as new media types were introduced. We all laughed at the joke but there is much more than an element of truth in ‘how many times’ are we as fans asked to buy the same music.
So I plan to stick with my original decision in 1973 and skip ‘The Red Album’ even if it is digitally re-mastered and on sale from UK supermarkets – I have enough versions of ‘Paperback Writer’ already.
PS I do recommend buying the best book ever written about the Beatles music: “Revolution in the Head”. This is a track by track guide in the timeline of recording of the songs which details what was happenning in the studio, has insights to what was happening in the world outside and with the group themselves when each of the songs were written and recorded.
