Beatles

What a mess. For all of his brilliance on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Paul McCartney must take much of the blame for the ill-conceived for television movie “Magical Mystery Tour”. McCartney had thought of it while in America in April of 1967. The others agreed to it so they all share it to some degree. He wrote the title tune and recording began April 25th.

The producer Ralph Sall had an idea ten years ago or so: why not get some of the greatest musical talents of our time to pay tribute to Sir Paul McCartney by having them cover his songs? What could possibly go wrong?

After the unexpected sophistication of “A Hard Day’s Night”, the goofy follow up movie that probably served as The Monkees’ TV show template was disappointing. The 14 song Parlophone Help album was not.

It all started as a misheard request for a condiment, Paul McCartney recollects in one of the introductions to the box's sumptuously produced book. During a flight back from America, the band's roadie Mal Evans asked Paul to "pass the salt and pepper", which he misheard as "Sergeant Pepper".

If you want to quickly know if you’re going to like Giles Martin’s The Beatles remixes start with “Long, Long, Long”. If you don’t like that one, you’re probably not going to like the rest, but for me, that remix in particular is far superior to the one on the two original “Top Loader” U.K. pressings I have: more transparent and more spacious, with a holographic George front, center and three-dimensional as he’s not presented on the original.

Before I get further into this follow-up review, a short disclaimer: other than the US Apple/Capitol singles of “We Can Work It Out”/“Day Tripper” and “Hey Jude”/“Revolution” (which, as expected, sound lousy), I don’t have any Beatles 7” singles other than this new The Singles Collection box. All my Beatles listening is on LP (the 2014 mono series, the Giles Martin remix LPs, and a few mono and stereo UK and European pressings) and the occasional lossless digital format, therefore from these recordings I’m used to great sound quality. My expectations for The Singles Collection (generously gifted to me by AnalogPlanet editor Michael Fremer) were likely different from most others’: sure, I expected the all-analog lacquer cuts to sound good, but sound quality on 7” singles isn’t the first thing I think about. With the 7” format, it’s primarily about the musical content, collectibility, packaging (when applicable), and finally, sound quality.