For anyone with Max/HBO, there is a 12 minute documentary on the making of the new song.
I don't love the tune, but the show is about how it came together. Originally a demo tape by John, it was given to the other 3 by Yoko in the 90's. George worked on it before he passed. It took Peter Jackson and the ML he created for his Beatles doc last year (2 years?) to enable the song to be put together.
All 4 Beatles were more involved with the song than I would have thought.
Someone else wrote - McCartney must be taking great pleasure in the trouncing of the Rolling Stones in the news cycle.
McCartney’s on the new Stones record, right? Sounds like they’re stretching a bit, although I would never ever suggest that the greatest pop songwriter ever is egoless.
You know that and I know he's on the new Stones record.
Discogs is a funny, not so funny place. Opinions run rampant there and the stakes are high. People are doing all kinds of things there including buying and selling physical music media. The opinions often expressed there rival some that we see here in the song comments.
RP has taught me a lot about how to discuss shall we say, topics on the Internet. Since there is real money involved and crazy moderation, if one wants to sell their stuff there, the wise ones sort of sit back and try to stay out of the crossfire there. When to let complete bs slide just because of the possible consequences for example. And there is the database oriented faction that is more like a mob than anything else.
Not to jack the thread but here is an outside look at all the fun going on over there. I spend most of my time there anymore just trying to keep things straight and it is very frustrating.
What goes on at Discogs affects everyone who is still buying physical music media.
Someone else wrote - McCartney must be taking great pleasure in the trouncing of the Rolling Stones in the news cycle.
McCartneyâs on the new Stones record, right? Sounds like theyâre stretching a bit, although I would never ever suggest that the greatest pop songwriter ever is egoless.
I’d call it “The Capitalism”. If music couldn’t be sold, this would not exist.
Do you really think Paul and Ringo need the money from this song? I don't know much of the backstory to the video/song. I gather the seed to this flower was a low-quality demo of John trying out a few lines. True, the finished work isn't up to the Beatles standard: there probably wasn't enough on that demo to work up into a great song. But it provides another facet in the prism of the Beatles' beauty. These days, the group's albums are almost forgotten fossils—brilliant, but still largely unchanged and dated. The video gives you a layered travel through time to see the guys at various stages in their lives and careers. The guys come to life again, mostly as joyful memories. It's haunting, poignant and admittedly a bit creepy to see things like a young George in full Sgt. Pepper's regalia playing with an aged Paul. But the video briefly revives for me the Beatles' power and grace even if feels like a wistful goodbye.
Here's a thoughtful take from over at Discogs on what is going on with this new bundle that the song we are talking about is part of. This discussion started 8 days ago. Also note that the bundle has the very first song and now the last.
The point is to drag in a new generation of younger listeners. It worked in 2000 with the 1 comp, which is the biggest selling album of the 21st Century.
Most people our age have or have had access to these songs since forever - the casual older fan ain’t the intended market, and, yep, the vinyl is a pricey addendum to the collections of the many Beatles collectors (it sold out the first pressing in hours) but the key market here is the streaming market. These vinyl releases and the noise around them to date are marketing for that - and the collectors are paying for that marketing.
The Beatles have done one thing that almost all other legacy acts have failed to do - kept their distant catalogue alive through succeeding generations, and worldwide too, into the massive Asian markets. This is part of that. It’s the reason UMG kept that but flicked everything else owned by EMI Records Ltd to Warner.
McCartney must be taking great pleasure in the trouncing of the Rolling Stones in the news cycle.
Andrew Hickey (podcast History of Rock in 500 Songs) dropped us Patreon sponsors a very long letter with his take on it. Hereâs an excerpt:
â¦To give some idea of the kind of surgery that's had to be done to turn Lennon's demo into an actual song, the length of his demo in the bootlegged version I have is five minutes and five seconds long. The version of the track in the "official audio" video I linked above (there are some slight differences in the mix used in the Jackson video, which has some tuning up at the beginning but is missing the almost-inaudible spoken remark from Starr at the end) is four minutes and eight seconds — of which
forty-five seconds in the middle are an instrumental break that's not in the original demo, and there's a thirty-second instrumental outro that has no real counterpart in Lennon's performance either.
â¦To be clear, I think McCartney performing major surgery on Lennon's song makes the result a more authentic Beatles record, rather than less. Lennon and McCartney's collaboration was often in the form of editing each other's work, and sometimes extensively rewriting it (as when McCartney turned Lennon's sad acoustic dirge about being unloved and uncared for as a child into "Yellow Submarine") and what both men missed in their solo work was the ability of the other to find the core good idea among their bad ones and to polish it up for them and turn it into something workable
If music couldnât be sold, this would not exist.
Do you really think Paul and Ringo need the money from this song?
I don't know much of the backstory to the video/song. I gather the seed to this flower was a low-quality demo of John trying out a few lines. True, the finished work isn't up to the Beatles standard: there probably wasn't enough on that demo to work up into a great song.
But it provides another facet in the prism of the Beatles' beauty. These days, the group's albums are almost forgotten fossilsâbrilliant, but still largely unchanged and dated. The video gives you a layered travel through time to see the guys at various stages in their lives and careers. The guys come to life again, mostly as joyful memories.
It's haunting, poignant and admittedly a bit creepy to see things like a young George in full Sgt. Pepper's regalia playing with an aged Paul. But the video briefly revives for me the Beatles' power and grace even if feels like a wistful goodbye.
Wow! and holy shit they just threaded a 60-year-old tape onto a machine and let it roll? Without hooking it to a system to digitize it on the first pass? Crazy! But I want to hear it.
Yeah, I would love to hear it, too. I hope that it gets released in some form, if not to buy, just to be able to listen.
Wow! and holy shit they just threaded a 60-year-old tape onto a machine and let it roll? Without hooking it to a system to digitize it on the first pass? Crazy! But I want to hear it.