The Beatles

| Live at the Hollywood Bowl (Eight Days A Week)

Twenty years gone, the 1997 two-CD release of BBC session recordings now gets the luxury box-set treatment to match the studio album remasters from 2015. Does it deserve it? There seems no further remastering made to those tracks already released, while the ‘missing’ content which serves as the reissue impetus is tacked on as an extra disc instead of being inserted into rightful placing in the original sets. So the June 1969 Playhouse Theatre recordings of Dazed and Confused (a fine 11-minute take, beginning its extended evolution from the studio version) and White Summer (8:23) are isolated on the bonus disc instead of slotting in after the broadcast interview with Page and Plant, which is great fun but still not included here. There’s twice the offence thus separating off What Is and What Should Never Be and Communication Breakdown from the 1971 Paris Theatre concert since, unlike the Playhouse gig, this was recorded as an end-to-end performance. Why not present the lot in the order they happened? Still, good to have them, and the material as a whole remains an impressive display of their early mightiness and ability to mess around as they go—the ‘Pop Sundae’ take of Communication Breakdown (one of five versions here) is remarkable for the band’s shortest random diversion ever, all of 15 seconds near the end, as well as this session’s burying of Jimmy’s rhythm track (though not his solo overdubs) in the mono mix behind amazingly high bass and drum levels (for the BBC). The final three tracks are, however, mainly there for completism, a lost session for Alexis Korner’s ‘Rhythm & Blues’ World Service show in 1969, ‘recorded off the radio by someone in Eastern Europe’, according to Jimmy—and off Short Wave by the grungy sound of it—a bootleg recycled here in a luxury box-set. Zeppelin always was magnificent at marketing, too. Jez Ford