Nostalgia makes it impossible to ‘Let It Be’

Acouple of weeks ago I got a copy of the newly remixed version of the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” It’s a handsome package: five CDs and one Blu-ray. The list price is around $150, but you can find it for less online or at your local record store, if you’re lucky enough to have a local record store. (There’s also a fiveLP box set available.)

I dutifully listened to the tracks, read the accompanying material printed in the 100-page book, and ripped the tracks onto a hard drive connected to a computer in my upstairs studio. I also ripped them onto another hard drive, one built into this fantastic little high-end audio device called a Brennan B2 that lives downstairs that we hardly ever use. Then I put it up with the other super-deluxe box sets held onto over the years. I don’t want those watermarked tracks leaking onto the Internet.

Hard drives are where my record collection lives mostly in waveform audio files on a four-terabyte hard drive. (Every year or so I back up those files to another hard drive.) There are 13,389 albums on that drive. It would take more than a year to listen to all the music archived there. There are some redundancies — for instance, several versions of “Let It Be.”

I bought the album at the exchange on Barksdale Air Force Base sometime in early 1972, fully two years after it was released. The Beatles were not a top priority for my 13-year-old self; I distinctly remember choosing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Cosmo’s Factory” over “Let it Be” during a previous visit to the BX. That the CCR album ran a full seven minutes longer than the Beatles record was just one factor in my calculation.

Though it would be a couple of years before I started writing about music, I remember being disappointed with the album. “Get Back” had been a thrilling single when it was released in 1969, but I wasn’t taken with much else on the album.

The title track sounded maudlin, and some songs I like now — “Two of Us,” “Dig a Pony” and “I’ve Got a Feeling” — seemed slight. I actively disliked “The Long and Winding Road.” For a long time, “Get Back” would be my least favorite Beatles album.

I wasn’t the only one underwhelmed. Contemporary reviews were mixed to dreadful, and since the Beatles had broken up before the album’s release, a lot of people thought of it as a kind of sour send-off. Someone likened it to a “cardboard tombstone,” an unworthy monument for the Beatles’ genuinely world-changing career.

It didn’t help that Phil Spector was brought in to monkey around with the track; he overdubbed a 33-piece orchestra and a 14-voice choir onto “Across the Universe,” “The Long and Winding Road,” and “I Me Mine.” On the title track, he added a second George Harrison guitar solo overdub, applied a delay effect on Ringo Starr’s hi-hat, and remixed the track to feature more prominent orchestration.

This was particularly egregious in that the album had been conceived as the Beatles’ return to the rock ’n’ roll sound of their early years, as a livein-the-studio project that eschewed the overt use of studio technology that had marked their work since the release of “Revolver” in 1966 (and their subsequent retreat from live performances).

Paul McCartney in particular was incensed at how Spector had modified their music (and seemingly missed the point of the project). This led to the release in 2003 of “Let It Be … Naked,” a stripped-down version of the album which resembled in some ways the “Get Back” version prepared by engineer Glyn Johns before it was handed over to Spector. That version, titled “Get Back,” has long been available as a bootleg and is, naturally, included in the new deluxe editions.

More than 50 years on, the Johns mixes sound superior to what Spector ultimately produced. They are tougher and more visceral, but the songwriting still has a tossed-off feeling about it. “Let It Be” is still one of the Beatles’ weaker albums, and my primary interest in it is nostalgic.

I’m looking forward to Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back,” which has evolved into a three-part documentary series of about six hours, to be presented over three consecutive nights on Disney+ beginning Nov. 25. It promises to be a corrective to Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary “Let It Be,” often cited as a source of the conventional notion that the Beatles’ final days were fraught with tension and dissension.

Which they probably were, though the 56 hours of camera footage (and more than 140 hours of audio tape) Jackson and his team had access to contained plenty of examples of the Beatles enjoying their work and each other. It’s probably a more complete picture of how the band was at the end, but it’s not the whole picture either.

I rewatched Lindsay-Hogg’s “Let It Be” not too long ago; it’s hardly the downbeat document it’s often described as being. And Lindsay-Hogg has responded to Starr’s comments to the effect that he “didn’t feel any joy” in the “miserable” film by saying he doesn’t think the drummer has seen the film in 50 years.

“I think, if you haven’t seen the movie in a long time, and you may not have the best memory in the world, all that kind of gets mixed up in your brain about what it was like,” Lindsay-Hogg told Rolling Stone. “Because when I saw it last, I’m thinking, ‘What is he talking about?’ In fact, there’s great joy and connection and collaboration, and good times and jokes and affection in ‘Let It Be.’”

He’s right, though it seems odd that so many of us seem to care so much about these artifacts of our youth, which were originally offered in the spirit of rock ’n’ roll, as transitory pleasures to be consumed with joy and quickly moved on from. Beatles songs may be like real estate in that they’re not making any more of them, but we can always build higher and dig deeper. So long as the market commands it, the market will flow.

I’m just disappointed the John Lennon-sung version of “Get Back,” which really does sound remarkably like the early Beatles, albeit augmented by a speed metal guitar solo by someone like Kurt Hammett (it’s actually Lennon), didn’t find its way onto the new “Let It Be” release.

Maybe they’re saving that for the 60th anniversary.