Compleat Beetles

Paul McCartney got it right when he said Hello Goodbye was the best album the fab moptops ever made [See click bait shop, March - Ed.], but a couple of their other albums have been given the supreme honor of space on my iPod, and they're both improvements to the originals that you, the home hi-fi enthusiast, can accomplish yourselves from household materials and a little old-fashioned can-do gumption! Yessiree Bob!

As even the least informed Beatles fan knows, there were more tracks recorded for Sgt. Pepper than made it to the album. Why they didn't, and why the album is improved with their reinstatement, is what we're going to look at now. Firstly, it's not a question of groove time. Adding the missing songs results in a fifty-minute album; long, but do-able at the time of release. There are two reasons why Northern Song, Penny Lane, and Strawberry Fields (all recorded during the album sessions for the album) were left off. It was current practice not to put singles on Beatles albums, because fans would feel cheated at buying the same song twice. This is not a concern today, when Beatles fans happily buy as many versions of the same song as possible. When Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane were pulled as a single the songs became ineligible for the album. Nuts by today's standards, but there you go. It's not hard to speculate why Northern Song got axed. In spite of some criticism from certain quarters it stands up well to the Lennon/McCartney compositions, and is arguably more interesting ("better" if you like) than Within You Without You. It got cut because it would have given Harrison unprecedented groove time on an album, something L/McC might have been uncomfortable with. Neither reason should concern us today. Reinstating these tracks is bringing them home. The only other context you're going to hear them in is record-label marketing projects (the MMT album, and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack) that had little or no Beatles input other than signatures on a contract. Reinstating these songs isn't screwing around with the classics. It's not sacrilege. It's artistically, historically, and musically the right thing to do. The only problem is - and it's an enjoyable one - programming the tracks so they fit with the album. Adding them at the end as "bonus" tracks doesn't work. They need to be integrated. Cutting into the impeccably engineered segués is neither an option or necessary, nor is altering the original track order. You can either solve the problem yourself, or click in the comments to hear how I did it. The result is an album that sounds complete and correct and natural. I never now play the original edited release because it sounds like there's something missing. Which there is. Beaucoup.

Compleating Revolver involves slipping in the associated singles and B-sides, making a 16-track forty-minute album - again, totally do-able. I think altering the track order is permissible here, and even necessary. I was never happy with Taxman as lead track for a number of reasons, but Tomorrow Never Knows is a natural and epic finale. Again, the easy way out - of adding the tracks as "bonus" material at the end - is unsatisfactory. I toyed with using Robert Freeman's rejected circular design for the cover, but rejected it in favor of this colorful outtake from the sessions, as I did for Pepper.

Neither of these solutions claims to be definitive, and there may be technical aspects that could be improved. You may, if the idea doesn't make you throw up your pale hands in horror, prefer your own solutions.