Let us consider the song “I Saw Her Standing There.”
Now let us consider the nine versions of “I Saw Her Standing There” entered on my iPod.
The Beatles recorded “Revolution No. 9,” but I have “I Saw Her Standing There No. 9.”
Why would a person intentionally import nine versions of the same song onto his online music library? Because the person is a Beatles fan, and it makes perfect sense to play a version of “I Saw Her Standing There” from a 1963 BBC broadcast on the top of the version John Lennon and Elton John performed at Madison Square Garden in November 1974.
These are entirely dissimilar listening experiences, something Beatles fans intensely understand.
We note the overkill of music matter because there is some new news being produced by the onetime Fab Four. More than 45 years after releasing their introductory album to manic fans in the United States, we still keep meeting The Beatles.
Last week, after what seemed an interminably long delay considering this might be the most obvious fulfillment of supply and demand in entertainment history, The Beatles’ original albums were made available on iTunes.
“Hey Jude” is so far the most-downloaded song, though it should be “The Long and Winding Road,” given the fits-and-starts process that led to Apple Corps (The Beatles’ omnipotent licensing company), Apple (the omnipotent computer and gadget company), EMI and Sony/ATV to agree on terms.
In a complex labyrinth of licensing rights, EMI is the band’s original label, but Sony/ATV owns most of the publishing rights for the recordings. Sony/ATV is a partnership between the music corporation and the late Michael Jackson, and that’s where the publishing rights of the Lennon/McCartney songs wound up.
This is the multipronged corporate entanglement that the most innocuous of pop songs, “Love Me Do,” helped create.
The release of The Beatles' original studio recordings on iTunes was prematurely reported back in 2006 by a wide variety of reputable media outlets. Paul McCartney himself has been hinting for about three years that the music was due to be made available on iTunes at any time. But it wasn’t until the release of the band’s music on Rock Band that the full collection of digitally updated (and vastly improved) recordings have been marketed to the general public.
In the interim, we have had ample opportunity to hear and purchase those remastered CDs. Most fans have simply downloaded those recordings to their iTunes libraries. So the novelty is long gone for those who already follow these updates in The Beatles’ product (what used to be called “music”), and these iTunes releases are not nearly as important a moment today as they would have been three or four years ago.
Dennis Mitchell, at home with The Beatles.
“Longtime fans have already bought this stuff five or six times,” says Las Vegas’ pre-eminent Beatles expert Dennis Mitchell, who has hosted the Vegas version of Breakfast With the Beatles since 1991. Its current on-air home is KVGQ 106.9-FM “The Q,” where it is broadcast at 10 a.m. Saturdays and 5 p.m. Sundays. The show also can be linked at BeatlesRadioShow.com.
“These are not as good a quality of recording as the CDs,” Mitchell continues, referring to the entire set released in tandem with The Beatles’ Rock Band partnership. “For longtime Beatles fans, this is not a game-changer. It makes us pleased, though, because it means many more fans are going to be introduced to the music.”
This might well be the final frontier for “new” Beatles releases. At the risk of inviting certain similarly affected Beatles devotees to prove me otherwise, there simply is not much else out there in the form of non-bootleg recordings to be remastered. There are the Live at the Hollywood Bowl recordings from 1964 and 1965, performances that were about as aesthetically pleasing as listening to an hourlong whine of an F-16 jet engine. The full-length film Let it Be could be re-introduced, too, but some reports are that the surviving Beatles don’t want to wade through that unhappy project just to remind people what the breakup of a legendary rock band looks like.
Mitchell says the anticlimactic issue of the band’s original recordings was always more about how much Apple could make off The Beatles, not the flip side.
“The Beatles flat don’t need the money,” he says.
And for his listening pleasure, The Beatles’ puritan prefers to fade to black.
“I like vinyl,” Mitchell says. “I’m sentimental. It’s just a different sound, but it’s all there.” And now, it’s all available.
Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at twitter.com/JohnnyKats.
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