Love
January 21st, 2007 by 
Rory Harper
For the past few days, I’ve been ponderously pondering what to post today. Most of what comes to mind is fairly dark, because that’s what most often interests me. Big surprise there, right?
Anyhow, while I work my way though that, I thought I’d put something lighter up as a place-holder for the evening.
Last year, Sir George Martin, often called ‘The Fifth Beatle’, and his son Giles remixed a bunch of Beatles songs to create a soundtrack for a Cirque du Soleil show. The remaining Beatles and the estates of the departed ones approved the project.
You can find the resulting CD track listing here, with free streams of four of the songs:
I’ve cruised several boards and checked the comments about it. Some people think it’s a cool thing that they did. Others consider it sacrilege. You can make your own decisions on that, based on your particular religious beliefs about the Beatles.
One comment did strike me as being spot on, though. The remix of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ takes from the softer demo that George did, and has absolutely none of the guitar line played by Eric Clapton.
Someone needs to be shot for that.
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Which cleverly segues into my next post above.
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Posted in Art, Music, Pop. Culture, Rory | 
7 Comments »
January 22nd, 2007 at 11:16 am
The Spouse, who is an eminence grise of Rec.arts.music.beatles, was worried about Love, but he’s now a convert. Doesn’t think it’s perfect, but finds a number of the pieces (can you call them songs?) very swell indeed.
January 22nd, 2007 at 1:46 pm
Yeah, the only thing holding me back from getting it is that the samples I’ve heard so far sound like they softened up too much on the rockin’ songs.
I haven’t heard all the snippets posted on the site yet, though, so will give them a listen more this week.
In any case, I figure the album won’t suck too bad, with George Martin involved, though I wonder how George, and especially, John would have reacted.
January 22nd, 2007 at 7:56 pm
John would probably have said something either scathing or dismissive. The older I get, the less impressed with John I become. Crank, crank, crank.
January 23rd, 2007 at 1:41 am
The pieces I like best are the most mashed-up. Although the remastered Day in the Life is sonically interesting as well. In all, I found it cool (even swell at times) but after a couple of listens I was ready to put it aside for a while.
January 23rd, 2007 at 10:38 am
While George Martin was involved, it was really Giles (his son) who did most of the work. There is a really good interview with him here about the whole thing.
January 24th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Sorry to disagree on three points, but:
Anyone who thinks Love “softened up the rocking songs” didn’t listen to the same album I did. That remix of “Revolution” could saw through carbon steel.
It also seems to me as likely as not that John Lennon, that obsessive fan of studio reprocessing techniques, would have liked what the two Martins did just fine.
Finally, I think using George Harrison’s demo of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, rather than the George-and-friends version on the White Album, was a good call, because it demonstrates that, even stripped of Eric Clapton’s showboating, it’s a fundamentally good song. If anyone “deserves to be shot” it’s probably Harrison’s widow Olivia, who, like Paul, Ringo, and Yoko, had veto power over everything on the record.
January 24th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
You are absolutely correct on ‘Revolution’. Not to mention ‘Back in the USSR’, which also rocks.
However, and I wish to state that I’m not being oppositional simply to be oppositional — ANY version of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ that doesn’t contain some Clapton in it, is incomplete, sacrilegious, unclean, and generally Of The Devil.
This has always been my favorite Beatles song. However, I do concede that Orange Sunshine, which was sparkling across my axons and dendrites at the time I first heard it, may have influenced my evalaution of its musical worthiness.
But early-to-mid Clapton, no matter how excessive, is not to be criticized. I will help you with slagging a lot of his later stuff, though.