Send "The Beatles " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Four lads, seven years, and 54 of the greatest songs everThere are purists out there who will argue very fervently against the very idea of compilation albums. They will hold the studio album—long accepted as the primary method of presenting popular (particularly rock) music in long-form to the masses—up as an immutable concept, one that should not be diminished or desecrated by taking select components out and mixing them together with selections from other albums to create something aimed primarily at impulse-buyers and cautious neophytes, the sort of people who refuse to hold the album in the same regard. To pick apart albums for incorporation into a best-of/greatest hits/singles collection would not only remove songs from their proper context, it would strip a band down into an easy-to-digest Cliff Notes format, hitting all the main points while obscuring the finer details. With that in mind, it would be a particular affront to summarize the musical output of the Beatles—not only widely accepted as the greatest rock group ever, but one of the epochal artists in all of modern art—into this perceived lesser format. Yet, here are a few good reasons why a Beatles compilation should exist. Firstly, while the Beatles assuredly helped spearhead the concept of the pop album as Art, they were also a stunning singles band, responsible for numerous brilliant flipsides that never found their way onto a long-player. Perhaps more importantly, not everything the Beatles recorded was great, or even good. Even their finest albums had one or two duff tracks that are eternally skipped over even by diehards (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “Don’t Pass Me By”, I’m looking at you). Naturally, it’d be nice to be able to indulge in the highlights, particularly if you find yourself stuck somewhere with only a few records to choose from (yes, there are still people out there without MP3 players—don’t ever forget it). Furthermore, there will always be future generations who will need a proper, functional introduction to the Fab Four’s music, and they won’t all have parents or older siblings with copies of Abbey Road or Revolver laying about to act as a road map. Still, care needs to be taken when figuring out how to assemble the perfect Beatles compilation. The multi-million unit-shifting 2000 release 1 appeared a good idea on paper—compile all the Beatles’ chart-toppers into one hits-packed disc—but it ultimately comes up short, given that its remit dictated the exclusion of essential album cuts, overwhelmingly favored John Lennon-fronted material in its first half and that by Paul McCartney in the latter end, and omitted the band’s masterpiece, the 1967 single “Strawberry Fields Forever”. Crucially, 1 demonstrates that a solitary disc is simply not enough space to cram the story of the Beatles into. Sure, it’s rather unreasonable to demand people buy five or six albums from the outset if they want to see what all the fuss about these lads from Liverpool, England is all about, but even one 80-minute CD is too limited a scope to effectively convey the quartet’s stylistic breadth as well as include all the mandatory hits....full text |
| Eil |
| THE BEATLES 1962-1966/1967-1970 (Set of two 1970s Canadian Capitol label double LPs comprising the black vinyl issues of the 'Red' and 'Blue' albums with a total of 54 classic tracks, housed in their individual gatefold colour picture sleeves including original lyric inners. The 'Red' album has a promotional punch hole in the bottom right hand corner, however both remain factory sealed from new in the original shrinkwrap with rare custom tracklisting sticker on the front - still unplayed some three decades on! SKBO3403/4)....full text |
| Newstime |
| Next week marks the re-release of The Beatles 1962—1966 and The Beatles 1967—1970, the famous “red” and “blue” Beatle compilation double albums originally released (on vinyl and cassette) in 1973. (For those who want the albums in a slightly different and more unique format, they will also become available at the end of November in the form of a 4-CD box set entitled The Beatles 1962—1970, at a slightly higher price than the combined cost of the two double albums.) This time, the songs are featured in their remastered versions, as heard for the first time on the magnificent Beatles Stereo Remasters box set released on 9 September 2009. The stereo version of the Beatles Remasters set (a mono version was released as well) seems destined to go down in the annals of rock music as the best individual item it will ever be possible to buy, since it contains the finest recording catalogue in the history of popular music, coupled with what I regard as the best sound quality ever achieved in a recording studio. It is all the more remarkable that such superlative technical quality is heard on recordings made in the 1960s, when studio equipment was primitive by today’s standards. Of course, The Beatles 1962—1966 and The Beatles 1967—1970 are, and have long been, available on CD. So, if you have them already (as do I) or if you own the Stereo Remasters box set (as do I), the re-released versions will, technically, be superfluous. But if you own the original CD versions and have not heard the Stereo Remasters, the newly remastered versions of the red and blue compilation albums will make an excellent purchase on account of their vastly superior sound quality. After all, millions of the people who bought the Stereo Remasters box set already owned copies on CD of all the tracks in that set. And that purchase was worth every cent of its substantial asking price even if you had copies of the originally mastered versions. Even if you own the Stereo Remasters box set, the remastered versions of The Beatles 1962—1966 and The Beatles 1967—1970 are still worth buying because of the fact that they collect in one place the greatest highlights of the Beatles’ magnificent catalogue, which are otherwise scattered across 13 albums, of which two (The Beatles (White Album) and Past Masters) are double albums. If you want to listen at one sitting to a selection of the Beatles’ best songs, in stunningly remastered form, ranging from “Love Me Do” to “The Long and Winding Road”, taking in “A Hard Day’s Night”, “Paperback Writer”, “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and “Revolution” along the way, without having to jump and up down repeatedly to change the CD, the remastered versions of the red and blue albums are the thing to have – together, of course, with a CD player that is capable of taking four or more discs. Such players, however, are now standard equipment in many home-entertainment and car sound systems. And since many millions of people rushed off to CD shops in 2000 to buy the compilation album 1, which featured on one CD the A-sides of all 27 of the Beatles’ British and American Number One singles, despite already having copies of all of those tracks (which were not even the superior remastered versions currently available), it is fair to expect that a pretty sizeable number of record buyers out there will buy the new versions of the red and blue albums all over again. (I have already ordered my copy of The Beatles 1962—1970 box set, despite the fact that this will add to my collection a seventeenth copy of the songs “Ticket to Ride” and “Help!”. I refrain from recounting here how this ridiculous state of affairs has come about, but it has.) The red and blue albums hold a special place in my affection because in 1966 the music of the Beatles was banned (even in cover versions) from SABC radio stations by the right-wingers who controlled the South African airwaves in those days, owing to John Lennon’s infamous remark that the Beatles had become more popular than Jesus. I was a young child at the time, with no access to any other radio stations, which meant that I completely missed out on the Beatles’ music at the time when it was happening during the second half of the Beatles’ career: all I knew were the A-sides of the Beatles’ singles up to 1966, plus the handful of B-sides on the singles which were bought for me as gifts from time to time, and the songs I heard in the movies of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, which I insisted upon being taken to see when they first hit cinemas in 1964 and 1965, respectively. So The Beatles 1962—1966 and The Beatles 1967—1970, which appeared late in my high-school career, were the way in which I caught up with the most important of the Beatles’ songs, and the springboard from which I launched myself into the remainder of the Beatles’ catalogue, which took me another two to three years to collect. I played the compilation albums continuously for weeks on end, and was astounded that one group of four musicians (even with the assistance of a producer as prodigiously talented as George Martin) could come up with material of the complexity, excellence and (sometimes) profundity of “Eleanor Rigby”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “A Day in the Life”, “I Am the Walrus”, “Hey Jude”, “Something”, “Across the Universe” and so many other famous songs....full text |
The Beatles lyrics
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