Yes those albums were remixed by Giles Martin. |
Yup, ya’ll are of course correct, it WAS Giles Martin, not Dhani. I didn’t pay much attention to those two reissues, so didn’t absorb that info deeply enough to recall it.
And I myself haven’t heard about Dhani being involved in the All Things Must Pass 50th, though I also don’t know that he didn’t. It’ll be interesting to find out who was involved in making decisions in regard to the new mixes, removal of the tacked-on reverb and echo, song selection, etc.
I haven’t decided how far I’m going to go---it’s being made available in everything from the basic/original 3-LP (and corresponding 2-CD) song line-up, all the way up to an 8-LP boxset. I’m leaving out the $500 ultra-deluxe package, which features a wooden crate. I just want the music.
At the time of ATMP’s initial release---shortly after McCartney’s first solo album, a very "small" recording---I found McCartney’s much more to my liking. More intimate and "inviting", ATMP too bombastic and, again, over-produced. Of course, by that time I---and a lot of others---had had my tastes permanently realigned by The Band’s 2nd s/t album, itself very small and intimate.
And I REALLY didn’t like Lennon’s first album, and still don’t. WAAAY yonder too personal; I’m not interested in your deep internal and intimate problems, John. Tell it to your shrink ;-) . And stop screaming, will ya?
But Ringo’s Nashville-recorded Beaucoup Of Blues album (his 2nd) I quite liked. A lot of my new-to-me favorite musicians accompanied Ringo playing gen-u-ine Country music (Ringo’s first love), guys heard on a lot of Dylan’s mid-60’s albums. Sure, their musical talent tended to make more obvious Ringo’s lack of singing talent, but that’s okay; I much prefer a great song sung by a mediocre singer to a mediocre song sung by a great singer. In the same way that the script/screenplay is more important to the making of a good movie than is the talent of the actors. Do I really have to say imo? ;-) |
Here’s a section of a recent Mojo magazine article on the 50th ATMP: Paul Hicks was the guy who actually worked the machines for the restoration. “BACK IN JANUARY 2001, only 10 months before his death, George Harrison expressed his ongoing dissatisfaction with the “big production” of All Things Must Pass in the liner notes for the album’s 30th anniversary reissue: “It was difficult to resist remixing every track,” he noted. Now, for the upcoming 50th anniversary motherlode edition of his already expansive 1970 album (pandemic-delayed and due in August), some tasteful retrofitting has been applied.
“My dad was not a fan of reverb,” Dhani Harrison tells MOJO, on the phone from his family’s Friar Park estate in Henley-on- Thames, explaining that the new, from-the ground-up mixes of the landmark triple album involved painstaking audio restoration and a foregrounding of his father’s vocals, somewhat stripping back Phil Spector’s layers of effects. “It’s like restoring a painting,” Harrison adds. “We’re so careful. Every stage has been A/B’ed [comparing the new and earlier versions] along with the original. When you hear it, it’s just mindblowing.”
The new Super Deluxe All Things Must Pass comprises 70 tracks over five CDs or eight LPs, reclaiming the solo acoustic demos from the hands of the bootleggers. Dhani recalls his dad having a significant conversation with Bob Dylan regarding outtake curation: “I remember him talking back in the ’90s to Bob and saying, ‘You’ve just got to release all your bootlegs. Make it sound great and own it. Take it back.’ We wanted to make it so good that there’s no way you could ever want to bootleg these ever again.”
From the 30 included demos (26 previously unreleased), Dhani singles out the whimsical groover Cosmic Empire, along with the mantra-like Dehra Dun, while other highlights include a different version of Sour Milk Sea from the Esher sketch for The White Album and a Sun Records-style slapback rocker titled Going Down To Golders Green.
Harrison and engineer Paul Hicks (also responsible for recent sonic restorations for The Beatles, the Lennon estate and The Rolling Stones) together mixed a staggering 110 tracks, before making the final selection. Of what Dhani calls the preliminary “small band” versions of ATMP songs (featuring Ringo on drums and Klaus Voormann on bass), he admits that the mixing of an alternate I’d Have You Anytime was an affecting moment.
“It broke my heart,” he says. “I just started sobbing. Paul looked at me and said, ‘OK, so we’re doing it then.’ There was no question as to whether or not this was the right way to go because it’s just so powerful. Ultimately, everything had to be emotional.”
Meanwhile, an Über Deluxe Edition of the album, limited to 3,000, will be housed in a wooden crate along with Rudraksha prayer beads, a seven-inch-tall figurine of George and ¹/ ¹² th-scale laser-scanned gnomes as featured on the original cover, and a bookmark cut from a pine tree on the Harrison estate.
“You actually get a piece of Friar Park history,” Dhani enthuses of the crate edition, modeled on a Victorian ale chest. “I wanted it to be like a time capsule. It looks like it’s lasted years and will last another 100 years.” |
Some fabulous information spoilt unnecessarily gratuitous self indulgent opinions. If anyone had a right to express his feelings it was John Lennon. After all he'd be doing all of his career; In My Life, I'm So Tired, A Day in the Life etc. |
Fantastic @tomcy6, just the info I was looking for! I missed that issue of Mojo, a mag I love and for years had a subscription to.
As for "unnecessarily gratuitous self indulgent", I don’t know what that means (as least as it is in this context applied), and don’t care. This thread was instigated by myself; I’ll give my opinion about anything related I want. If you don’t agree with my opinion, fine. If you disapprove of me expressing it, too bad.
If one can’t differentiate between "In My Life" (one of my couple of favorite Lennon songs, along with "Strawberry Fields Forever".) and "A Day In The Life", and, say, "Mother" (unlistenable, retched. Narcissistic, too, as well as sadistic.), well, I can’t help you there. |
