THE BEATLES
SPICY BEATLES SONGS
Remastered Edition
Declicked, denoised, pitch & phase corrected from the LP on Trade Mark Of Quality TMQ 71076 (1974)
This bootleg is most famous for its cover art, by William Stout. The music on it is fairly commonplace thirty-five years later, and has come out in much-improved quality. But at the time when this record was released, it was new to collectors, and sourced from tapes from the trading community, before there was any documentation of when and where the music was recorded.
The first track is not The Beatles. "Have You Heard The Word" was made at a drunken recording session at Nova Sound Studio, London in August 1969. Bee Gee Maurice Gibb, his brother-in-law Billy Lawrie, and the two members of Tin Tin, Steve Kipner and Steve Groves, made this pastiche of The Beatles and forgot about it. A studio employee heard it, and passed it on to the owner of Beacon Records in London, who issued it on a 45 RPM single, Beacon 160, credited to The Fut. It turns up on this album (and several others of the period), dubbed to tape from the 45. On this particular record, it appears in a version in which the tape recording was paused just before the middle-eight, and resumed after it was over. It sounds so much like The Beatles that in 1985, Yoko Ono applied for copyright protection for the song as a Lennon original! It was, however, composed by Kipner and Groves.
"What's The New Mary Jane" is the rejected single mix, which John wanted to release in the fall of 1969 backed with "You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)" as a Plastic Ono Band record. An ad flyer was printed up to warn people of its impending release (which never happened). Here (and elsewhere) only the left channel of the stereo mix is present (there was no mono mix of this version). There were some severe volume fluctuations in the cacophonous end section, which have been straightened out here, so that you couldn't tell.
"Don't Let Me Down / Those Were The Days" was recorded for Dutch radio during the Bed-In at the Amsterdam Hilton. John is asked to sing a new Beatles song, but two months after making the record, he can barely remember how it goes (and he never played it again).
Everything else on the album is The Beatles on the radio, from Sweden, and on the BBC.
"You Really Got A Hold On Me" edits seamlessly from the live performance into the EMI studio version at 1:39, with no change in the acoustics. I can't explain this one, but you'll hear it when George Martin's piano accompaniment comes in. It was not present for the first half of the song.
"A Hard Day's Night" appears here sourced from a 1968 "Top Gear" retrospective, which is still undocumented. Host Alan Freeman breaks into the dialogue on the end to say, "is it really four years ago since I had that chat?" There is no middle-eight solo in this version. It appears elsewhere with the solo from the record edited in. After this, the tape edits to the original 1964 broadcast of "Top Gear" for the continuation of dialogue and "Things We Said Today." "From Us To You" is spliced together from two different sources.
Turntable: Technics SP-10 Mk II
Tonearm: SME Series III-S
Cartridge: Stanton 881S
Preamp: RTS Systems 405
Sound Card: Turtle Beach Riviera
Software: Adobe Audition 3
Processes: 32-bit recording, declicking, denoising, level, pitch and phase correction, 16-bit downsampling, FLAC conversion
Artwork is included.
Please do not convert this material to a lossy format and redistribute it. Burn in Disc-At-Once mode.
Enjoy!
Remasters Workshop
October 11, 2009