YEAR: 2003 ID3G: 17
Of all the Beatles albums, none has garnered as much controversy and speculation as Let It Be. Released as their final album in May 1970, the record began its life as a back-to-basics affair called Get Back, which was intended to show the Beatles as a stripped-down rock & roll band after the excesses of Sgt. Pepper and The White Album. They weren't just going to record an album — they were going to tape a documentary of the rehearsal and recording of the album, which would conclude with their first live performance since 1966. To facilitate filming, the band abandoned the home turf of Abbey Road Studios and hunkered down at Twickenham Film Studios, where Michael Lindsay-Hogg filmed endless hours of the band jamming, bickering, recording, and fighting. Throughout it all, the Beatles recorded so much material — with much of it being no more than sloppy rehearsals and unfinished takes — that neither the group nor its longtime producer, George Martin, had any desire to cobble together a releasable album, so the task was handed over to engineer Glyn Johns. As the group was recording Abbey Road, Johns crafted a Get Back sequence that captured the raw, unfocused nature of the sessions by splicing conversational asides between new songs, revived songs, covers, and brief, jokey tunes. This pretty much mirrored the feel of the Get Back sessions, and the record got fairly close to release — including an airing of an acetate on a Boston radio station — before it was scrapped at the last minute. Soon, the Get Back project mutated into Let It Be as Phil Spector, who had been working with John Lennon on solo projects, was brought in to finalize the project. By and large, he retained the original spirit behind the project, right down to the inclusion of dialogue and jokes, but he did overhaul three songs significantly, most notoriously Paul McCartney's "The Long and Winding Road," which he wrapped in syrupy strings and choirs. This is the version of Let It Be that was released as the Beatles' final album, and McCartney made his displeasure with the final product, particularly "The Long and Winding Road," known. Over the years, fans pined for an official release of Get Back while McCartney rumbled about revising Let It Be (even after a string-less "The Long and Winding Road" appeared on 1996's Anthology 3), and when the Beatles announced the release of Let It Be... Naked it seemed that the desires of both camps would finally be satiated. Unfortunately, that wasn't quite the case.
As the title should make clear, Let It Be... Naked is not Get Back. Where Get Back was designed to be deliberately loose, complete with ragged performances and spoken asides, Naked is a deliberately professional piece of work, with all of the rough edges smoothed down. Consequently, it's not so much an archival release, but more like the audio equivalent of George Lucas' Star Wars special editions, complete with controversies along the lines of Han Solo not shooting Greedo first. Let It Be is recognizable in its Naked form, but it's been cleaned up, mixed up, and altered, gaining the superb "Don't Let Me Down" at the expense of "Dig It" and "Maggie Mae," as the song sequence has been shuffled and the dialogue has been cut out completely (perhaps Paul wasn't too keen on John's mock "and now here's Hark the Herald Angels come" preceding "Let It Be"). Those are merely the obvious changes, too. Throughout the record, there have been edits, splices, and polishes, some of which are a little disarming, such as the lack of the coda on "Get Back" (including no "hope we passed the audition" from John) and a different guitar solo on "Let It Be" (a solo different than either the single or album version). Most of the changes are subtle — a correction there, an added lick here — but they usually can be felt, even if the overall sound of most of the tracks hasn't changed all that much. The exceptions, of course, are the three songs Spector overhauled: McCartney's "The Long and Winding Road," Lennon's "Across the Universe," and George Harrison's "I Me Mine." Paul's song does indeed sound better and less saccharine in this arrangement, and it is a marked improvement. John's tune — now in its third distinct incarnation, the most of any Beatles song — is also different and an improvement, benefiting from the simpler arrangement, but it isn't a revelation along the lines of "Road." George's song is fine in this version, but in Spector's hands, it felt like a harbinger for All Things Must Pass, and is arguably just as good on the original album as it is here. The rest pretty much sounds very close to how it did on the original album, only with much better fidelity — so much better that it raises the questions why the Beatles' entire catalog hadn't been remastered yet (ideally, it would be released as hybrid SACDs mastered with DSD, much like how the catalogs of the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan were).
So, the big question: was the whole Let It Be... Naked endeavor worth it? The answer is, yes...kind of. There's little question that this was an avenue worth pursuing, since neither Get Back nor Let It Be really were finished, and both fans and the band desired to set the record straight. But Naked doesn't set the record straight; it further clouds the waters by presenting a third version of the sessions, one that is no more accurate than the original album. It could be argued, in fact, that without Lennon's wiseass remarks and larks like "Dig It" it feels less like the sessions, which were ramshackle (in fact, they were directionless, as the bonus "Fly on the Wall" disc reveals). But it is also true that Naked is a finished album, with polished intros and outros, and is overall slightly stronger on a track-by-track basis. These changes make it a sleeker, slicker album, but it's hard not to miss the off-the-cuff aura of Let It Be, which contained more character and revelations than this revised version. After all, even with the changes and edits, the biggest differences boil down to the resequencing, the lack of joviality, and the de-Spectorized three. And since Let It Be was initially an unfinished album, cobbled together by associates of the Beatles, not the bandmembers themselves or their producer, it doesn't make a great deal of difference if the order is changed, especially since this was also mixed and produced by associates of the band, not Paul himself, and the main takes are those on the original album, which themselves weren't all that different than what was on Get Back. It all boils down to interpretations of an unwieldy session that was abandoned out of frustration at the end. This is a valid, entertaining interpretation of the Let It Be sessions. But, contrary to the sticker selling the album, this is not necessarily "Let It Be...as it was meant to be. The band's cut from the original sessions." The dogged seriousness of Naked contradicts the let-it-all-hang-out intent of the sessions or the warts-and-all Let It Be film. Though it is still faithful to much of the feel of Let It Be, the presentation of Naked, including the slight bits of modern-day editing, reveals that it is revisionist history, not the final word. Which doesn't hurt it as a record — these are great songs, after all — but it is a bit disappointing that this long-awaited project wasn't executed with a little more care and respect for the historical record.
[The bonus disc, "Fly on the Wall," contains 20-plus minutes of excerpts from the countless hours of tapes from the Get Back sessions. No song is heard in its entirety — most are heard in shambolic snippets of 30 seconds or less — and even if the fidelity is considerably cleaner than that on the monumental (and monumentally boring) nine-disc Get Back Journals, it's still hard to make out the conversations on this disc, and even hardcore Beatles fans will likely tune out this disc after a few minutes. It would have been better if this set was released with a disc devoted to Let It Be... Naked and a disc devoted to the original Get Back, but that's a pipe dream.]