White Album 50th Anniversary Edition | Page 4 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

I’m gonna be a bit controversial here and make some complaints about the 50th anniversary edition, or elements of, anyway.

First off, the packaging of the 4LP and Super Deluxe, or more precisely, their slipcases.

How did the album become known as the White Album ? It was because the outside artwork was all white. By using the gatefold pictures on the slipcases for both they defeat and change that original artwork in a way I disapprove of.

Neither of those are the proper White Album artwork, and Nasty doesn’t like that. Since when did you have four individual portraits on the cover of the White? And, yes, I get that slipcase removed, you get the proper artwork, or an approximation on the Super Deluxe, but none of my current releases when everything is in its right place has pictures of the Beatles visible, these do, therefore defeating and contradicting the original artwork.

There should be, at the least, one more disc of studio outtakes. The Pepper super deluxe gave us 33 outtakes for the sessions, allowing us quite a glimpse at how songs progressed, many quite deeply explored over several versions. The Beatles super deluxe offers us 50 outtakes for the sessions – and quite a few of those are for things that were not released at the time, only 17 more even though it’s dealing with over double the amount of songs, instantly meaning there can be less exploration of how songs developed.

And of the 5 non-album songs to the album for outtake examination, unlike Pepper where we got alternate versions of the two non-album tracks along with their finished versions, the master of none of those five songs is included.

And then we get to the Lady Madonna  sessions, the outtakes of which are added (out of chronological order) to the end of the third disc of outtakes, as if an afterthought, something that isn’t a part of the WA sessions, and that’s because those three songs aren’t and weren’t. It also annoys me because it confuses where George was during the WA sessions. He’d abandoned the sitar and Indian music that had dominated his contributions to the group in the couple of years previously, returning again to the guitar. How better to show George had given up on making his songs Indian by the time of the WA than to include the instrumental of one of his most Indian tracks?

I’m not suggesting I won’t be raving over what we do get on 9 November, just that it could have better.

Off-topic:

@The Hole Got Fixed I’m not good at keys and things like that, but isn’t the 2017 Giles remix of She’s Leaving Home  in the same key as the Beatles mono mix rather than the sped-up original stereo which changed the key and was done without them?

Myself, @Tony Japanese, being familiar with what’s available on bootleg, I know there’s more out there that hasn’t been included. For instance, Brian Epstein Blues, a jam from the Sexy Sadie  session is absent, as is the I Will  variation The Way You Look Tonight.

A week before the expanded White gets released, on 2 November, Dylan releases the 6CD Bootleg Series 14, which includes the complete New York sessions for Blood on the Tracks. In recent years, with different degrees of availability, Dylan has released virtually every recording made, either in the studio or live, between 1961 and 1967.

I don’t think the Beatles should follow suit as both had different recording methods, but do think they could have easily been more expansive with this White re-release than they have been. Whether it’s one that excites or not (for me, it does excite), compare the depth Yoko has gone into the Imagine  sessions on the upcoming box set for that to the scratching the surface of what’s there that this edition of the White does.

@The Hole Got Fixed, one of the main points Giles made about his Pepper remix was that he created a stereo mix that was based on the mono mix which the group were a part of rather than the stereo mix where they weren’t in the room.

I realise aspects of Giles’ mix may seem odd to those unfamiliar with the approved mono mix, but Giles’ mix is closer to how they wanted it heard than the stereo mix done without them at the time was.

The truth is, the original stereo She’s Leaving Home , while the most familiar, ignored their mono mix and sped the song up.

As Giles said:

I grew up listening to the stereo. I was surprised. I didn’t know that there were different pitches in “She’s Leaving Home” in the mono and stereo, and how stark the differences are, before I started working on this project.

All Giles has done is given us a stereo version of how they wanted the song, and even if a little jarring because it differs to the familiar stereo, it makes sense to me that Giles stuck with the Beatles mono mix rather than, what was largely, Geoff Emerick’s stereo mix.

John always said that you haven’t heard Pepper until you’ve heard the mono, for those who don’t like mono, Giles created a stereo version of it.