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2.18pm
30 July 2018
Offline
Hello Everyone! This is my first time posting here, but I have read topics from this forum for at about 3 years. I have been a Beatles fan for about 20 years which is most of my life. I have never felt the need to post anything myself as everything I wanted to know was already somewhere on here. Enough about me though, as there is one topic that I could never find an answer to on this forums (although correct me if I am wrong and this was already somewhere here). The topic I am referring to is that on the Naked Version of Dig A Pony there is clearly keyboard playing quite prominently through the intro and the rest of the song. In the original Let it Be version, the keyboards are almost completely removed although it still is a little audible in the verse. My question is what’s the deal with this. I would guess that it was just that Spector removed it from the song for the album, but to add on to what I was saying before, when listening to the entire rooftop concert, the keyboard is still gone! I know that they didn’t just slap the LP version over it as the “All I Want is You” beginning and ending is still present. The Anthology version also doesn’t have it, but that is a different take to the original LP, Naked, and rooftop versions (which are all the same take). So if anyone has a definitive answer to this please reply. Thank You.
9.57am
22 December 2013
Offline The rooftop sequence from the film sports some pretty raw audio in comparison to the fragmented official album releases… There’s bits in other songs from the performance that also get buried beneath the “rawness” of the original… Anyhow this is my take on your question, for what it’s worth… Billy Preston appears to step back into the shadows on ‘Dig A Pony ‘ for, musically, it doesn’t really need anything else to distract from its guitar driven chassis… However, instead of kicking back and enjoying an onstage seat at a Beatles’ show, he twinkles away at low volume to prevent his hands from freezing up from the cold January temperatures… Spector’s main task for ‘Let It Be ‘ was tidying things up and this was just one of those many things that he deemed disposable and thus did his best to remove it or bury it in the mix…
Bringing it up in the mix for ‘Naked’ underscores the pretentiousness of that project… It’s another jab at Spector’s work on ‘Let It Be ‘… “look! he even removed Billy Preston’s brilliant keyboard part!” except, that it wasn’t “brilliant”… nothing against Billy’s playing (Ringo’s claim that he NEVER hit a bad note is spot on) but the song simply doesn’t need it… ‘The Long And Winding Road ‘ most certainly had the room for other instrumentation but ‘Dig A Pony ‘ doesn’t really need anything else… George Martin edited bits from many of their recordings for official release but apparently Spector wasn’t allowed to do the same, eventhough he was! The ‘Naked’ project is a low point in their history… I’ve listened to it once out of curiosity and that was one time too many…:-)
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