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"THIRTY
DAYS" - THE ULTIMATE GET BACK COLLECTION
The Beatles’ Get Back
sessions have been written about to death, so we'll keep it brief. The
Beatles gathered on January 2, 1969 at Twickenham Studios with the
intention of rehearsing brand new songs for a concert that would be
televised live throughout the world. They also agreed to have the entire
process filmed for an accompanying documentary. When the sessions drew
to a close thirty days later, the spectacular live show had been
downgraded to an impromptu concert on the roof of the Apple Building,
and the live television broadcast and documentary had been combined and
reconfigured into a single feature film. The Beatles left behind them a
half-finished album and boxes upon boxes of taped rehearsals,
performances, arguments and jams. It is from those boxes that this set
is culled.
So what makes this
collection "'ultimate"? First off, everything on these 17
discs has been digitally transferred with great care from master tapes.
So they sound better than they ever have before! More than 500 rolls of
tape were sifted through, and only the very best and most interesting
performances were chosen for inclusion. In some cases, performances have
even been painstakingly reconstructed from as many as three original
tape sources. Secondly, the dialogue and lengthy stop-and-go rehearsals
that sometimes made listening to Get Back sessions a chore have been
bypassed, with only ‘takes’, serious run-throughs, oldies and the
more interesting and structured jams being presented. All the
performances that made up the Let It Be album (except for those recorded
outside the time frame of the Get Back sessions) can be heard in their
original, unadulterated form. And for the very first time, the January
30th rooftop concert has been meticulously reconstructed from
ALL existing source material, while the January 31st session that
produced "Two Of Us", "The Long And Winding Road"
and "Let It Be" is presented in a far more complete
(and enjoyable!) form than ever before.
In the track listings that
follow, each song is cross-referenced to its entry in "Get Back:
The Unauthorized Chronicle of The Beatles' Let It Be Disaster", the
authoritative work on these sessions. The prefix of each number
represents the day in January 1969 on which the song was performed,
while the suffix places the song in chronological order within that day.
All tracks which weren't covered in that book have only a day prefix
followed by the word "NEW". Even a cursory glance at the track
listings (especially those from the January 22nd to 31st Apple sessions)
reveals that an avalanche of new and exciting material is waiting for
the listener! And even if the song is "old". It is most often
in better quality or more complete than it was on any previous issue.
You can also see that in some places the authors of Get Back were
incorrect with their dialings and performance placement, so the correct
information is presented here. So hit "play" and enjoy the Get
Back sessions like you never have before.
Humphrey
Lestouq, M.B.E.
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