The Beatles album Neil Young refused to listen to: “You’re not really there”
There was never any sense in trying to reason with whatever Neil Young did throughout his career.
He played by his own rules, and he wasn’t about to let the biggest suits in the industry breathe down his neck and tell him how rock stars are “supposed to” make music. He simply cared too much about the art behind everything, but he also couldn’t help but be a little bit disheartened when he saw some of his biggest inspirations start to cash in every now and again.
Because if there’s one thing that Young hated more than anything on Earth, it was the idea of selling out. To him, rock stars were more than capable of living a life on their own terms, and while the idea of people doing commercials and making more mainstream music isn’t that taboo today, you could always count on Young to take the piss out of a few rock stars that started to take themselves a bit too seriously behind the scenes.
Hell, ‘This Note’s For You’ is still one of the funniest songs that Young has ever written about the corporate side of music, but it wasn’t about the idea of getting paid, either. He was perfectly fine with artists who wanted to make some more money where they could, but when he started to see a problem came when the music started to suffer. Once any musician compromises once, it’s only a matter of time before they start trying to make something even more uninspired the next time they see the royalty check.
But you didn’t really have to worry about that kind of thing when it came to The Beatles. The Fab Four did have a handful of albums where were spinning their wheels a little bit, but even if an album like Beatles for Sale was their most cynical in some respects, the fact that it still managed to have the best tunes of their middle period is a testament to the kind of pace they were used to working with.
Young would have gladly played along to any Beatles song that he could, but he did get a little bit wary when he saw what happened with Yellow Submarine. The album itself was clearly thrown together to appease the producers of the film of the same name, but where the final product released in the 1960s was admittedly pretty fun to listen to for tracks like ‘Hey Bulldog’, Young wasn’t a fan of their choice to remix the records over and over again.
There was a purity to the vinyl version, and Young felt that any attempt to recreate that was always going to pale in comparison to the original, saying, “The record label needs product. But something like Yellow Submarine is disconcerting to me. I wouldn’t listen to it. There’ll be a whole bunch of things like it that’ll be coming out – and they’re gonna be no good. It’s like a novelty. You’re ‘in the room,’ but you’re not really there with whatever psychedelics the Beatles were doing. If they had done their own 5.1 mix then, it would be them. But this is not the Beatles.”
In all fairness, remixes don’t necessarily need to be about cleaning up what the Fab Four had done by any stretch. In fact, some of the remixes of the band’s classic hits are enough to expose them to a completely different audience, like the new generation of kids falling in love with the 2023 remixes of songs like ‘And I Love Her’ or when Cirque de Soleil gave everyone a new appreciation for their work on the album Love.
Was it going to satisfy the purists like Young who wanted to preserve the original versions? Not really, but music was never supposed to be stagnant. It was about trying to find new ways to bend and twist everything, and while AI has been that kind of practice a bit more complicated in recent years, the real musicians will always know how to bring their own identity to even the remixes of their work.
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