The worst sounding Beatles album, according to John Lennon
In the grand story of The Beatles, John Lennon was never the one known for being a stickler for perfection.
He was always the adventurous member of the group, and on every one of their later records, each of his songs seemed to experiment with the mechanics of what a hit record could sound like on the radio. The studio was practically a playground for him half the time he played, but that didn’t mean that he could ignore when something sounded like trash when he put it on the turntable.
When looking at the beginning of their career, the Fab Four really needed to work with what they had. Please Please Me was practically a live album that happened to be recorded in a studio, and while Lennon had a lot more ambitions beyond playing the typical rock and roll, it’s not like he was going to throw any old thing onto an album for the sake of experimenting. It had to have a message, and even for a song that was as meaningless as ‘I Am the Walrus’, no one could deny that it sounded fantastic.
But around the time of The White Album, the definition of what sounded good tended to blur a little bit. ‘Revolution 9’ was far from a radio-friendly song when Lennon started putting it together, but when Paul McCartney suggested that they go back to their roots on Let It Be, Lennon felt that the end result was some of the worst recordings they ever made before Phil Spector managed to tidy things up.
As far as he could tell, Macca was leading them astray, but the real villain of the story all had to do with one person: Allen Klein. Simply put, the band’s new manager was a scoundrel who only seemed interested in money when he first signed the group, and while McCartney had the foresight to realise that he was the wrong man for the job, the thought of him getting their affairs in order was what kept the rest of the band paying attention.
After Klein failed to deliver on that promise, though, the idea of him putting together a greatest-hits collection of the band’s work wasn’t what the rest of the group had in mind. They sculpted their albums to be pieces of art, and while the Red and Blue albums do have a special place in fans’ hearts, the fact that the whole thing was remixed in stereo instead of their original mono mixes never sat well with Lennon, even decades after the fact.
By the late 1970s, the dust had seemed to settle on the band’s feuds, but Lennon wasn’t about to pretend that he enjoyed approving the greatest-hits, saying, “I didn’t realise it until they put it out. I presumed they would just copy them from the masters. I didn’t even listen to it until after it was out. I took it back and played it and it was embarrassing. Some of the tracks survived, but some fool tried to make it stereo and it didn’t work. If you mix something in mono and then you try to fake it, you lose the guts of it, and a lot of them lost the guts. The first version of ‘Revolution’ was destroyed.”
Stereo may have been the standard that everyone measured their records against at the time, but the real difference comes from how The Beatles intended their albums to sound. They wanted to create that same excitement that they gave their fans back in the day, so when everything starts to sound a bit too sterile, it wasn’t going to even come close to what they did onstage or even in the studio during records like Sgt Pepper.
If there’s one silver lining to this, it’s that those records, however flawed they were, did manage to become a foundational part of the band’s discography, with countless fans getting introduced to them through those tunes and then going back to the originals and having their minds blown. It’s not the optimal way anyone should experience the band, but the idea of another generation falling in love with classic rock’s golden boys was never a bad thing.
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