I hope every­one likes the new look! I need to tweak it a bit, but I’m pretty happy with it.

The first Bea­tle album was recorded in quite a hurry. They had released their sec­ond sin­gle, Please Please Me, and it had become a instant #1 smash hit. The music indus­try wasn’t really built on long term suc­cess back then, so it was always about get­ting as much out of an artist while they’re hot. There­fore the record com­pany said “We need a full album. Right now!” If mem­ory serves (from all the Bea­tle books I’ve read) they took the first full day they had free from their live shows and booked all day in Abbey Road. What fol­lowed, in the words of Bea­t­les scholar Mark Lewisohn are “the most pro­duc­tive 585 min­utes in music his­tory.” They recorded 11 songs, play­ing live in the stu­dio. One song “Hold me tight” was recorded, but not used until the next album. The entire album was recorded live, with no over­dubs, and it really show­cases how great a live band they really were.

And now for the actual review. The first thing is WOW do these sound good. The Bass is so much louder than it is on the orig­i­nal albums. It’s almost over­whelm­ing on a song like “I saw her stand­ing there”. But it’s really cool to actu­ally hear it. Paul McCart­ney is prob­a­bly one of the top two or three bass play­ers in music his­tory, and even on this first album, while play­ing and singing, the lines are really cool. And out­side of the Bass, the clar­ity is just stun­ning. Every­thing else is just as clear as day. It’s really like lis­ten­ing to the album for the first time. I didn’t lis­ten to this album over and over like some of the oth­ers, so I’ll really be curi­ous to see how I feel about the other ones. But this is a really good start. The songs that really stick out to me for var­i­ous rea­sons are the following:

1) I Saw Her Stand­ing There — As usual, just rocked. And hear­ing the bass so much louder was cool. It’s all so much clearer that I even could hear some slight weird­ness in the bass part dur­ing the end of the solo. But awesome.

2) Boys — Ringo is the only drum­mer I’ve heard who can play cool fills while singing. And he sounds really good on this track.

3) Please Please Me — Always a great track.

4) Do You Want To Know A Secret? — the depth of all the vocals and the reverb is great on this track. In fact, all the tracks have this huge Phil Spec­tor reverb thing going on, and this one sounds really cool to me. The “Do-dah-do” back­grounds are “in the cave!” And I never caught this before. There’s some kind of click dur­ing the bridge, which to me sounds like some­one hit­ting two drum­sticks together. But the snare is still there, so it’s not Ringo. And I know the album was recorded live, so who is it? Mys­te­ri­ous indeed.

5) Twist and Shout — for those of you who don’t know the orig­i­nal story, here’s the short ver­sion. They needed one more track at the end of the night, and after much debate, this is what they decided on. John Lennon’s voice was pretty much dead, so he said “I’ve got one take in me, and I’m going to kill my voice.” And they pulled it off in one take, and if you really lis­ten, Lennon is just scream­ing it. He did such a good job that he missed the next two live shows, and said his voice wasn’t the same for a long time after­wards. It’s pretty fierce, and at the end of the track you can hear some kind of vocal sound, which sounds like Lennon say­ing “God.” There were sev­eral one take record­ings in Bea­tle his­tory, usu­ally of some of their cover songs from the cav­ern days, and this is one of them. I’ll point them out as I go. It’s also one of the few times in Rock his­tory that a cover ver­sion of a song exceeds the orig­i­nal. I’ll let some­one else spec­u­late on the others.

So over­all, I’m pretty stoked. Just this first album was good enough that I can’t wait for the oth­ers. My main prob­lem is that my favorite Bea­tle album is Abbey Road, which is the last one, so it’s going to take me for­ever to get there.