by Daniel Johnson

Created on: January 30, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

It's Let It Be NakedOr Is It?

The Beatles Let It BeNaked (Apple 2003)

Yeah, yeah, yeahanother shiny new piece of Beatle product just in time for the holidays! This time around the in-famously troubled Let It Be album gets a revisionist work out. Even hardcore Beatles fans have a hard time trying to define what the album was originally supposed to be. A soundtrack to a movie about a band making an album seems to be the most apt description. But the rough sessions depicted in the movie were polished over for the album by producer Phil Spector's dubbing of orchestra tracks and re-editing the material to everyone's approval but McCartney's. So what casual fans need to know about this new Let It Be Naked is that the basic tracks are presented without overdubs and later added effects. In other words this is a completely de-Spectorized Beatles product. Or is it?

The edits that Spector made on "Dig A Pony" and especially "I Me Mine" (Spector's patchwork repeating of verses extended a 1:34 track to 2:25) remain intact on this supposed true-to-the-original tapes project so how naked is it really? Don't get me wrong this is a nice listen from start to finish great clean unadorned takes of such A' material as "Get Back", "Across The Universe" and "I've Got A Feeling" leave a good feeling in the air above your stereo. The remastered raw but languid Harrison guitar solo on the title track alone should satisfy most Beatle lovers. Whether or not this is an essential replacement of the 1970 released Let It Be or inessential Macca cash-in is a useless argument. One has to face that in this media age with the gigantic amount of Beatle material movies, TV appearances, demos, live broadcasts still waiting for the remaster/reissue treatment we are going to have new Beatle product at every holiday for the rest of our known existence. And that's not really such a bad thing. Or is it?

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