So last night I spent over an hour at beatles.com. Been there before, but hadn't been in a while (and I'm still trying to find, again, the Let it Be outtake in which they're discussing the possibility of touring again, and of performing in the Persian Gult on a boat, ending with George Harrison's "The idea of the boat is insane...").
What I found was a new subsite, Love. I'd heard a few tracks from the new CD ("Lady Madonna" surprised me: I knew no details about the project, and I was prepared for the guitar-horns break when in came guitars from "Hey Bulldog," not a Beatles tune one hears on the radio every day), but only a few. But there were plenty of interviews, including George Martin, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr, so I settled in for a listen.
Well.
In one of the interview clips, Sir George explains that his "brief" was to take any sound he'd made with The Beatles since 1962 and work with it, come up with something for the Cirque de Soleil show in Las Vegas. Well, he did stick with that, so there is nothing from the Star Club tapes or the Tony Sheridan sessions, and no Decca audition or Kinfauns bootleg material (Sir George wasn't part of any of those), and as far as I could tell, nothing from "Free As A Bird" or "Real Love."
They provide a video to what they call a "Within You, Without You"/"Tomorrow Never Knows" medley. Trust me, it's no medley. What it is, is...well, it was apparently Giles Martin's idea (Sir George's son, and partner on the project), is what it is. Give it a listen. If you're not familiar with both tunes, you'll either like this new version or you won't. If you do know both tunes, I suspect you'll be very, very impressed.
Posted by Craig Ceely at December 28, 2006 10:20 PMIt's an interesting mash-up, and you have to credit anything that makes "Within You..." bearable. (The Big Daddy troupe once reshaped it into a respectable Ken Nordine word-jazz pastiche.)
I am inordinately fond of mashups and such, so I'd probably rate this higher than it deserves, but it's more for ingenuity than for sheer artistic merit.
Charles,
I know what you mean about "Within You" being bearable, but George Harrison did have a gift for creating tunes, and the introduction of the rhythm section from the John Lennon song made it...well, I actually liked hearing it.
I'm not fond of mash-ups, and I'm kind of a Beatles perfectionist, really -- but I thought this was an outstanding effort, and sounded great.
Posted by: Craig at December 30, 2006 10:33 PM