According to those bickering yet informative sods over at the atease message boards, the extended take leaked as part of a new bootleg, Revolution.. Take Your Knickers Off. Where things start getting interesting is that apparently only two copies of the take in question were ever made at the end of the session: one was taken home by John Lennon and the other by someone whose name isn’t noted in EMI documents. Hmmm. Scandalous!
How does it sound? Well imagine “Revolution 1″, and then imagine “Revolution 9″. Now, imagine the where the first song normally ends. Then, imagine the “shooby doo wop” back up vocals continuing for a further seven minutes while some of the sound collage noises from number 9 play over the top, eventually arriving to a crescendo before scaring the shit out of us all with a creepy spoken word piece by Yoko. I guess, John decided to chop the song in half, or rather, separate the sanity from insanity. ROCK AND ROLL!
The Beatles - Revolution 1 (Take 20).mp3 (10min 47sec)
If I were one of the boys back then, I would have left just because of Yoko, never mind the “artistic” differences (Yoko’s contribution here is self-indulgent shit, not art), the grudges, or the fights. Lennon should have gotten his sex and his (so-called) musical inspiration from different places. Yoko’s fishing off the company dock did nothing for these guys. What a frigging shame.
I presume this tape has been leaked [great by the way, but, would we really expect other wise ?] by one of the production team working on the beatles remasters ?, i mean, it dosent sound like it’s from a 40 year old tape that’s just been found and transferred onto disk, and there are no obvious signs of the heavy handedness of standard public audio cleaning [some very good jobs done, but the software always takes too much off]. If the case is that they are cleaning all of this up [instead of just the mix we all know and love] i cant help but wonder if we will be seeing any bonus tracks, which would be great, a not chopped up “Not Guilty” for example would be great as would the long version of Helter Skelter, and this is just from the white album, maybe now we will see the offical release [and the debút release for a couple of songs] from the decca sessions as a “please please me” bonus. Personally, i would love to hear multitrack isolations, but the odds for that are slim at best. ofcourse “Carnival Of Light” is the one we all want to hear, but, although Paul wants to put it out, he still needs permission from Yoko, Ringo and Olivia [whom i could imagine would want to uphold George's wishes, and not put the song out, who knows]. “Now And Then” is another, the amount of times we have been told by various sources that Paul is working on that, well, it’s crazy, but, it would be awsome. i would also like to hear a propperly produced, and cleaned version of George’s “Circles” demo, with Paul on harmonium [sounds great, but, the quality is pretty poor]
Sorry for the essay
-Bob
Obviously the encoder in iTunes 7.7 is very bad. I’m used to lame, and even if I encode to 96 kbit using the low-quality mode, it’s better than what iTunes did here at 192 kbit.
Wow, we’re being spoilt! First Revolution 1, take 20; now Revolution 9, alternative mix! Is this real?!! :-) This is the new version which has surfaced along with take 20:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDRdMSTAnAg
There’s something eerily over-produced about this track. How do we know it’s not a hoax? A lot of the masking is also heard on other “White” album tracks, etc.
The first part sounds like the released #1 less the distorted guitar and the horns. The rest sounds like they just kept jamming and used some of the loops that ended up on #9. My favorite bit is at the end is when Yoko says “Maybe, it’s not that” (which is on the released #9) and then John says “It is That!”
Hearing this makes it easier to understand why there is a #1 and a #9 on the album. When it became clear to John that they wanted to use just the first half of #1 for a single, he must have figured fine then and put together #9 which was a sound collage void of “the beat” (Beat Less?).
My favorite part of #9 is when George says “He found the night watchman, unaware of his presence in the building”. You can just picture him whispering that into a mike in the studio late at night, great stuff.
Oh and by the way, thanks Yoko for helping to let this side of the Beatles grow.