Beatles Weekend

I mentioned a few days back that I was under the weather, and this cold has been dogging me all week. Up until yesterday I could hardly even talk, but I braved it out at work and maintained an ironman streak of sorts. I haven't taken a sick day since working for my current employer, and that's over twelve years. (I guess it proves that we liberals aren't as lazy as the others would have you believe.) But I spent the whole weekend just hanging out at home so I'd be nice and healthy for the start of the week. With all this time on my hands, I hung out at a couple of right wing blogs that I don't normally frequent and tried to engage those good folks in rational debate. They weren't interested in civil discourse, and I quickly grew tired of them. So I decided to dig into my DVD collection, and watched the last four episodes of the Beatles Anthology series.

As you may have gathered by some of my earlier posts, I'm very much into music of the 60's and 70's, and also have a keen interest in music trivia. But I have to say that I've kind of taken the Beatles for granted all these years, and never really had a full appreciation for how great they really were. I always thought they were great, but in the same way that I thought ice cream was great. Their music has been ubiquitous for over forty years, and sometimes the things that are most familiar to you are the ones you forget to marvel at. They really laid the groundwork for what followed them.

The biggest, unsolvable mystery is whether the Anthology project would ever have been done if John Lennon were still alive at the time. He was quite an enigma. In all of his interviews in the last years of his life, he seemed to harbour great resentment over everything Beatles, but would turn around and exhibit pride in the next sentence. He used to contradict himself a lot. He'd certainly be the Beatle I'd most want to have dinner with. Luckily, Yoko allowed his footage to be used. I hadn't really had a great sense of the other Beatles' personalities before watching this. Paul seems like the Phil Mickelson of the Beatles - immensely talented and charismatic, but maybe more of an ego than he lets on for the cameras. Ringo is just laid back, friendly, and generally like his stage presence. The biggest revelation to me was George Harrison. He seemed the most cynical of the bunch , and yet he had a terrific sense of humour and humanity. He was taken far too soon. And yet, when you consider that he was just 26 when the Beatles recorded their last album, and with the great career he had afterward, he really had two or three lifetimes in his 58 years.

Having watched the documentary, I was very curious to hear the Anthology CD's. I think this kind of thing is unique to fans of Rock - the desire to hear studio outtakes and early versions of a song while it was still a work in progress. (I don't know of any opera fans who are scurrying for session tapes of the Three Tenors.) I listened to the second CD of Anthology 3, and it was incredible. It had gems from the recording sessions for the Let It Be and Abbey Road albums. I've got to say that for guys who weren't very happy and were about to break up the band, they seemed like they were still having fun in the studio. The highlight might have been during a take of "Oh Darling", when John started improvising lyrics about Yoko Ono's divorce being finalized. This CD also had tracks of a few songs that never made it onto Beatles albums. The saddest one to me was George doing an early version of "All Things Must Pass".

It isn't healthy to live in the past, but I enjoyed spending this time with the Beatles. For some people they defined their generation and helped shape the culture of the 60's, but to me it's all about the music. Do you think the day will come when there will be a Celine Dion Anthology or Limp Bizkit Anthology?