| | |  Entertainment | April 2009 
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 Verlyn Klinkenborg - New York Times
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To me, growing up with the Beatles meant buying each 45 r.p.m. single as it was released. My parents saw that as less of a commitment than buying a long-playing vinyl album. They were wrong. The 45 may not look like a white-hot medium, but in 1964 it was. And how did it all sound? I owned a cheap portable record player with a volume knob, a single tone control and a primitive needle. But when you hear “Ticket to Ride” for the first time, all the fidelity you need is between your ears.
I think about this now because, like most people who love the Beatles, I’ve been waiting a very long time for a properly remastered edition of their music. According to Apple Corps, the Beatles’ company, and EMI Music, it will be released, at last, on Sept. 9 — the whole catalogue, more or less, revitalized for the first time since 1987, when it was converted, disastrously, for the CD format. What we’re all hoping to hear is what George Martin and the band heard when the tracks were first mastered, before they were squeezed and contorted to fit the various formats in which they were eventually sold.
I remember those couple of weeks after a new single had been released, when the novelty and strangeness of the first listening had faded but the songs had not yet been fully tattooed onto my brain. That’s the moment I’d like to be returned to. After all these years, I no longer see the photographic distortion in the cover of “Rubber Soul.” Even the name of the album has shed its playfulness.
So what I will be listening for when September comes is something that has never faded. Call it the assurance of this music. That’s what I heard in the first 45 I purchased: “I Want to Hold Your Hand” backed with “I Saw Her Standing There.” There was no pose to it. It was straight-ahead playing and singing, brash and tuneful. I measured it by the way it made my nerves jump and the fact that I didn’t even want to think that my parents might be overhearing it. It was for me alone, for some part of me that didn’t even exist before I heard that music. Perhaps there is no recovering those emotions. But getting even closer to those voices and instruments, and the room in which they were recorded, will be a wonderful thing. |
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