ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, November 2, 1996 TAG: 9611050106
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALLAN KOZINN NEW YORK TIMES
THIS TIME LAST YEAR, The Beatles publicity machinery was stoking the fires of '60s nostalgia to prepare the way for ``The Beatles Anthology,'' a project to be released on video and in three CD installments throughout 1996.
Assembled at Apple, The Beatles' own company, the ``Anthology'' video would run a staggering 10 hours (4 1/2 of which were seen in a three-night Beatlemania TV blitz on ABC last November), and would offer the definitive word on the musicians whose songs and social pronouncements defined their time.
Promised, too, were six compact discs of unreleased music that would parallel the band's commercial output. Using rejected songs, scrapped arrangements and live recordings, the CDs would offer an alternative musical history previously known only to collectors of bootleg recordings. The hits were there, but in versions that were either subtly or vastly different.
There was, perhaps, a certain hubris in all this. The Rolling Stones and The Who have been celebrated in shorter documentaries, but the 10-hour variety is normally reserved for wars, baseball or the history of rock 'n' roll.
Luminaries like Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa have raided the vaults to offer rarities to their fans, but these have had mainly a hard-core appeal.
To wonder whether The Beatles were overestimating their market, though, is to underestimate not only their hold on baby boomers' imaginations but also their appeal to younger listeners who are discovering that bands like Oasis could not have existed without them.
Last November, ``Anthology 1,'' the first installment in the CD series, sold 856,000 copies in its first week, breaking the sales record for a double CD. EMI estimates that since then, ``Anthology 1'' and ``Anthology 2'' have sold 13 million copies together. ``Anthology 3,'' which completes the series, arrived in stores last week.
The ``Anthology'' video, released last month, has been in the top 10 of the Billboard Music Video chart for several weeks, despite its hefty $159 price tag. And all the hoopla surrounding the ``Anthology'' has helped sell another 6 million copies of the Beatles' catalogue albums.
Has the ``Anthology'' delivered on its promises? Sure, if you shrug off the claim of definitiveness; autobiographies rarely are.
Only The Beatles and a few close aides are interviewed; it is as if Ken Burns' ``Civil War'' confined itself to the recollections of Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis.
But for anyone just discovering the band, the documentary captures the time, the music and the personalities. Beatles cultists who have read all the books will find a few new twists, but there are no great revelations.
How could there be? Hardly anything the Beatles did in the public spotlight went unreported, and the ``Anthology'' shows the reporting to have been largely accurate. Their memories of private moments are often amusing but ultimately trivial.
Does knowing that their Japanese hosts had their itinerary timed to the minute during the 1966 tour add much to our understanding of the Beatles or their music? Of course not.
But as authorized productions go, in fact, the ``Anthology'' is refreshingly unvarnished. Drug use, financial disputes and personality clashes are discussed frankly, if by no means comprehensively.
Footage from their early interviews gives the impression that they took life as a joke; but the tour footage and television appearances show that they did plenty of hard slogging.
The musical discussions make it clear that The Beatles' refusal to repeat past successes was both a point of honor and a creative spur, but these conversations also reveal how weary they had grown by 1969.
Loose ends are neither tied up nor pared away, and The Beatles' memories are shown to be as fallible as anyone's.
George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney contradict one another openly. All three challenge some of John Lennon's reminiscences. Sometimes, contradictory memories are all correct, and uncover the former Beatles' attitudes toward their work.
Discussing the 1968 ``White Album'' sessions, for example, Starr remembers the tracks the Beatles recorded as a band; Harrison's memories center on the times they worked separately.
Taken together, the video and CD releases offer a twin perspective that no stack of Beatles books can match. The ``Anthology'' video presents the human drama - the story of Beatlemania and its discontents, with sociological and historical threads woven into an anecdotal narrative.
Music permeates and enlivens it, but its main business is telling what, when, where and sometimes why the Beatles did what they did. The CDs show how they did it.
Actually, several agendas are played out on the CDs. One was to trace the band's work chronologically, from embryonic rehearsal tapes to the final sessions, with time out for concert performances that prove that the Beatles could cook on stage.
Another was to find a home for rejected songs, from the lukewarm 1962 version of ``How Do You Do It'' that was almost their first single, through the sizzling and inexplicably unissued 1964 remake of Little Willie John's ``Leave My Kitten Alone,'' to Lennon's six minutes of avant-garde zaniness from 1969, ``What's the New Mary Jane.''
But at their best, the CDs open a door that the Beatles had always kept tightly shut: that of the recording studio, the workshop where they shaped their songs, far from the public glare.
Promising ideas were tried and discarded: a vocal introduction on ``Eight Days a Week,'' vibraphones on ``I'm Only Sleeping,'' electronic effects on ``Glass Onion.'' Usually, the Beatles' instincts were unerring, but if the finished versions were superior, the outtakes show their compositional minds at work.
The unbuttoned, sometimes wacky atmosphere of the sessions is captured as well. The version of ``And Your Bird Can Sing'' on ``Anthology 2'' - by far the most magical of the three sets - is as fascinating for the vocal harmonies that break down in giggles as for its hard-driven, Byrds-influenced arrangement.
Similarly, the loose oldies jam on ``Anthology 3'' shows that the ``Let It Be'' sessions were not all dour.
There is much more where this came from. The 15-song Decca audition, sampled on ``Anthology 1,'' would offer an instructive glimpse of the early Beatles, and the ``White Album'' practice reel, excerpted on ``Anthology 3'' could be a wonderful ``Unplugged'' album.
An album's worth of comical Christmas sketches issued through the fan club in the 1960s deserves revival, as does the scrapped ``Get Back'' album, which is vastly superior to its remixed, orchestrated incarnation, ``Let It Be.''
And that's saying nothing of the video possibilities. If Apple truly wants to show the Beatles' history in its full perspective, and satisfy the demand of a large and clearly eager market, the ``Anthology'' should be the beginning of a serious archival series, not an end in itself.
LENGTH: Long : 121 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: The Fab Four in 1967. color.by CNB