When Anthology 1 came out in 1995 in a limited vinyl edition, I made a vow to myself that I’d keep buying new Beatles releases only on vinyl. Since then i’d broken that vow twice; first when i had a chance to get a collection of the Beatles Christmas messages on CD (who can afford $200 bucks for the record?), and second, the LOVE project, which isn’t really the Beatles at all but an amazing mashup project.). So why did I buy the remastered Sgt. Pepper compact disc? Maybe I succumbed to that zombie dance at Abbey Road crosswalk that Microsoft created for the Rock band commercial. Or maybe I just plain gave in to the siren song of that word remastered like I’ve always done. Whatever the reason, on Sept 11, I bought the remastered Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In researching this little rant I found out that the record was released Thursday, June 1, 1967, which means i can say with relative certainty that I bought my first copy of Sgt. Pepper on Saturday June 3, 1967, and probably at Gaynes Shopper’s World in South Burlington for $2.37. Know where Staples Plaza is? Anyway, it was probably a mono copy and I listened to it the way you’re supposed to listen to mono records – on a portable RCA hi-fi with a single 3 inch speaker. Sometime that afternoon I became addicted to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and started sketching backgrounds for a cartoon that i wanted to try and make with my father’s 8mm movie camera. He’d stumbled on the single frame possibilities of the camera and had started animating titles for some of his home movies and shown me the trick. A pretty high concept for a 14 year old who’d just brushed up against psychedelia for the first time. Anyway, back to 2009 and that remastered CD. Entertainment Magazine had warned me about the compression utilized in the remastering processing and there WAS a flatness to the music I heard when I put in the disc the next morning.

But there was also a new clarity and subtlety to those songs I knew so well. Here are some of the notes I scribbled during that first headphone listen: … Listen to the fades and the silences…the echoes…the doubled vocals, those hand claps…the first REAL kick in the head is the clarity of “She’s Leaving Home”…the break on “Within You Without You” (that whispered “da ta da two” lead (George?) at the end of the instrumental break) …even in its crystalline remastered glory “When I’m 64″ is still right there with “Besame Mucho” for ultimate Beatle cheese…The fadeout on “Lovely Rita” might have been Charlie Manson’s head’s up for “Helter Skelter” …”Good Morning” has that patented sax chorus that George Martin found for his Boys …Lennon’s “Bye” at the start and that little organ bit in the fade into “Day In The Life”…and of course the inner groove at the end of the now strangely anti climactic “Day in the Life”…

The next morning brought 2 more listens at home on speakers. The CD went on first and it sounded great. Then I got down my copy of EMI BC 13, the Beatles Collection box that first came out in 1978, pulled out Sgt. Pepper, put it on the turntable and set the needle to the vinyl. And there’s that analog/digital divide which I can’t really tell you about. The vinyl is, as they say, warmer, and to this geezer’s ears, the way the Beatles are supposed to sound. But what about those subtleties? Some of them are there in the room as I listen, but on Listen #4, with the vinyl on headphones, all of those little things I thought I was hearing for the first time Friday morning on the CD come right back out at me from the LP. So what is there to write about now?

A few days later I did another listen with my friend Erik. A couple of cuts in both formats and there’s that omnipresent word warmth again. A few days after that I rediscover my copy of Sgt. Peppeb’s Loney Hearps Club Band, a Chinese knockoff on Liming Records from back in the day that I picked up at a porch sale in Richmond, Virginia, and when I listen to it on headphones, some of those subtleties I heard on the remastered compact disc last week come bubbling out through 30 years worth of surface noise. So I guess I’ll end this with, not the Rockband Beatles which a lot of you love, and not the remastered Beatles catalog on compact disc that will launch akagillion memories, rants and lies, but rather, a Utopian to do list.
First, find a good record player and speakers. Second, track down the cleanest LPs that you can find (at least until they come at us with the limited edition remastered vinyl). Third, plop ‘em on, turn ‘em up, and enjoy some great records by a great band. And that’s not to say you shouldn’t be buying these CD’s, cuz I’m pretty sure that at some point, I’ll be getting the CDs of Abbey Road, The White Album and Past Masters, it’s just that, as they say, nothing is real.

-Michael Breiner