Your Mother Should Know is the first case I’ve come across of the mono version being substantially inferior to the stereo. The mono mix has far fewer backing vocals than the stereo mix, and the ‘cello appears to be much higher in the mix (there’s a little run of notes just after “soon will be the break of day, sitting here in Blue Jay Way” that I’d never noticed before, despite twenty years of listening to this album).Īnd the mastering quality is so good that you can hear the Hammond organ’s motor kicking in in the opening bars… It sounds more like a standard pop song than his recent Indian work, thanks partly to the full-band performance, but like those songs is based around a drone, switching between C and Cdim7, with no other chords (George, like myself, was almost obsessed with the tonal ambiguity possible with diminished 7ths – you hear them, especially Ddim7, throughout his later Beatles and early solo work). The guitars in the mono mix sound a bit louder than in stereo.īlue Jay Way is one of George Harrison’s most musically interesting songs. A simple 12-bar with a gorgeous mellotron part played by John, it’s pretty much like all the other twelve-bar instrumentals they noodled around with but didn’t release. The finger cymbal on the second beat of each bar in the chorus is completely out of nowhere, and still throws me off balance a little, but in a good way.įlying is an instrumental credited to all four Beatles. And most original of all, and totally Ringo, that hand percussion. But this isn’t to say that the music here is a Beach Boys pastiche – the answering phrases on the acoustic guitar in the second verse are not something Wilson would ever do, the recorder part (the single most distinctive bit of the entire record) is McCartney’s original idea. It’s a shame, because this plain little D major/minor tune is one of the best things he’s ever written.Īnd the arrangement, which is stunningly clear in this new mastering (and I can’t say often enough how much better these CDs sound than any previous release, and this is coming from a fan of vinyl), shows that McCartney had been paying attention to Brian Wilson – almost all the distinctive instrumental touches (the flute trio, the huffing bass harmonica, the jew’s harp) had been used by Wilson on Pet Sounds and/or Good Vibrations. This simple, sparse melody is the kind of thing that McCartney used to be able to write almost without trying, and which he appears to have consciously chosen to give up bothering with around 1969. The Fool On The Hill again has few if any noticeable differences between the mono and stereo mixes, but is one of the most rewarding songs on the album. I don’t hear any distinct differences between the mono and stereo mixes, but what details there are are much clearer. ![]() The melody – what there is – is mostly a reworking of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. Magical Mystery Tour itself is an inauspicious start to the album, given that there’s very little actual song there, with what little interest there is coming from the horn arrangement, and from Lennon’s comedy Scouser voice. As until buying this box I only owned the album on vinyl, that means that I’ve never heard the proper stereo version of Baby You’re A Rich Man so won’t be able to compare that one very well). (Incidentally, when the Magical Mystery Tour LP was finally issued as an LP in the UK, they used Capitol’s masters, which included weird reprocessed-fake-stereo versions of the mono mixes of the tracks on side 2. Either way, it’s still one of my very favourite albums – up there with Help!, Rubber Soul and Revolver as the band’s best work. Magical Mystery Tour gets surprisingly little respect as an album among Beatles fans, which I can only assume is because of its semi-canonical status (it was only released as a double-EP set in the UK, and padded out to album length in the US with singles) – either that or its association with the famously disastrous but really not all that bad film to which it was a soundtrack. Do people want to hear my thoughts on the Abbey Road/Let It Be reissues or is it more the mono mix differences you’re interested in? So we’re getting near the end of these reviews now – after this there’s only the White Album in the mono box set. An edited version of this essay is now included in my book The Beatles In Mono.
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