Fab Four surprises

Would that Giles Martin, the 49-year-old son of the late Beatles producer Sir George Martin, could oversee the re-production from the ground up of every iconic rock ’n’ roll album.

His painstaking restoration of the Beatles’ Hollywood Bowl recordings and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band rendered all previous incarnations obsolete. And now he and his team of engineers have worked similar wonders with The Beatles, the Fab Four’s 30-song double album commonly referred to as The White Album.

Home to numerous staples of the Beatlemaniac diet (“Back in the U.S.S.R.,” “Dear Prudence,” “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Rocky Raccoon,” “Blackbird,” “Birthday,” “Helter Skelter”), The White Album has just turned 50. And to commemorate the occasion, Capitol has rereleased it in a bewildering array of formats. The good news: All of them include Martin’s refurbished version.

Martin’s main accomplishment—besides getting the maximum brightness and oomph from tapes recorded with museum-piece technology—is his elimination of the extreme panning afflicting many ’60s stereo mixes. By realigning across the left-right spectrum the four or eight tracks that originally went into the final product, he creates a clear, nearly three-dimensional center. And it’s a center that holds, mainly because of the quality of what the Beatles were able to commit to tape.

During their 4½ months in London’s EMI and Trident Studios, the Beatles, who were only the most popular music group in the world, strove to outdo themselves. They succeeded by getting back in touch with their roots as a rock ’n’ roll band (i.e., a unit capable of playing together in real time) without forsaking the studio know-how that they’d amassed while crafting Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour. A good portion of the 164-page book included in The White Album’s seven-disc “Super Deluxe Edition” chronicles the great lengths to which they went to guarantee a splendid time for all.

The book also makes clear that what was on the Beatles’ minds wasn’t LSD (of which they’d had enough) or the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (with whom they’d recently studied) but writing, playing, singing, and recording as many good songs in as many different styles as Capitol and EMI Records would let them release. Never before had they covered, and never again would they cover (not even on their solo albums), so much ground.

In addition to the book, the Super Deluxe Edition includes four discs of demos and rehearsal takes that abound with surprises. There are, for instance, early versions of songs that would end up on Abbey Road, Let It Be, Lennon’s Imagine, McCartney’s McCartney, Harrison’s Gone Troppo, or, in the case of “Lady Madonna” and “The Inner Light,” 7-inch 45s. There are brief, spontaneous “jams” and tightly rocking instrumental backing tracks.

But most surprising of all—given how tired John, Paul, George, and Ringo allegedly grew of each other’s presence during these sessions—are the jokes, banter, and friendly asides that can be heard before, after, and sometimes during various unfinished takes. Writes McCartney in the Super Deluxe book: “The tensions arising in the world around us—and in our own world—had their effect on our music, but the moment we sat down to play, all that vanished and the magic circle within a square that was the Beatles was created.”

Or, as Giles Martin puts it in the book’s introduction, “It is clear from listening to the tapes that their collective spirit and inventiveness were, in fact, stronger than ever.”

Now, thanks to Martin, so is The Beatles.