Night Beat by Mikal Gilmore

the best of this series, but is also perhaps the most revealing album in the Beatles’ entire catalog. This set covers 1968 to 1970: the Beatles’ fateful period. These were the years when friction set in between the band members, when John Lennon met Yoko Ono and embarked on making avant-garde art and dabbling in radical conceptual politics, and it was the period when Apple Records (the Beatles’ own label) was established and then quickly spun out of control. The music on the albums from this time proved wildly uneven. The two record set
The Beatles
(better known as the White Album) was brilliant yet disjointed—as if it had been made by four independent men rather than fashioned by a true band—whereas
Abbey Road
came across as a unified masterstroke from start to finish.
Let It Be
(recorded before
Abbey Road,
but released later) began as an album and film project called
Get Back,
and was to present the Beatles playing live, uncluttered by studio artifice (in keeping with late 1960s’ pop’s return-to-the-roots rage, inspired by Bob Dylan’s acoustic rock & roll gem,
John Wesley Harding
). The Beatles lost interest in
Get Back
and put it on hold. By the time the album was released—as
Let It Be—
the band had broken up and John Lennon had recruited producer Phil Spector to remix and orchestrate some of the tracks (sort of John’s revenge on Paul—maybe on all the Beatles). Coming as the Beatles’ final album,
Let It Be
felt indifferent and haphazard—by far the lowest moment of the band’s output. After hearing it, it was a bit easier to let the Beatles go.
    Anthology 3
changes the way one hears this period’s music—in a way that I’ve never heard another pop retrospective accomplish. The set’s alternate tracks play pretty much in the order the music happened, and what emerges redeems some of what had once seemed abject. Many of the versions of the White Album tracks included here are from solo acoustic demos recorded by the various songwriters (Beatles Unplugged!), while others are rough sketches with different configurations of the band playing together. Either way, these alternate White Album tracks are mesmerizing—like ghostly survivors that divulge the music’s real, long-ago secrets. Paul McCartney, not usually regarded as the Beatles’ hard-tempered personality, turns in a lengthy, ominous reading of “Helter Skelter” that feels scarier than the frenetic original. He also takes the one-trick “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road,” and imbues it with a weirdly wonderful, deranged passion. There is much, much more on
Anthology 3
that is transfixing—especially George Harrison’s acoustic solo version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and John Lennon’s spooky “Come Together”—but the set’s real value is in what it tells us about the Beatles’ relationship during this period. Clearly, this was bottom-of-the-soul time. Many of this collection’s songs are brimming with desolation, aloneness, and fear, and yet from that came some inspired and enduring songwriting. More important, while you can hear the tension between group members in some of the tracks (John mocking Paul at various points in “Let It Be” and “Teddy Boy”), you can also hear the real pleasure and affinity that took place within this band. Listen to John and Paul’s lovely harmony singing on “Two of Us”: These men were already on the way out of each other’s lives, and yet they could still bring out the best in one another, and could still revel and take pride in that realization.
Anthology 3
is a wonderful story of lost and found and lost-again community. It is the Beatles’ equivalent to Bob Dylan’s
Basement Tapes,
perhaps even darker. Hard to believe that, in 1996, we could receive a new Beatles album that is so moving.
    The video half of the
Anthology
series—which purports to be the Beatles’ sole true autobiography—is an elaborate expansion of the three-part TV special of the same title,