It’s impossible to overstate the kind of impact The Beatles had on the recording studio.
Their albums would be benchmarks of musical engineering that would redefine what a rock and roll band could do once they got into the studio, and yet some of the purest compositions of their career didn’t need those extra bells and whistles.
That’s not to discount the great moves they did make in the studio. ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ deserves its place in history as a psychedelic headtrip that announced the Summer of Love, but the only reason it worked was because John Lennon knew how strong it was on an acoustic guitar. So, seeing how both Lennon and Paul McCartney started off playing the acoustic before breaking in their first electric guitars, what is the best example of the Beatles putting on their own MTV Unplugged performance?
Well, that technically already exists. The Esher demos from The White Album is practically a jam session consisting of them banging out anything they can on acoustics and the odd instrument they had lying around, but this is about more than the final versions. It’s about envisioning what songs would sound like in their original stripped-down form.
After all, the idea of MTV Unplugged was made to give the audience a different view of the tunes that they knew so well, and even if a handful of great Beatles tunes worked better in their produced versions, it’s worth it to think about how they would have sounded with a stripped down approach. There are, of course, exceptions. As much as ‘Rocky Raccoon’ works as an acoustic ditty, it’s hard not to think of it without the different bells and whistles like the honky tonk piano.
So if we’re working with the same format that the Fab Four used on their early albums, this 14-track album would serve as the ultimate catch-all for what they could do unplugged. Certain songs are a must like George Harrison’s ‘Here Comes the Sun’ or the duet ‘Two of Us’, but the further back you go, it’s clear when ‘The Nerk Twins’ wrote tunes that could compete with each other. ‘If I Fell’ is a great example of an earnest acoustic ballad, but it’s impossible to ignore the beauty of a track like ‘And I Love Her’.
This kind of record would also give people the chance to see songs in the way they were originally intended. As much as the studio version of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is untouchable in many respects, the acoustic rendition that appeared on Anthology and the eventual LOVE album is a perfect example of Harrison writing a beautiful tune with only a guitar in his hands.
In fact, the unplugged nature of the stripped-down versions end up telling the story a lot better. There’s no other way for this kind of album to end with anything else but ‘Yesterday’, but if they were to remove the string section behind Macca during the verses, the whole thing would sound a lot closer to the situation he’s talking about. The track is about heartache, so hearing him singing to himself with an acoustic guitar in his hands would be the perfect bittersweet conclusion.
Will this kind of compilation be a good enough replacement for the Red and Blue albums that came out? Probably not, but that’s far from the point. The entire Beatles market has been inundated with re-releases, so this kind of move towards more creative packages could be a great way to expose the young generation to the more soft-spoken side of one of history’s favourite acts.
