RayL wrote:Just to get it clear with regard to those two early Beatles albums, is it being suggested here that the stereo versions were issued on vinyl at the same time as the mono versions?
More or less (maybe a few weeks' delay - absolutely no more than that).
I can remember the Liverpool Echo's record reviewer - who rejoiced in the by-line "Disker" - reviewing the stereo pressing of "With The Beatles" some time in very early 1964. He mentioned the "extra depth" on the guitar solo for All My Loving. At the time, never having heard stereo, I didn't know what he meant - I now realise he must have been referring to the reverb on the "other" channel.
The reason I ask is because when George Martin was interviewed for the radio programme The Record Producers he stated very clearly that he recorded those albums "in two track, not stereo" with the voices on one track and the rhythm on the other with the aim of compressing them together to make "a harder sound" (his words) for mono release.
Yes - that has long been his position.
On a separate recording (I think it's a programme about Abbey Road, but I'd have to look through my cassette collection to find it), it is explained that when EMI wanted to make stereo versions of those early albums, George had already left EMI to go to independent at Air Studios. Back at EMI, they got out the two-track tape, listened to it and said to themselves "Well, if a producer as prestigious as George Martin recorded the tape in this way, that must be how he intended the stereo to be". They didn''t ask George, otherwise he would have put them straight.
No.
George Martin was working at EMI until the later sixties (certainly until after "Sgt Pepper").
The stereo LPs were DEFINITELY released at the same time as or not long after the initial mono releases, and whilst George was still at EMI/Parlophone.
By the time George did get to hear these 'stereo' albums it was too late, of course, and now they are accepted as the 'true' version. However, from George's own lips, these two-track recordings were never intended to be used as they were for a stereo album.
I too have read that (it's in his autobiography).
As is sometimes the case with all sorts of people, he remembers - or at least, recites - it differently from how it actually was.
Why that would be, I don't know. But it is so.
Luckily, we are talking at the moment about the group who are more authoritatively documented than any other, and it is trivially easy to prove what I say about stereo release dates. Some stereo Beatles releases were even on the early sixties type Parlophone label (predating the full 1962/1963 transition from the "old" to the "homogenised" label design).
Google returns:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Please_Please_Me
http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/kirkland/266/btls/uk/uklp.htm
JN
