Putting the Beatles Back together...Just for Fun.

I have been putting the Beatles solo songs together into "Beatles Albums" since I was a teenager.  Time wasted?  Maybe, but I just wanted more Beatles.  I know other fans have done the same.  For Christmas 2011 My wife gave me a book called Let's Put the Beatles Back Together Again 1970-2010  (below).  I read it and was fascinated by it.  I didn't always agree with how the author put the songs together......so I did my own.  I created 10 Albums using Beatles Solo material (I have shared my 10 albums in the Blog entries that follow). 

The Book:

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2010

 

Indispensable for any discerning Beatles fan, this book shows that beyond the 1960s lie four decades of Beatles masterworks waiting to be discovered and savored. How so? In the tradition of White Album individuation, the Beatles can be said to have carried on from 1970 right through 2010. Take only the best of John, Paul, George and Ringo from that era, thoughtfully assemble it into Beatles format album-sets and you basically have what the Beatles would have produced had they stayed intact. Simply imagine that a new manager quickly replacing Allen Klein had convinced them that, though they had become ill-disposed to recording together, they should still release together after recording more-or-less separately (as on much of the White Album and on numerous Beatles tracks starting with Yesterday). The resulting listening experience proves an extraordinary and worthy extension of the bona fide Beatles' works. The author has painstakingly put together and tweaked such sets over several years. In this book he offers a rationale for retrospectively superimposing upon the Beatles an alternate history that could plausibly have generated the sets as real-life products. And he provides juicy backgrounders for all the selected tracks. These tracks can be downloaded individually from online music providers and skimmed from solo-years best-of CDs, so as to create one's own Beatles Releasing Collective (BRC) sets on CD-Rs or iPod playlists--either duplicating the author's sets or customizing them to personal taste. For Beatles fans, it's an upbeat and relatively inexpensive hobby for trying economic times, not to mention a way to wrest control of the second half of the Beatles' legacy from the suits. It's worth it. Don't wait decades for it to dawn on record executives that this is what comes next. It's the natural and indispensible sequel to the digital re-masterings of the 1960s Beatles works released Sept. 9, 2009, those constituting a quantum leap in listenability. And we have had a great year of listening. But now it's time to move the whole Beatles experience further along that long and winding road. Because, with all due deference to one of the 20th century's greatest artists, the dream lived on, past the death of Lennon, even past that of George Harrison. It was never over. [Note on new 'Stripped Down' version of 'Double Fantasy': Make this your source for 'I'm Losing You', 'Cleanup Time', '(Just Like) Starting Over' and 'Beautiful Boy'. Implement appropriate fade-outs and transfer to 'MoonDogs' set. Peeling away several layers of over-production improves these tracks substantially.]

Editorial Reviews

Review

“This is the most oddly compelling music book I have read in years, and if you have even a small interest in the Beatles or music from 1970 on, you owe it to yourself to get it. If you are a fan, run, don’t walk. It’s that interesting.
The author conducts a nearly 500-page thought experiment: he imagines an alternative history after 1969 in which the Beatles didn’t stay together, but didn’t exactly split up either. They agreed to release the best of their solo efforts under the Beatles banner. So what he does, essentially, is kill off the weak stuff and the material that just wasn’t very ‘Beatle-y’ and turns what’s left into a series of Beatles albums.
He makes a compelling argument for why a) this isn’t such a stretch b) doing it his way restores the post-breakup material to a place of honor.
I got the book late yesterday and stayed up way too late reading.
[Y]ou can do everything he does yourself, provided you have the music in your library. What I like best about it, so far, is that he finishes the Beatles story as it should have been finished--and even though his conceit is fanciful, his approach is solidly grounded in reality.
Highly, highly recommended.”
--New York State’s WWNY-TV news director Scott Atkinson

“[A Beatles 1970-2010] is what Walker has created, and I agree with him, that you’ll rarely listen to the individual solo albums again. I have a full set of his suggested compilations and they are superb. I suggest that you follow this train of thought, get into the background of each solo track, album and songwriter, and then make your own ‘Beatles’ albums. It’s well worth it. Go on, dig out your back catalogues and Put the Beatles Back Together Again.”
--British Beatles Fan Club Magazine (David Bedford, author of Liddypool)

"[I]t's a pleasure to welcome [a Beatles book] that doesn't tread in the footsteps of what's gone before...[W]hat Walker is proposing...works well...He is both a good writer and a good researcher..."

--BBC Radio Merseyside's Spencer Leigh

"Very interesting new concept based on...the treasure trove of music from the solo Beatles."

-- 'The Fest for Beatles Fans' Mark Lapidos

"The author makes the Beatles breakup a way to revise their catalog...He puts a new spin on [the breakup]...The premise of the book is to replace Allen Klein (which will certainly get the book fans for that reason alone)...Walker's logic behind the [resulting] new albums makes for a 'what if' scenario that creates, at the least, something to consider. "

--Beatles Examiner's Steve Marinucci

“Wow, I’m really impressed. It’s so big and smart and well written...a very great unadulterated pleasure...[Walker’s] really done it.”

--‘Toronto Today Magazine’ editor-in-chief Eric McMillan

About the Author

Pop-culture analyst Jeff Walker's work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Financial Times of Canada, Frank, Piranha, Skeptical Inquirer, B.C Skeptic, Free Inquiry, Books in Canada, NeWest, Liberty, Humanist in Canada, Penthouse and Saturday Night. He has also written for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's 'Ideas' and for a pop-music radio station. He previously published The Ayn Rand Cult (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), favorably reviewed in newspapers, magazines and online zines in the the U.S., Canada, Germany and the U.K. The author resides in Toronto, Canada, with his spouse and their two children.