The Beatles
Let It Be…Naked
Capitol Records

If Let It Be…Naked had been released five years ago, it would have been a big "fuck you" to Phil Spector, whose efforts on the original album have been excised. Released instead this fall, this little act of revisionist history has rendered the "fuck you" an insult added to a much more dire and bizarre injury. Phil Spector has seen better days.

McCartney has long disdained Spector's contributions to the tracks the Beatles laid down for the original Let It Be, so on this version, the choruses and orchestrations have been stripped out. (Spector's major contributions were to four tracks — "The Long and Winding Road," "Let It Be," "Across the Universe" and "I Me Mine.") Two studio baubles, "Maggie Mae" and "Dig It," have been cut, replaced by the roof jam "Don't Let Me Down." There are alternate vocal tracks for other numbers. There is no extraneous chatter. You will not hear John Lennon say things like, "Sweet Loretta Fat, she thought she was a cleaner, but she was a frying pan," before the band rips into "Get Back."

McCartney, in his advancing years, has been laboring to enhance his legacy. It's not merely his adding to his brood; he has been doing little, faintly petulant things as well, like trying to juggle songwriting credits on some excellent songs. If this and the excision of Spector from Let It Be seem like digs at the man who asked us to imagine all the people sharing all the world, well…it's possible. (Spector was John Lennon's pick to work with the tapes from the Let It Be sessions.) In Hunter Davies' "The Beatles," McCartney talks about how Lennon was angered when he recorded "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" without him. Less than half a year after Lennon's untimely death, McCartney said, "Anyway, he did the same with 'Revolution 9.' He went off and made that without me. No one ever says all that. John is now the nice guy, and I'm the bastard."

McCartney may err toward "bastard" to this day, but if the new Let It Be is better, he's also a wizard for coaxing a classic out of a turbulent, fractious period in the Beatles' brief history. "The best version of [the album] was before anyone got hold of it," he told Musician magazine in 1986. "[Before] it had all its raw edges off it, that was one of the best Beatles albums because it was a bit avant-garde. I loved it." Certainly makes you want to hear this phantom masterpiece, huh? Beatles fanatics, a little patience: Let It Be…Naked isn't it.

Credit is due to Allan Rouse, Paul Hicks and Guy Massey, who remixed and re-sequenced the album. It's the best-sounding Beatles compact disc available. The others retain that signifying Beatles-y separation of sound, which casts quite a spell in mono recordings and on albums, but wreaks absolute havoc on compact disc. A tambourine buried in the mix of one song suddenly comes bursting out of your car speakers, nearly overwhelming the bass and drum tracks. On another song, the vocals are buried in one speaker, back behind an insistent sitar, as though the singers were at the end of a hallway, singing through cardboard toilet paper tubes. Let It Be…Naked, by contrast, sounds rich and clean. The vocals and guitars are particularly vivid, which, in the case of John Lennon especially, is a great virtue. His singing on this album's pared-down "Across the Universe" justifies producer George Martin's observation that it is "a voice that sends chills down the spine." What pop singer communicated more directly and honestly in their songs than John Lennon? On this track, you can hear exactly why he matters.

The problem, however, is that the new album is too clean. It lacks the mess of the original, and the mess is honest. The mess is what the Beatles were in at the time — they were unable to function as a band due to self-will run riot (and, possibly, in Lennon's case, a nifty little heroin addiction). You won't get a taste of the conflicts listening to the bonus disc, "Fly on the Wall," which collects some limp studio chat for the die-hards to probe for meaning (there is none). Spector, through canniness or luck, found a way to let the rough edges define the album. Some songs on the original version dribble out; one is delayed while a band member rubs his nose. "Get Back" ends with John Lennon saying he hoped that the band "passed the audition." That's a great, off-the-cuff remark, and it's gone on the new disc.

Lennon told Jann Wenner not long after the band broke up that he wanted to release the Let It Be tapes unadorned to show the world how far the Beatles had fallen. That wish flags the perverse sense of humor Lennon shared with the gun-toting Spector. Lennon and Spector's original Let It Be features many an off-tune instrument; the reverb the producer loves so well gums up time signatures left and right (listen to how it makes hash out of Ringo's drum work on "Let It Be"); also, the orchestrations and choruses Spector added can now be seen, by way of comparison, as tongue-in-cheek, providing a bit of syrupy grandeur to incomplete songs. Hardly a tone of reverence for an album by the world's greatest pop band. McCartney's new, stripped-down, straightforward version is an interesting alternative, but it doesn't have the broken spirit of the former. Of the tensions of that time, McCartney said, "It's actually very good for the art, a lot of that stuff, you work it out and it adds an edge that you don't necessarily get when you're happy." Let It Be…Naked, then, is an attempt to clean up the problems of the past by a bunch of happy people. Why couldn't they have posted bail for Spector and had him chip in?

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)