Andrew Hickey
Thoughts on "Now and Then"
Pt 2 (part 1 should be read first and is in the post before this...also it was a pateron only post, so couldn't share)Now, I have no problem at all with remixing old records to try new things out, *as a new thing*. As a different way of looking at the material, as an interesting experiment. But these remixes to make the records sound more appealing to modern listeners have, rather than supplementing the original records, replaced them, and I think that's deeply disturbing for anyone actually interested in the history of popular music or popular culture. If you want to buy a copy of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the actual album released in 1967 by the Beatles, it's very, very difficult to do so now. Not impossible of course -- with the millions of copies of the album in print, it'll likely never be impossible to find a copy -- but one has to make an effort. The new version has replaced the old as far as sales of new copies go. And that's worrying.
But on the other hand, there have been occasions when this technology has been used for entirely good purposes. I think what was done with the Live at the Hollywood Bowl album, for example, is a minor miracle. That album as it was released in the seventies, well after the group split up, was not in any way the result of an artistic choice by anyone involved. It was badly recorded and the music was almost inaudible due to the screaming of the audience. The 2015 reissue, using demixing technology, is just an improvement without any negatives to it -- it makes the historical recordings *more* accessible, in that you can actually hear what the musicians were playing.
But "Now and Then" as it's currently constituted doesn't have its roots in those remix projects, although Giles Martin is on board here as he was with those. Nor, really, is it comparable to the nineties tracks "Free as a Bird" or "Real Love", though those are the obvious points of comparison, and the homeopathic amounts of George Harrison left in the track come from those sessions.
Rather, to understand what's going on with "Now and Then", I think we have to look at two projects that came between those -- Liverpool Sound Collage and Love.
Both of these projects were the product of *radical* dissasembly, deconstruction, and reconstruction of Beatles recordings. In the case of Liverpool Sound Collage, the project *is* a collage -- something not dissimilar to "Revolution #9" in some respects -- in which McCartney and his collaborators Youth and Super Furry Animals have taken a small number of outtake recordings from Beatles sessions, mixed them in with other recordings (including McCartney doing vox pops on the streets of Liverpool, talking to passers-by) and created new tracks from them. The closest of those tracks to a conventional song is "Free Now", a track credited to Paul McCartney, Super Furry Animals and the Beatles, whcih is based around a loop of George Harrison saying "do what you wanna do" and some McCartney vocal improvisation, and which can be found at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Zwd7LcGFKU for those who are curious.
Love, meanwhile, is a project largely supervised by Giles Martin but with the help of his father, Sir George, the final Beatles-related project the elder Martin took an active involvement in. That was the creation of a soundtrack for a Beatles-themed Cirque du Soleil show, one which was also released as an album. The soundtrack album was made up entirely of material from previously released Beatles recordings (with the exception of a new string arrangement for George's demo of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" -- the demo had been released on Anthology 3, but the strings were a new addition) but every track was reconfigured with elements of other recordings. So for example, "Within You, Without You"'s lead vocals and string arrangement were overlaid on the rhythm track and some of the sound effects from "Tomorrow Never Knows", while "Drive My Car", "The Word" and "What You're Doing" were turned into a medley, with the drum part from "Drive My Car" playing almost throughout, but also with snatches of horns from another track, and most of the guitar solo from "Taxman", while "Strawberry Fields Forever" became a montage incorporating bits of Lennon's original demo, the early takes heard on the Anthology set, and the finished single.
This kind of collage creation is a world away from the kind of remixing to make the original records more palatable for modern ears that we've heard in the recent "Deluxe" versions of the older albums. It's the creation of something genuinely new from older, familiar parts, and making a fresh new creation from it.
And that is, to a large extent, what Paul McCartney has done with "Now and Then".
When I first heard that McCartney and Starr were going to be completing the track, I thought it was a terrible idea. The publicity for the new single has tried to pretend that the reason George Harrison didn't continue work on the track in the mid-nineties was simply because he didn't think the recording quality on the demo was good enough -- and the demo does have some obvious flaws in that regard, most notably the 60hz hum heard through large parts of it. But the truth is that Harrison told McCartney at the time that the song was "fucking awful".
And, frankly, he was right. Lennon's original demo is a meandering, borderline-unlistenable, mess. There are at least four half-finished musical ideas in there -- a verse ("I know it's true/It's all because of you"), an overlong bridge which has at least two, possibly three, melodies in itself ("I don't want to lose you"... "but if you have to go...") and a half-finished other section ("Now and then, I miss you...").
To give some idea of the kind of surgery that's had to be done to turn Lennon's demo into an actual song, the length of his demo in the bootlegged version I have is five minutes and five seconds long. The version of the track in the "official audio" video I linked above (there are some slight differences in the mix used in the Jackson video, which has some tuning up at the beginning but is missing the almost-inaudible spoken remark from Starr at the end) is four minutes and eight seconds -- of which
forty-five seconds in the middle are an instrumental break that's not in the original demo, and there's a thirty-second instrumental outro that has no real counterpart in Lennon's performance either.
It's hard to say for sure without some more A-Bing, because both tracks have repeated sections and I'm not always sure if the new version is using different sections for the repeats or if it's just pasting the same bit of Lennon vocal in repeatedly, but I think there's probably a total of ninety seconds used of Lennon's original demo. McCartney has taken the "I know it's true" verses, turned the "Now and then I miss you" section into a middle eight and completed it, and scrapped all the other ideas in the track. He's then structured the remaining material into something that is actually a song, which Lennon's original demo manifestly isn't in any sensible sense of the term.
I actually suspect that while the story being put about that Harrison only had technical issues with the song is false, the spirit of it -- that he'd have been willing to work on it more if he'd had access to the technology used now -- is truer than one might think. Because it's only by totally stripping off the piano that anything like a continuous performance has been created here, and only that way could it be restructured into something that's not a mess.
McCartney has done quite a bit of subtle rewriting throughout the song, too. Some people have noted that Lennon's voice sounds very artificial on the track and put that down to the software used to create the track. I don't think that's what they're hearing -- watching the little mini-documentary that was put out to promote the track a couple of days ago, there's a section where we get to hear some of the isolated vocal, and it does sound stunningly clear.
Rather, what I think people are hearing is the layering that's been done *after* that, to smooth the gaps where Lennon's vocal drops out altogether. Throughout the track, McCartney is doubling Lennon, sometimes only very faintly and almost inaudibly (as on the first few lines, where Lennon's voice is clearest and where he has the lyric completely thought out), but his voice comes up in the mix where Lennon's vocal is missing odd words (like on the end of the second verse, where the lead vocal sings "will love you" -- McCartney sings the "will").
I also think there's some autotune, both on Lennon's voice and on McCartney's new vocals, but mostly what's been done seems to be to turn half-formed lines into full ones by creating a Lennonmccartney solo-sounding vocal. For example, in the section that becomes in the final track the middle eight, Lennon sings (starting 2:13 in the demo) "Tow [sic] and then I miss you/Oh, now and then I wan te dow de Turnham Green/I know return to me" as near as I can phonetically transcribe it. In the completed track, at 01:09, the same section is "Now and then, I miss you/Oh, now and then, I want you to be there for me, always to return to me". (And the same snatch of recording comes back at 02:03, a repeat that isn't in Lennon's original, though he noodles a similar bit of melody later in the track without singing).
The "I wan" and "return to me" in that section are Lennon singing lead. The "t you to be there for me, always to" are McCartney filling in the blanks. Obviously that section also has McCartney and Starr singing harmonies *as well* but the "lead vocal" part changing mid-syllable can only be done convincingly if there's a certain amount of artificiality to the sound.
To be clear, I think McCartney performing major surgery on Lennon's song makes the result a more authentic Beatles record, rather than less. Lennon and McCartney's collaboration was often in the form of editing each other's work, and sometimes extensively rewriting it (as when McCartney turned Lennon's sad acoustic dirge about being unloved and uncared for as a child into "Yellow Submarine") and what both men missed in their solo work was the ability of the other to find the core good idea among their bad ones and to polish it up for them and turn it into something workable. Both released plenty of fatuous solo work that could have been turned into classics with just a little bit of help from the other (as well as both releasing plenty of actual classics in their solo work).
There's been some debate as to what Harrison contributed to the recording, given that he didn't spend much time on it at all. He's credited for acoustic and electric guitars, but all the lead guitar is McCartney playing in what he thinks of as a Harrison style (it actually doesn't sound very Harrison to my ears, and the attempt at emulating his style is probably the weakest thing in the instrumental track). I assume from the footage of McCartney and Harrison working on the song together in the nineties included in the video that he's one of the layers of strummed acoustic guitar playing at points. Given he's also credited for electric guitar, I assume the staccato bits of electric rhythm guitar that appear from 01:40 (and which sound very familiar to me, like they're flown in from another song) were also him.
But of course even if he made no audible instrumental contribution on this track at all, he's vocally all over the track. One of the most effective things that's been done to the track is the flying-in of block backing vocals from John, Paul, and George from other tracks.
Supposedly these are from "Because", "Here, There, and Everywhere" and "Eleanor Rigby". I don't actually hear anything identifiably from the latter song, but in the instrumental break many of the "aaahs" are *very* identifiably from "Because" while the "oohs" are largely from "Here, There, and Everywhere". There's so much going on in the mix that I wouldn't swear to it, but my ears tell me there might be a bit of "Sun King" thrown in there as well at times (though the vocals on "Sun King" and "Because" are so similar that I could be mishearing).
Of all the Beatles, Ringo is the one who had least chance to shine in the reunion tracks, and the same is true here. On both reunion tracks, and now here, he had to play to a pre-recorded track, always a hugely limiting constraint for any drummer, especially one with such a nuanced sense of feel as Ringo, but not only that, the songs themselves are all plodding mid-tempo piano ballads which don't give any room for the kind of playing he could do on rock material, always his forte. McCartney and Harrison got to show off their vocal and guitar skills on "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love", and McCartney gets to do pretty much everything on this track, but Ringo is stuck playing a very straightforward part which, frankly, could have been anyone, and without even the mitigating factor on the other tracks which was that he was playing with his old friends. Here he and McCartney weren't even on the same continent when they recorded their parts.
Still, at least his drums aren't being recorded by Jeff Lynne (who has many positive attributes as a producer, but whose drum sounds are painful). And he is audible in the newly-recorded backing vocals, though not to anything like the same extent as McCartney is. He does as good a job as anyone could ask for on material that doesn't play to his strengths in any way.
Giles Martin has done a decent impression of his father in the string arrangement, but if anything he leans a bit too much on his father's style in an effort to make it sound "Beatley", which the rest of the track frankly doesn't. It's this that gives the track the initial impression I had, which is that it sounds like the Rutles.
Specifically, it sounds like the Rutles Archaeology album, much of which is Neil Innes trying to turn his own old solo songs into Rutles tracks by singing them in a Beatley voice and adding Beatles-style arrangements, but missing the mark because songs like "Questionnaire", "Knicker Elastic King" and "Eine Kleine Middle Klasse Musik" were fundamentally not actual Beatles pastiches. Giles Martin is trying too hard to turn a John Lennon demo into the Beatles, and ends up hitting Rutles Archaeology.
But there are far worse albums in the world than the Rutles Archaeology, and there are far worse tracks in the world, and even a few worse in the Beatles canon, than "Now and Then". Its main problem as a listening experience is that divorced from the circumstances of its creation it's merely a little bland, the kind of track I'd have said doesn't seem to have any reason to exist.
But of course it does have a reason, and that reason is Paul McCartney. The breakup of the Beatles seems to have hit the four band members very differently. Lennon, oddly, seems by the late seventies to have had the most mature attitude to it -- fundamentally "it was a good thing, they were important people in my life, but it came to an end as good things sometimes do. It's fun to look back at those times, and I miss them, but you can't go back". Harrison seems to have had a lot of resentment towards Lennon and, especially, McCartney over the way he was treated, while Starr seems just to be sad that his friends weren't all friends with each other any more.
But for McCartney, more than any of the others, the split seems to have been catastrophic to his very sense of self, and after spending much of the seventies and eighties running away from his past, he seems to have developed a psychological need to somehow "fix it", to make it better somehow. There's always been a recurring theme in his work, even when he was very young, of looking back at the past to see if he could pinpoint a mistake and change it somehow, and I think a lot of what gets called revisionism or dishonesty when people talk about him seems actually to be that. There's an Asimov story, The Dead Past, about a historian trying to build a machine to view the past so he can prove that the Phoenicians didn't really commit child sacrifice, who turns out to have as an underlying motive a worry, never fully voiced, that his own child's death had been his fault. One gets the impression -- and this may well be me reading far too much into things -- that projects like the Get Back project, and McCartney's constant stressing of the good times the group had in the sessions for the White Album and the Get Back sessions themselves, are him trying to look back, find the moment where it all went wrong, and prove to his own satisfaction that it never really did, to rewrite history in a fundamentally different way from the rewriting that goes on in the deluxe editions of the albums, to heal an unhealable rift, to make it not have happened.
And "Now and Then" seems to be a big part of that for him. It's something he's talked about a lot in the nearly thirty years since those sessions, and it is in itself the last bit of unfinished business from the *second* time the Beatles split up.
It also may have special meaning for him on an even more heartbreaking level. Apparently the last words that Lennon said to McCartney, the last time they met in person in 1976, were "think about me every now and then, old friend". McCartney was, right after Lennon's death, not just devastated as anyone would be at the murder of someone they were close to, but desperate to know for sure that things really had been OK between them at the end -- he reached out to Andy Peebles, the DJ who was the last person to interview Lennon, to ask "did he still love me?" in those words, according to Peebles (and Peebles reassured him that he did).
While the song as recorded by Lennon meanders all over the place and seems lyrically aimless, those parts of the song that McCartney has picked out to finish up, at least, do read as if they're a message to the other Beatles, or to McCartney in particular, and he seems to have crafted the song to be the message to himself he wanted to hear, perhaps the one that Lennon intended to send him but never did. In that respect, the song seems as much as anything to be a companion piece to "Here Today", possibly the most moving thing in McCartney's solo catalogue. That song asks what Lennon would say to McCartney if he were here today, and imagines him being rather cynical and denying they were ever friends. "Now and Then", instead, becomes Lennon ruefully admitting that he did miss his old friend -- not all the time, but occasionally, now and then.
Does that mean it's a song that I'll return to much once the novelty has worn off? No, probably not. But if, everything seems to suggest, this entire publicity blitz and technical wizardry was, fundamentally, all about helping an old man finally come to terms more than forty years later with the death of someone he loved dearly but who died when there was still unfinished business between them, that gives the track far more reason to exist than the endless copyright-extension boxes and remixes that have been coming out for the last decade.
Artistically, the Beatles' story should have ended with "The End", and nothing that followed that can possibly better it as a full stop on the group's career. But all we could really ask of "Now and Then" is that it not be terrible, not a disgrace. And somehow, miraculously, it isn't. That has to be enough.
