Let It Be...Naked [VINYL]

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So hopefully at some point in your life you’ve heard “The Ecstasy of Gold” from Ennio Morricone’s unsurpassed soundtrack to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which is without question the greatest piece of movie soundtrack music ever composed. But a deeply flawed release with a couple of redeeming qualities I had missed the first time around. The real shame, as is usual with these things, is the opportunity lost: there was a wealth of material recorded that hasn't, at least officially, seen the light of day, other than a dozen or so tracks on Anthology 3. Although I’m not sure exactly what makes Clint Eastwood “good”, what’s so good about claiming reward money for bringing in criminals then shooting the rope when they are being hung so they can escape and then splitting the loot with them? I realize the crux of some or many of the reasons I prefer Naked to all other LIB's run counter to a number of what the band's intentions or plans at the time were.

Regardless of country of origin all tracks are sung in English, unless otherwise stated in our description. It's the only version of the album I find not wondering when it will be over and also feeling sad when it is over. In my opinion, "Let it Be" was always something of a B-grade Beatles album, a mish-mash of doodles with some faulted gems within the Phil Spectorised structure and production. Probably mostly a lame attempt to give us a version of the song that didn’t already exist, but it really isn’t all that interesting. I totally agree with you on the sound of LiBN, I personally think it sounds great, the sound really justifies the release for me.Naked" -LP was mixed and remastered from the original 1969 recorded master-tapes and comes without "Dig it" and "Maggie Mae," two titles of the 1970 "Let It Be" release but with "Don't Let Me Down" that is not on Phil Spector's reproduced remix from 1970.

Morricone channelled his muse and wrote that music while watching film of a guy running around a graveyard. Two years before that, the Anthology sets and Love were remastered, also for streaming and download. of course, for a couple of songs we already had some outstanding remixes on Let It Be…Naked – which was a complete misfire in so many ways, but did have exceptional sound quality. Instead of several discs of music from these tapes we should have got, we got 20 minutes of snatches of bits of songs and mumbled conversations that sound like they were assembled by someone with severe ADHD, who after a couple of seconds went “OK, on to something else now”.The new production, for me, brings the album up to standard and we can appreciate the boys rocking again. These guys were really cooking and grooving in a way I hadn’t appreciated about these sessions previously. Like “I’ve Got a Feeling” – mixing the two versions rather than just using the first take makes this something very different than simply a de-Spectorized Let It Be, and wasn’t that the point to begin with?

I would give this a 7 because when I do dial up a Beatles album, there’s a better than average chance it will be this one. The rest of the songs, shorn of Spector's decorative flourishes, confirm that although the Beatles were having occasional difficulty speaking to each other during these sessions, there was no problem about playing together. I am quite amazed at how for the first time in thirty odd years I can listen to these songs and hear how great they really are.

Naked consists largely of newly mixed versions of the Let It Be tracks while omitting the excerpts of incidental studio chatter and most of Spector's embellishments. When the album came out, the first thing that hit me was that song sounded the least like the one I heard at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. And you have a point about Lennon’s vocal on “Across the Universe”, it does stand out a lot more, I just miss the other instruments. It's the Beatles, about whom more words have probably been written/uttered than any other pop culture phenomenon.