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What is Your Favorite Beatle Album

Favorite Beatle Album


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    24

fatbob

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Wonder what a live album from the boys from Liverpool would have been like? Have heard some live BBC Vaults stuff, but never anything that was really produced.

Oh well, we will never know.

I think they probably consciously fought against any attempts to do proper live albums because it wouldn't at the time have shown their full breadth and depth effectively. There are some acts that can clearly perhaps best express themselves live - Springsteen, AC/DC even the Stones, but the Beatles with their overdubs and multitracking and the far from insignificant role of Martin in engineering them really used the studio to full effect.

That and the screaming of course
 
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Mendieta

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It's weird the thread didn't ask if you preferred the Stones more or asked to assess the relative merits of a Dead piece but we get into it quickly.

Yup. I grew up among a perception that The Beatles were Pop and the Stones Rock. Early enough in life, luckily I think, I stopped giving much of a crap about that. And realized the beatles, for instance, were so much more than pop (a genre and sound I find uninteresting, and a culture I don't care for). Take Helter Skelter for one. OMG when I heard that song. How many... Should I say genres of music? ... Have roots in that seminal, primal song. That aint no Hey Jude.

So yes, I chose the White Album.
 

fatbob

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Growing up as a kid within about a dozen miles of Strawberry Fields and the Cavern Club, the Beatles were always this sort of thing that just were. Your parents had a few records and occasionally a parent would tell stories of having seen them at the Cavern before they became the phenomenon. But culturally they were far less important than the mightiest sports team on the planet Liverpool FC and even music wise they weren't the most important band from Liverpool to an 80s teenager - not with Teardrop Explodes, Echo and the Bunnymen and FGTH around. Obviously age brings with it perspective and I've been able to appreciate them more since ( though I still get a visceral thrill from the horn intro to Reward or the dark chords of Killing Moon or "the air attack warning sounds like...". And as for the KLF..true successors to the Beatles arthouse creativity.


& don't knock Hey Jude - one of the most perfect pop sings ever written
 
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François Pugh

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dbostedo

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Growing up in the 80's and early 90's, I knew a bunch of Beatles songs just from the oldies stations my parents would listen to in the car, and I heard a few more in college when there was a little flurry of retro-popularity... but I was never a fan. It was old music.

Then XM Radio added a Beatles station last year, and for some reason it hooked me. On top of listening in the car, I must have listened to every one of their albums from Help! on, 8 or 10 times through each (and the earlier ones a fair amount too).

I was also amazed to learn that they released every one of their popular albums (in the US at least) in a 7 year span, from '63 - '70. I had always assumed they released a bunch of albums through the 70's too. They produced so much so fast.

This article was a great read as I was going through the albums : http://www.vulture.com/2017/06/all-213-beatles-songs-ranked-from-worst-to-best.html
And here's what Rolling Stone reader's said to this thread : https://www.rollingstone.com/music/...readers-pick-the-top-10-beatles-albums-13986/

Oh, and I picked Revolver, though Rubber Soul was close. I think my ranking is something like :

Revolver
Rubber Soul
Sergeant Pepper's
Abbey Road
Help!
The white album
Let It Be
Magical Mystery Tour
Hard Day's Night
Beatles For Sale
With The Beatles
Please Please Me
Yellow Submarine
 

Jim Kenney

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Growing up in the 80's and early 90's, I knew a bunch of Beatles songs just from the oldies stations my parents would listen to in the car, and I heard a few more in college when there was a little flurry of retro-popularity... but I was never a fan. It was old music.

Then XM Radio added a Beatles station last year, and for some reason it hooked me. On top of listening in the car, I must have listened to every one of their albums from Help! on, 8 or 10 times through each (and the earlier ones a fair amount too).

I was also amazed to learn that they released every one of their popular albums (in the US at least) in a 7 year span, from '63 - '70. I had always assumed they released a bunch of albums through the 70's too. They produced so much so fast.

This article was a great read as I was going through the albums : http://www.vulture.com/2017/06/all-213-beatles-songs-ranked-from-worst-to-best.html
And here's what Rolling Stone reader's said to this thread : https://www.rollingstone.com/music/...readers-pick-the-top-10-beatles-albums-13986/

Oh, and I picked Revolver, though Rubber Soul was close. I think my ranking is something like :

Revolver
Rubber Soul
Sergeant Pepper's
Abbey Road
Help!
The white album
Let It Be
Magical Mystery Tour
Hard Day's Night
Beatles For Sale
With The Beatles
Please Please Me
Yellow Submarine

Interesting perspective from a younger generation:) Would you say your generation prefers, when it comes to classic rock, Led Zep or AC/DC? Sometime around 1995 or 2000 the classic rock stations on regular radio stopped playing Beatles music except for very rarely (at least the ones in Wash DC). I guess because it was too old? I have to admit I got sick of a lot of classic rock music because I heard it too much in the 70s-90s. The early-mid Beatles sounds better now to me because I was not over-exposed to it.
 

4ster

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The early-mid Beatles sounds better now to me because I was not over-exposed to it.
I am in the same boat. I listen to & enjoy the Beatles more now than I ever did back then.
By the time I was 11 or 12 years old, bands like cream and some of the other blues based British groups caught my attention along with local bands in the SF Bay Area. Pop groups like the Beatles & Beach Boys took a backseat.

I think it was this performance a few years back that brought the Beatles back to the forefront for me.
 

fatbob

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This article was a great read as I was going through the albums : http://www.vulture.com/2017/06/all-213-beatles-songs-ranked-from-worst-to-best.html

Thanks for that. Long read but one of the best analyses I've ever read. And articulates better than I could the flaws in the White Album, my reservations about Sgt Pepper. Top 20 in particular is spot on - you could argue forever about the ordering, personally I'd have Strawberry Fields at the top but the important thing is it represents the breadth of greatness.

Like the stat that Come Together a relatively routine rock out for them has surpassed even Stairway to Heaven in rock radio airplay.
 

dbostedo

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Interesting perspective from a younger generation:) Would you say your generation prefers, when it comes to classic rock, Led Zep or AC/DC? Sometime around 1995 or 2000 the classic rock stations on regular radio stopped playing Beatles music except for very rarely (at least the ones in Wash DC). I guess because it was too old? I have to admit I got sick of a lot of classic rock music because I heard it too much in the 70s-90s. The early-mid Beatles sounds better now to me because I was not over-exposed to it.

Zeppelin and AC/DC were both pretty popular when I was in high school (early 90's)... "70's rock" had a bit of a resurgence - Pink Floyd, Steve Miller, The Eagles, Zeppelin, Boston, AC/DC (yes, some of those bands had hits in other decades, but I lumped them together in my head at the time). Our theme song for high school lacrosse was "Shoot To Thrill"... so I guess AC/DC at the time for me. (Although I recently bought the whole Zeppelin boxed set.)

Now? I have no idea what older music is popular with my generation. Most people stick with what they liked in high school or college, but I feel like those are over and done with and don't listen to them as much. I'd still say that Pearl Jam is my all time favorite band, but I don't listen to them much. I typically listen to more modern stuff (2000's) with occasional periods of older music.
 
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Bad Bob

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Does it mean that you are officially "old", when you start hearing the music you rocked out to as elevator music? :huh:
 

kitchener

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Lots of great remarks -- Jim Kenney, I myself am finding the mid-period to be fresher these days because I've heard their late period ad nauseum. Maybe for that reason while I've for years ranked Abbey Road as my favorite, lately I'm appreciating Pepper more and more. I think it's because I've come to love the so-called "lesser" works on it, too, like Fixing A Hole or Lovely Rita. The album is sublime in its perfection -- a great answer to Pet Sounds.

Albums aside, I also love stand-outs (for me) from the mid and later albums that aren't often mentioned (if that's even possible where the Beatles are concerned). Such as "Long, Long, Long," Harrison's song for God on the White Album, or "For No One," by McCartney on Revolver, John and Paul at the mic harmonizing on "Two Of Us" on Let It Be, and several of the "throwaways" on the mishmash Yellow Submarine, like "Hey Bulldog," "It's All Too Much," and "All Together Now."

I have a music collection spanning back to 1905. My collection includes many genres, from Mozart and Chopin to Lightnin' Hopkins and Howlin' Wolf, from Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams (don't get me going on the Hillbilly Bard) to Django Reinhart and Edith Piaf, from Joy Division and Throbbing Gristle to KMFDM and the Butthole Surfers, from early Floyd to late Dylan. I think the Beatles take the cake.

 
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dbostedo

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^^^^
Excellent cover by Fiona Apple that I've always liked (Pleasantville is one of my favorite movies)... and actually I didn't know it was a cover until a few years ago.
 

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