Finally, Paul plays our revisionist album game
The vast majority of the Beatles catalog is so well recorded and produced that it actually comes as quite a shock that "Let It Be" fared so poorly. That's why this blog mostly addresses song programming, not sound production. "Let It Be" is different, and is made further complicated by the politics.
The "Let It Be" back-to-basics concept was apparently Paul's idea. In hindsight, it was a very bad idea. That's obvious from its contrast to "Abbey Road", its highly polished and widely acclaimed antithesis which was recorded later the same year.
There are essentially four sets of recordings from the "Let It Be" sessions that have been officially released over the years.
First, there were the three songs on singles produced by George Martin, "Get Back", "Don't Let Me Down" and later "Let It Be". Just about everybody enjoyed them. So far so good.
Then there were the raw unadorned recordings, some of which eventually appeared on "Anthology 3" and are often referred to as the Glyn Johns recordings, after the sound engineer. These include "I've Got a Feeling", "Dig a Pony", "Two of Us", "For You Blue" and "Long and Winding Road". These are among the recordings that John Lennon called "shit".
Then there were the infamous Phil Spector mixes that comprised the first album release in May 1970. These were commissioned by John and George Harrison, who along with Ringo also approved the result. But it seems everybody else involved hated them - particularly George Martin, Glyn Johns and especially Paul McCartney who really despised the sickly stringy version of "Long and Winding Road".
But as the smoke cleared, from a Beatles fan's standpoint, its hard to see much point to all their complaints. The concept was Paul's to begin with, but then all of them violated that "back to basics" dictum by tampering with the tapes. Phil Spector just went farther than anyone else.
The fact that they didn't try to fix it when it happened is the real issue. They just moved on to record "Abbey Road", and as great as that was, it didn't mend the fences and stop the group from splitting up. Furthermore, "Abbey Road" was a triumph of production, not the songs, most of which weren't that great either. If you live by production, you die by production.
Maybe Paul was the biggest victim of his own idea because he had the most sincere interest in keeping the Beatles together, but you can't have a band of one. And if they had stayed together, they wouldn't have been able to "get back to where they once belonged".
Finally, in 2003, Paul commissioned Paul Hicks, Guy Massey and Allan Rouse to produce one more version of the "Let It Be" recordings. In my opinion, the result is as good as could possibly be hoped for. This is how the album should have sounded from the beginning.
Just about every song is an improvement - some vast such as "The Long and Winding Road" and "Across the Universe", some subtle, such as compared to the George Martin version of "Let It Be". The one exception to me is that George Martin's version of "Get Back" on the original single is superior. The sudden truncated ending of the newer version is jarring, and I always liked Paul's "high heel shoes and a low neck sweater" monologue near the end.
"Let It Be... Naked" also welcomingly restores "Don't Let Me Down" and dumps "Maggie May" and "Dig It" which were just mindless studio babbling.
The keys here are that "Let It Be... Naked" is not "naked" at all, but good tastefully clothed music, and that timing is important. This version should have been prepared and released immediately after it was recorded, but also preferably after the "Hey Jude" album, to preserve the freshness of both of them. Then "Abbey Road" would have stood as the Beatles' final triumphant album statement.
