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- [00:00]
Shopify Narrator
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- [01:21]
Robert Rodriguez
John Legend, Sheryl Crowe, Elvis Costello and.
- [01:24]
Jesse Pollock
Alanis Morissette star in the MGM Original.
- [01:28]
Robert Rodriguez
Series Words and Music. Iconic artists share intimate performances and the.
- [01:34]
Jesse Pollock
Stories behind the songs. New episodes Sundays on mgm.
- [01:41]
Mike Vaccaro
John really loved his mother. I loved her too. And she played little Ukulele, which to this day, if I ever meet grownups, you know, who play ukuleles, I love them.
- [02:03]
Robert Rodriguez
Hello and welcome to episode 316 of Something about the Beatles podcast. And this one is another show about the 2025 anthology, but instead of being about Anthology 4 the Music Collection, this about the revamped doc currently streaming on Disney plus. So separate conversation and not really one about the content per se so much as it is about what we're being given 30 years after the original by Apple and the people seated at the table now. We've since lost George, of course, and Olivia occupies his space. Shawn is taking the place of Yoko. So presumably, and with the change over at the top, Jeff Jones having left and Tom Green taking over, I'm not sure how much of this process was started before that regime change happened. But in any event, I think this is really more indicative of the current position of Apple and the Beatles remaining and their heir instead of Disney per se. Disney is the platform and has been since, well, for a while now. ABC owns Disney and ABC in America did the broadcast of anthology back in 1995. Since then get back and Let It Be and Beatles 64, so that seems to be their outlet of choice. A Beatles Z. So this is a discussion of not so much what is in Anthology 2025, so much as really what is not in it compared to 30 years ago. And joining me for this conversation is a couple of guys that I just met at the recently concluded Everything Fab Four conference in New Jersey, Jesse Pollock and Mike Vaccaro, who have just recently started up a Beatle podcast of their own called all youl need is Pod. If you check out their show you get an idea what they're about, but they're a couple guys from New Jersey, Rich Le, lifelong friends and now Jesse lives in Ohio, but in any event deep in beetle knowledge and opinions for sure. So you will hear what we have to say about this and just know that the Internet is full of critiques of absolutely everything and negativity and bitching and complaining and all that sort of thing. We wouldn't be doing this if we didn't love and revere the Beatles and respected how much they affected our life trajectory. And it is out of reverence for the Beatles and their story and their art that we look at things and put our views out there of what could be done better to serve their story. Our interests diverge where we are interested in history presented in the most honest and accurate way possible. Whereas if you are the focus of such close scrutiny, maybe you don't want 100% accuracy out there, maybe you want a certain spin to things. And certainly we have seen that being the case for a number of years now, if not from day one really I guess would be more accurate to say so that is sort of the tension between the people who want to present the story as accurately as possible and those who want want to present it in a certain way to their like, such as always has been between public figures and the people that follow them and study their history. Any event, that's what we're talking about today. And one more thing before we get into the discussion is I just want to remind people, because I don't think I've done this in the last couple of shows to sign up for the SATB newsletter if you are so inclined. And you can also find out about the upcoming online Sat Bay Forum, a community of listeners and people that follow my work, that want to be part of the conversation, be part of the others that have been following the show for the years it's been running and want to weigh in, comment and give their input. We have a really smart curious following for the podcast and the people attend to follow my work, which I am deeply grateful and appreciative of. This isn't just a bunch of people sitting around talking about oh Weren't the Beatles great? And you know, just nonsense that is dime a dozen you could find anywhere. This is for people that think deeply about the Beatles and are immersed in their history and are bottomlessly curious wanting to find out more. And that really means not just the Beatles as subjects themselves, but the context around them. We're all about context on this show and in the books that I write. And I think that fleshes out the picture beyond just talking about the songs per se or individual Beatles per se. You want to know what was going on around them, what was influencing them and impacting them, and where the art came from. So to that end, that is really the basis of the work that I do on this show and in my books and where I really want to see the discussion continuing. People been writing to me through the newsletter for the 13 odd months it's been going and it's so much to process. I am so gratified by the quality of the input I get from people or just the sharing of stor really high quality stuff. And I'm apologizing to anybody listening to this who's already a subscriber that may have written to me and not gotten a direct response back. I truly regret that because my time is spread so thin, all the things that I do, everything takes 10 times longer than you think it will. And as much as I would love to respond to everybody individually, sometimes things slip through the cracks, sometimes I don't get to them in a timely fashion. But know that everything coming in gets ready and enjoyed. So thank you for that. Keep it coming. And I think with the startup of an online forum and community, everything will get put out there for everybody to enjoy and weigh in on and comment on and just established and reinforced this community that we've already had going here for a number of years. So there is that to look forward to. But to get on the newsletter, you can look for it on Beehive, which is spelled B E E H double I V E. It's an app. It's a newsletter aggregator, I guess would be the term for it. You could find it there or more directly you can find it at. Or you can get on it by writing to satb2010mail.com and to everybody who's been a subscriber already for the past 13 months or whenever point you came in. It might be helpful for the people who are skeptical or haven't signed up for it yet, just haven't bothered or made the time. And a lot of people tell me, oh, I've been meaning to do it, I just haven't got to it. That's fine. But to those who've been experiencing it and what it means and the content and all that stuff, maybe post something about it. You could post on any of my socials, on Facebook, Instagram, X Bluesky, LinkedIn, wherever. Just share your thoughts. Share what your feelings are about the newsletter and how much you've been enjoying it. I think that would be an effective way to let people know that this is something valuable. If you listen to the show and follow my work, you will enjoy the newsletter too. Anyway, let me get out of the way and get Mike and Jesse into the conversation.
- [09:16]
Jesse Pollock
Beatles and Anthology, of course. Well, I imagine everybody's got some passionate thoughts about this. Mike and I finished watching all nine episodes, if you want to call them that. Did you get the leak of the Anthology four tracks that came out about three weeks before? Yeah, we got those two and there was some good stuff on there and it was like, oh, there's some hope for what they're gonna do here. But that bait and switch that they pulled on episode nine, oh boy, am I salty about that.
- [09:44]
Robert Rodriguez
Okay, well, we can talk about that for sure. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the thing that I haven't done great deal of deep research on what the intent was with this thing in terms of. If there is the intention of providing a director's cut, full, unedited version of this on Blu Ray down the line, okay, that's fine. I can accept the bitter pill of the edits you made now, but I've not been able to find any of that. And it's the kind of thing that there was so much buzz and discussion, very heated, very passionate on every side of Anthology, the series, the Anthology 4 CD package, that's a whole different conversation. I feel like I've already had that in the show. But the editing, that's a whole wide conversation to have that. I kind of feel like I've seen this movie before because there was the whole taking a certain song off the John Lennon New York City package that got people riled up. And now you've got even more of that in the.
- [10:46]
Jesse Pollock
Oh, with what George said in Paris.
- [10:48]
Mike Vaccaro
Yeah, we had visions of all these French girls, you know, ooh la la and all that. And instead the audience was, at least on the opening night was all tuxedoed, elderly French people. And hanging around the stage door all seemed to be a bunch of slightly gay looking boys shouting, ringo, Ringo.
- [11:09]
Robert Rodriguez
The word fat as applied to another human being, John Cripples act.
- [11:13]
Jesse Pollock
They cut out the fat Elvis period comment, didn't they?
- [11:16]
Robert Rodriguez
Well, they cut out the fat lady being served spaghetti. In Magical Mystery Tour, John, the whole. You can still see it on YouTube as of this moment. The sequence about John's cripples act, gone.
- [11:27]
Mike Vaccaro
There were some really bad cases, God help them, you know, but there was really some poor little children that would be brought in. I mean, some actual basket cases. I mean, they were just in baskets, you know, and also some really just. Just sad thalidomide kids. It's not very nice to be, you know, afflicted. But, you know, John had this kind of thing that manifest as a, you know, as. As a joke. He'd always joke about it because the reality was too much for him. I think it was a fear or, you know, something you can see actually in all these home movies. Every time, you know, John, you switch camera on and put him on, he does. Goes into a spasm and his interpretation of what a spastic is. And John would always do daft, daft clapping. You know, we couldn't really see ourselves as the sort of, yeah, come on, get on.
- [12:33]
Jesse Pollock
It was all.
- [12:35]
Mike Vaccaro
There's a lot of that, you know, but it kept us sane. I think, you know, a little bit of irreverent humor. It meant we weren't falling for the game too much.
- [12:44]
Jesse Pollock
It's that easy. All you got to do is sort.
- [12:47]
Mike Vaccaro
Of clap your hands.
- [13:07]
Robert Rodriguez
And that. Yeah, okay, we can go down that path of discussion and have that, but I guess we'll see where the conversation goes. I'm more or less here to talk to you guys. I'm not necessarily wanting to say, well, here's my interpretation, but if you want to.
- [13:21]
Jesse Pollock
No, no, we want to hear yours too. I mean, we're fans. That's, you know, that's. That's why we're here. So, like, this is going to be, I think, a really great roundtable discussion from three people that are very, very passionate about it. Even though we're younger than you by a little bit. Like, Mike and I still remember the phenomenon of the original anthology releases. Whether it was the video, what went on a BEETLE C, the CDs, all of that stuff. And just the trajectory. Trajectory that we've seen over the last 30 years has just been wild. Like, it's like what George Lucas has been doing to Star wars since 77. It's just like every few months, it's like, let's chop a little bit here. Let's do this for the Beatles. One package. Then we'll re edit some little things for the 2009 remasters, those little video docs that they put in on itunes. And it's just what even is Anthology anymore. There's so many different versions.
- [14:12]
Robert Rodriguez
If the intent is this is our history, the way we remember it, and that sort of fool's errand, well, there's that aspect of resentment as expressed. You know, everybody else has told our story, but this is the real story. Cause we were there, which is bullshit. First of all, yes, you were there. But often the people that were there were the worst witnesses of all. As we know from the first time we saw Anthology. They can't even agree how the whole Elvis visit went down. And that's just one little thing.
- [14:39]
Jesse Pollock
Buckingham palace or who played on what. I mean, Aaron Torkelson. Webber talked about it in a really great way on your episodes with her. We can get into this too. But I do like that they kind of own it across all the different edits. Like it's present in even the original ABC broadcast. Particularly Paul and George just do not agree on anything. So at least they kept that instead of just copping out entirely.
- [15:02]
Robert Rodriguez
Right. And I do say at some point in the version I just got done watching that whoever's doing the telling, their version is going to be different from this version versus this version. Everybody's seeing it through their own eyes, living it through their own eyes. And it's way too much to expect anybody caught up in that kind of hurricane, living life, doing their job, focusing on the moment to moment, day to day, to be, oh, this is history I'm going to be documenting. I'm going to remember this conversation so that 30 years from now when they ask me about it, I can tell them exactly how it went down. That's completely unreasonable.
- [15:34]
Jesse Pollock
Well, the ironic thing is the one person that did think of that was Mal Evans.
- [15:38]
Robert Rodriguez
Well, keeping it his diary. Yeah, such as it is. And a lot of it's very mundane and not like really give it to deep thought. But as Erin made the point in terms of however she phrased it, but the data first source, or however she put it where somebody that was actually there or capturing something contemporaneous in real time is worth more than that same person remembering it decades later. What was the intent, what was the goal in their presentation of a telling? And I think we know the answer to that question. But a memoir is simply some person's latter day spin of their memories of what happened. And so I think a large part of life is managing expectations. And if your expectation Is, well, this is just the Beatles version decades later. It's not a definitive history, but I think it's sort of implicit if not explicit that well, it's the Beatles telling it. So it must be the definitive version. Peter Jackson's Get Back must be the definitive version of the January 1969 because it's all on film and on audio. So therefore, no, you are at best always witnessing history through a keyhole. Just what got filmed, just what got edited and presented before you as this end product serving whatever masters it's serving and whatever the end game is for this being presented now, this being on Disney, that's a decision right there. It's going to be a family entertainment all ages, across the board feel good platform. And I remember having, when I had Peter Jackson on the show wanting to know because we hadn't seen it yet, are you going to talk about John's heroin use? I'd love to see how that goes over on Disney because you know, a bit of the history, if we enter into embracing Anthology, it's the Beatles version remembered decades after the fact with whatever degree of self serving spin they want to apply to it. That's okay. Just don't present it like the final be all history of the Beatles because it ain't that.
- [17:31]
Rich Le
No, the only way to look at the way I've always held Anthology and a lot of this, you know, post, you know, event recollection is all of this is just good context for everybody that's enamored with the Beatles story to give you a deeper understanding of what was going on at the time. So like where Jesse, Jesse and I kind of have different approaches when it comes to the Beatles. You know, Jesse is the detail guy. Like God, I wish I had the recall he has. But for me I'm more enamored with the story of the Beatles, the how, the why, the collection of people surrounding them and the experiences that everybody had to go through from like an emotional standpoint, from a, a growth standpoint as people. So I'm the story guy.
- [18:16]
Robert Rodriguez
But in both of your cases you're wanting as much accuracy as possible, right?
- [18:20]
Rich Le
Yeah, there's flexible for them to be accurate about anything because just have to look at what was going around. Well, not just coming from them because everything is tainted with their own perspective of how things were going when people.
- [18:33]
Jesse Pollock
And like Robert Root over George's main motivation was I've got to pay off this debt because my business manager ripped me off. Paul's axe to grind at that time was with Ian McDonald Donald because it was going into the whole St. John mythos and like saying like, well, you know, Paul didn't actually play on this part. Well, wait, you weren't there. And who knows what Ringo's expectations were. He just didn't want to do Pizza Hut commercials that week, I think. But crossed first. But everybody had their own motivations for it. And then that's not getting into the motivations even of the distributors that require edits for certain. There are layers of motivation.
- [19:11]
Rich Le
Which explains, like you said, mentioning Disney and Family Friendly Entertainment is. You know, Jesse and I were having this conversation the other day where it's like we've seen, I don't want to say the whitewashing of the Beatles or this, this revisionist history of the Beatles where we've had all of these stories for all of these years that have been confirmed as fact by the people who were there, by the Beatles themselves, of things that went on in the Reaper Bond, things that happened in the early parts of their career. And they're going to cut certain portions of that out and say, well no, now for this episodic format that we have Disney, we have to clean up this image. We cut that like it didn't exist. So for this new generation of Beatles fans, the thing that I'm worried about, especially in a very like a cancel heavy culture, people who want to get remember the time that this all happened in and take that as a grain of salt, but they go and they see this version of Anthology and like me when the original came out, I was not the deep dive guy. My cousin gave me a copy on cassette when it came out because she knew I happened to like the Beatles. And after hearing all that I was like, wow, this is pretty incredible to hear the behind the scenes stuff when another fan comes along that's young like me and sees this and then they dig in. Is it going to turn them against the Beatles? Because they weren't given all the information right up front about John's Crip show or whatever he wanted to. The Max SHAO issues, the homophobia, all of these other layers that gets kind of left behind on the side because.
- [20:49]
Jesse Pollock
At the end of the day we're talking about a documentary series. Because we're talking about a documentary series that doesn't want to include George saying very gay looking boys, you know, while talking about Paris. But they also will make, I mean if they made acknowledge of this, I did not catch it. But it's yet another Beatles product that does not acknowledge that Brian Epstein was gay. You Know if you want to count playing hey, you got to hide your love away under his death montage, which is so goddamn corny at this point. Get it? He's got to hide his love because he' gay. And it was illegal at the time. Get it? You know, it's. There's so many different priorities here that just seem to be in conflict with each other. But not to sound too jaded, and we'll get into this when we start, of course, but at the end of the day, it's Prada. And they're like, how can we make a product that has the most broad appeal for a younger audience? Which I think is kind of a fool's errand because it's a nine hour documentary series and they're trying to appeal to a generation that does not drop $200 on, you know, quadruple LP sets. So it's like, who is this even for, is my question.
- [21:53]
Robert Rodriguez
There was that quote from the first Anthology where they're talking about the White Album and George Martin's pipe dream of it cutting down to a single disc. Ringo's like, well, we could have both. We could have the White Album or the White Album. Yeah, that's how I feel about this. It's like we had the whitewash in 95, now we have the whiter wash in 2025. Because to your point, I think there is. They seem to be operating in this fear of, well, we're trying to bring in younger generations to perpetuate this cash machine going forward after first gen dies off and then second gen and all that. So how do we make them as appealing as possible? Well, we have to sand off the rough bits. And I wonder how valid that is that we're pushing them further up on the pedestal to make them not human beings that didn't say occasionally derogatory things or lose their temper or indulge in bad habits and things like that. Now, remember back at the time of anthology in 95, there was the photo from 65 that they used on the sleeve For Real Love that they airbrushed the smokes out. And they've. Since they did that also with the. I wanna hold. You'd hand. The colorless suits photo.
- [23:05]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah. With Paul having the cigarette between his two fingers.
- [23:08]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, yeah. Abbey Road. They took the smoke out of his hand there. If one makes the argument, I don't know anybody that would defend cultural vandalism per se, but if it's, well, you know what, one of the four died because of this bad habit. And maybe we don't want kids looking at this thinking, oh that's cool, the Beatles did it. And so part of me was half expecting when I was watching 2025 Anthology to see all the scenes, the CGI, the smokes out of their hands and the 60s footage where it was pretty inescapable. They didn't do that. Which I was a little bit surprised. But. But to your point about the gay boys and fat girl this and John's cripple impression, which by the way, he's the one out of the four that actually did a benefit for the mentally disabled.
- [23:52]
Jesse Pollock
Exactly. The one to one concert and Willowbrook and all that. Like they could have easily got around that number one. They could have done the whole like. We'll put a disclaimer at the beginning of this saying these interviews are from the 1990s talking about events from the 1960s. There are gonna be some culturally taboo topics discussed. And then after the whole Crip discussion, I don't care if they had to fly in audio of Paul that was recorded now, but they could have just taken 5 seconds of audio with a photo of the one to one cops are saying, well, you know John, he later came around and realized how insensitive he was and did all this charity work. He raised a million dollars for the kids in Willowbrook. And people would have understood like he was a human being too and realized the error of his ways. And now it's just like, like it's gone. And if you're gonna find out about it, you're only gonna find out about it in a book or if you buy a copy of the original DVDs on eBay. And you're still not gonna have that context. You're still gonna have to go hunting even more for it. But Disney doesn't care because they're falling back on. It's a product which valid. They're not historians, but me being like a history buff with Hollywood. The film Apollo 13, great movie. One of the best movies of the 90s. Is it very good NASA history? No, they change a lot. The biggest defense of it has always been, well, it's not a documentary. Well, you can't say that with a nine part documentary series. You can't go, well it's not a documentary if we change history.
- [25:18]
Rich Le
And that's also speaking as to people who have made a documentary. It's like you're your whole mission. There is service to the truth. And when I say truth, I mean truth like in quotations because there's.
- [25:30]
Jesse Pollock
What is truth?
- [25:30]
Rich Le
You know what happened exactly what was perceived and what actually happened. You know, it's. There are always three sides.
- [25:37]
Robert Rodriguez
To me, there is this aspect of not wanting to have the conversation. We'd just rather not talk about it. We did a whole big discussion on the opening track of Sometime in New York City earlier this year when that was summarily removed from this box set. That people who are shelling out big bucks to get an upgraded bells and whistles version of the album that Johnny Yoko put out in 72 are getting a truncated, hobbled version. Okay, yeah, again, cultural vandalism. But if ultimately you are trying to sell a product, what is a better, more compelling story than of evolution of John going from the guy who did spastic routines on stage before the public, then doing a concert for a benefit of the mentally disabled, the guy who was so homophobic he beat a guy senseless for making jokes about it, Paul's birthday party, to the guy who was much more enlightened and openly supportive of the gay community in his last decade of life. Those are the stories you should be telling. And this fear that our fourth quarter is not going to look good because these young people are going to be turning away from it. You're selling the wrong story. Put the warts all in there. Because there is a better, greater good to have come from it that you should be selling that you're just too afraid to have that conversation. It's stupid.
- [26:56]
Jesse Pollock
And the interesting thing, too, is even when I was really digging into. Because I watched Anthology when it came out as a little kid, I was born in 88, came out in 95, so I was little. And then when the DVDs came out, when we were in middle school or early high school revisited again. And even at that young age, the context that they offered in the original version of the series was enough for me to understand it. They started talking about, like, well, John was kind of cracking under the pressure with that stuff because they were bringing in all these thalamide kids and thinking, they're like, Christ, they're going to heal these kids. And that's how he dealt with how scary and strange this situation was. So I was old enough to understand that then. And then when I found out about the Bob Wooler incident all these years later, something that I don't hear talked about enough, and maybe I'm trying to put too much of a rosy spin on this, but people often forget, like, it wasn't just homophobia. I don't think that led to him doing that. Bob Wooler alleged an accusation Against John at a party that was filled with press that could have landed him in jail. Like in. Even if it didn't land him in jail, if some reporter overheard that and decided to put that in the Daily sun or the Dairy Mirror, you know, affair rumors between Beetle John and manager Brian, it would have ended his career. So, like, I'm not saying better to.
- [28:11]
Robert Rodriguez
Go to jail for assault than being a homo.
- [28:13]
Rich Le
Well, not only that, it was.
- [28:15]
Jesse Pollock
That was what they were raised in, but it was.
- [28:17]
Rich Le
It would have been jail either way. Because just remember at the time, homosexuality was criminal. Criminalized in Britain at the time.
- [28:25]
Robert Rodriguez
So either way, Brian's dying day, right? He was like, I think just after he died. That's it.
- [28:31]
Rich Le
Well, they said that that was the biggest shame of all, is that it happened, you know, not too long after his death. That it would have been. He would have been open to be himself, possibly.
- [28:40]
Jesse Pollock
I don't know about how open it would have been, but at least I was just gonna say, considering his bringing.
- [28:44]
Rich Le
In where he was and all, that maybe it wouldn't have been so bad for him at that point.
- [28:50]
Robert Rodriguez
Isn't it striking how many English supergroup managers were gay at that time?
- [28:54]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, yeah.
- [28:55]
Rich Le
Cause we're listening. I don't think that there's a surprise to that. You know, they were going to these places that were off the beaten path and seeing people who were kind of going against the grain. That was the whole counterculture. So of course they were gonna be up on.
- [29:11]
Jesse Pollock
I do find it very ironic that the Ruddles made more of an obvious reference to the gay manager than the Beatles Anthology ever did. You know, I think it was the trousers. You know, it's like, the Ruddles are.
- [29:22]
Rich Le
Good for a lot of things.
- [29:23]
Jesse Pollock
Yes, they were. And it is so wild, you know, like. And I'm sure this has been talked about to death that this all goes back to the long and winding road project that Neil started in, what, 7071. And the work print of that led to the Ruddles. But honestly, the Ruddles is like. Everybody talks about, like, oh, the original template for. For a Beatles anthology could honestly be the Complete Beatles. And I'm like, nah, the Ruddles was four years before that. That laid out like, this is how you do a rock doc. And it was a parody, so go figure.
- [29:57]
Robert Rodriguez
Well, you can slide in some uncomfortable truths when you frame it as comedy every time.
- [30:02]
Jesse Pollock
Well, I love. Eric Idle was talking about they. Apparently they made some joke that was pretty hard hitting at the Beatles expense while they were filming. And George was Just like, hey man, come on, we were the Beatles. And then Eric said, George thought for a minute and finally said, ah, forget it, it's funny, just throw it in.
- [30:22]
Robert Rodriguez
So remember which bit that was.
- [30:24]
Jesse Pollock
He never specified it. But I did talk to Eric one time on Twitter back when it was called Twitter, you know, before the dark times. And I said, is it true that you guys borrowed a work print copy of the Long and Winding Road? And Eric was just like, no. George had us over his house in Friar park and showed it to us. So it's just like those little like, like teeny glimpses into history. It's just like that all led to the way that the majority of the public consumes Beatle history now. And I know a lot of people try to write off what's happening with the Disney stuff. I'm not gonna sit here and go the Disney ification. Cause we don't know how much of these edits are being mandated by Disney or by the new guard at Apple.
- [31:06]
Rich Le
But it's not even just the new guard at Apple. Just remember that as executive producers, Paul and Ringo have a pretty heavy amount of control over what's going on. Whether they're actively. Sean, of course, whether they're actively utilizing that is a different story. That's behind closed doors. Well, we may never know what happened with that, but this could be self selected trimming that they're in charge of like, no, no, no. Olivia could be saying, well, we don't want to hear George saying this, so cut that. Or Sean says, we're not going to show my dad doing this, you know.
- [31:41]
Jesse Pollock
And that would be completely valid. But we're in the dark about it is the issue.
- [31:46]
Rich Le
Well, we can only speculate.
- [31:48]
Jesse Pollock
I do find it very strange that this was originally announced as Peter Jackson's groundbreaking restoration of the Beatles Anthology project. And to my knowledge, Peter has been seen nowhere promoting this or talking about it. So we don't really have a lot of inside baseball regarding what went into the restoration. It's just, here it is, it's out. Enjoy it, have a nice Thanksgiving. And same with the the Real Love Remastered. Like apparently Jeff Lynn did that new mix himself, but he's not out there talking about it. So it's like, well, how much of this is in name only? Or is this a situation where they're like, I'm not really proud of my work here, so I'm not gonna promote it? We don't know.
- [32:30]
Robert Rodriguez
Well, it's easy to conclude based on a previous discussion we had on the show on Anthology 4, where a lot of times it seems like the people who have their hands on the raw materials and are presenting it, representing it for public consumption aren't the most knowledgeable people what all there is. And so if they're doing a remix, they might take out something that first gen fans or people who were around producing that product back when felt was important. Well, we don't need this now. So there might be that. As far as Peter Jackson and Anthology goes, where I see and hear his fingerprints, I'm certain the visual cleanup might have been with his people. But the audio cleanup specifically, the moment I can point to is in episode one, where you hear Red Hot, which was not part of. Of the actual Star Club release. That has never sounded better. And I've heard many a version.
- [33:40]
Jesse Pollock
Like a. There isn't a complete take of it. Right. That was like when the real end.
- [33:49]
Robert Rodriguez
Is off, I think. Yeah, yeah, right. But that didn't stop them from faking endings and repeats and doing what they did to the original Star Club album. Like, I'm gonna sit right down and cry over you. And they chopped the beginning off where have you been all my life?
- [34:01]
Jesse Pollock
And whatever they did, isn't the weird drum intro on one of the songs on Live at the BBC? Wasn't that some sort of weird digital creation too? I can't remember. Keep your hands off my baby.
- [34:12]
Robert Rodriguez
It could be, yeah. Because that was a rare one. They didn't have an obvious high fidelity version of that. They had one that was subpar and they just wanted to make it something listenable. But, yeah, if Peter Jackson had any hand, I would think it would be in technical support, not editorial control. The thing that's okay, explicable as I think it is indefensible. The things about chopping out the slurs, the things that are controversial. Okay, that's one thing. I get it. I don't like it. I don't agree with it. And I hope to hell if you're going to make this for home purchase, you're going to put in absolutely everything. The new stuff plus every bit you chopped out and whatever else. But when they seemingly make editorial decisions that don't make sense and are to the detriment. The bit about I love anybody who plays a ukulele.
- [34:59]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, the B7.
- [35:01]
Rich Le
Yeah, the B7 story hit me.
- [35:03]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [35:04]
Jesse Pollock
Mike and I are guitarists and we started learning guitar right around the time Anthology came out. And if you a guitarist that is an elder millennial like we are, and you're a Beatles fan, that story is iconic. Like, anytime someone brings up a seventh chord, it's like, oh, yeah, the double decker bus. Ching B7. Why would you cut that out? It's iconic.
- [35:26]
Robert Rodriguez
It makes no sense. Or the bit about Paul was nine months older than me.
- [35:30]
Rich Le
Yeah, he's still nine months older than me. Yeah, yeah.
- [35:32]
Robert Rodriguez
And showing his face when he's telling that. And Jules Howland laughing. It added so much. It sort of underscored it when you were seeing it in 1995, that it's stuck in your brain as somebody who's not watched it 20 trillion times since 1995, it's like, I remember that evening when I saw that in 1995 on ABC. It's inexplicable now. One thing I will never, and I hope to God somebody, and I'm sure somebody will, on Reddit or Steve Hoffman or somewhere, will do an AB of all this minute by minute, to show what was cut, what was added, what was reset.
- [36:04]
Jesse Pollock
Someone's going to. Someone's working on it as we speak.
- [36:07]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't got the. I went through that, but I was.
- [36:10]
Rich Le
Digging around to try and find my VHS copies.
- [36:12]
Robert Rodriguez
But, yeah, I've got my VHS, I got my DVDs, and I've got my director's cut. And I sure as hell not gonna sit through that and do the comparisons to all that stuff. Somebody will. But my thought was, okay, so they're adding another episode, ostensibly. But if you look at it minute by minute, what was in 1995? Episode by episode. And we're adding some things or taking some things away, and on the whole, the episodes seem to be shorter than they were 100%. Yeah. What is different from 1995 versus now is we didn't have a YouTube then, and anybody wants to see musical performances of the Beatles, they're a few clicks away. You could find a lot of what was new and unseen before. So I'm wondering, just to give people benefit of doubt, if they were going to do any trimming at all, whether for the addition of new material or just because, I don't know, we might squeeze more commercials in or whatever. And by the way, I don't know if this was the same for everybody, but watching it on Disney here, I kept seeing commercials for eczema. It's like, who do they think is watching this?
- [37:16]
Jesse Pollock
Well, you know, Mike and I were talking about this earlier. Like, we understand why they trimmed the episodes because. And again, I hate to sound like the stereotypical old man here, but it's like we've got a younger audience we're trying to appeal to. Attention spans are way different than they were back in 95. So we gotta keep this train moving. What upset me was there are some. For me, these are iconic moments in the original Anthology series. The David Frost performance of Revolution with the Shooby Doo Wops. When I first heard that as a kid watching it on tv, I was like, whoa. They took the harmonies from the acoustic version on the White Album, put on the electric single version. This is cool. And it made me fall in love with that song all over again. And then start looking into the two different versions of that promo that they cut. And then Nowhere man in Mute. I love that version of that performance because it's right when they go into the solo, Ringo just hits that crash symbol and kicks it into high gear. And it just. It adds this drama and this depth to that performance during what was, for all intents and purposes, a really disastrous tour. But it's like, right as they're about to get to that moment in this new version of it, we've got to cut to more audio of George going, I didn't have a good time, you know, and it's like, to me, they were taking out all the moments that turned me from a Beatles fan into a Beatle maniac when I was a kid. And it's like, I feel like with those magic moments now being truncated or deleted entirely, that this new generation might just look at Anthology and go, you know, that was all right, and never watch it again. Whereas if you leave those moments in, you never know, you might be birthing new fans that. That if you want to get corporate about it, they're going to be the ones that are going to go out and spend $200 on a box set. You know what I mean? It's. The more you make it for a casual audience, the less people are going to be devoted to it because you're trimming all of the color from it. The Technicolor bloom that comes from seeing these different versions. Thing, character.
- [39:23]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, you're whitewashing it out again, and not even for good reasons. It's one thing to make it not objectionable because you simply don't feel like putting Whoopi Goldberg at the front to explain this was times, folks, and turning into something far blander. And I get the whole TikTok generation thing. I get to where you want to appeal to people with shorter attention spans than we had in 1995. I understand that. But if the end result is blander and not with these super memorable little bit. You could make a, like I talked about Peter Jackson's monkeys reel that he previewed before the show. You could do all the happy, cool, engaging, surprising, funny stuff. You could have tightened it in that direction rather than this classroom lecture version.
- [40:10]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, again, it's one of these situations where you can understand why they're doing it, but it doesn't make it any less frustrating. And that's not even going into the AI restorations of some of the video element. Well, not some, like 75% of them. I got really excited when I heard this announced because I just figured, like, oh, it's a restoration. Well, we already know that, Anthony Anthology. The interview portions were filmed in. I don't know if they were 35 millimeter, maybe super 35. At the very least 16 millimeter. They're on film. So you can definitely do fresh high definition scans. And we'd already seen a preview of that in the Living in the Material World documentary from. What was that? 2010, 2011. We saw like cleaned up footage of George's anthology era interview. So I knew, like, oh, wow, that stuff is all still in good condition. Maybe we'll get an anthology remaster eventually. And that's honestly what I thought they were gonna do. They're just gonna rescan the film elements in the highest quality possible. And whatever is on video, it'll just switch to standard definition. And I would have been more than happy with it, but now they've gone and like, no one's gonna tolerate videotape quality anymore. So we need to up res it. Not to P, but all the way to 4K. And if you're not a tech person, essentially what that means is VHS is P progressive scan and K many times bigger. You are taking information that is literally the size of a postage stamp and trying to blow it up to the size of your bedroom wall. You're going to lose a ton of detail doing that. So they run it through, I don't know if you want to call it AI. It's some sort of video algorithm program. And it just makes it look strange. My wife walked in on me watching one episode and she was like, is this cgi? And I'm like, no, this is Peter Jackson and co running it through some sort of program that not only is upre, but it's changing the frame rate. Like, the motion just looks weird. Like the weird plastic, like soft face after effects that we're seeing. We didn't need all of that. It would have been just fine if we had 4K scans of all the film elements. But up reszing videotape to that. It just looks bizarre to me.
- [42:30]
Rich Le
I'll say this, cause I watched half of this on my TV and half of this on my phone. Cause I work a lot on the phone. It wasn't as noticeable on a smaller screen. But when you're watching this like at home, you're gonna sit down with a bowl of popcorn and like really settle in to watch it. The couple episodes that I watch on the tv, I was noticing a lot of what Jesse was talking about where it's like the faces look off, it's weird motion. It kind of was distracting at some point.
- [43:03]
Robert Rodriguez
And this speaks to my experience very like you and your wife Jesse, where I was watching Get Back when it came out and my son to walk into the room and saw the treatments that had been applied to this stuff and immediately questioned like what's going on here? Is that meant to be human? What is that? Because it looks so jarring. And I know that at the time there must have been some kind of pushback or feedback on that because it was much better done for the restoration of Let It Be.
- [43:32]
Jesse Pollock
Michael Lindsey Hogg directly told Jackson, from what I understand, he was like, I don't want all that make it look quote unquote filmic. And I believe it was when you talked to Jackson, he had mentioned, he was like, listen. And like it's very heavy on the first episode and a half because the condition of those reels were terrible. They were in really bad shape. Which you can understand this is like the opposite. It's like the film's in great shape, but man, videotape is such low resolution. We need to jack up this filter or this algorithm, whatever makes this video process do what it needs to do. It's like there was the only obvious explanation seems to be, well, people are watching this on 4K TVs, they want it in 4K and it's like, okay, well you got it in 4K but doesn't look good.
- [44:15]
Robert Rodriguez
Right. You're not going to be watching on your pre tear of big screens you have in your house. You're going to be watching it on TikTok or something. So it's not like they didn't have the knowledge that maybe we went a little bit too far in 2023. We got to correct this. Yeah, that was one of the first things before I sat down and watched it that I was seeing blowing up all over social media. People were doing frame captures of how beyond Uncanny Valley, the Beatles looked in some of the stuff. It was is like awful. It's like, oh my God. But then I did watch what I watched not on a super size, but a medium Goldilocks TV set. And the first thing that struck me was how much better the audio sounded. And I'm talking about the Cavern, certainly the, the Red Hot Star Club thing.
- [44:59]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah.
- [44:59]
Robert Rodriguez
So, okay, good. I think even the Sullivan sequences sounded like they'd been balanced properly for the first time.
- [45:04]
Jesse Pollock
One of them sounded off. I watched it like I made a point to watch it as I assumed Disney and co intended was. I was like, I'm gonna watch it on my 4k with my turned on. Because I imagine there was like a new 5.1 mix made of a lot of these elements and there were two that stuck out as me as really awe music performance wise. One was All My Loving from Ed Sullivan. The vocals sounded very strange on that. Who knows? It could have just been, well, it's a system you're listening to it on. But Nowhere man on the sound system sounded really, really weird to me. Like the vocals just. It was kind of like that Real Love 2025 mix. It's like the vocals just seem kind of like splat landed on top of the music. It was just. There was kind of a disconnect there. I mean, again, we're kind of nitpicking, but that's what Beatle maniacs are the best at. You know, it's, it's, it's what we do. But am I happy they did it? Sure, I guess, if it makes new Beatles fans awesome. And I don't want anyone out there, especially Peter, if he's listening, which he might be. I don't want to come off as coming down too hard on Peter Jackson because I know that intentions are pure. He does this because he loves the Beatles just as much as we do, maybe even more. But you have this candy shop of new tech that seems at face value, like, this is going to solve so many problems with old audio, old footage. This is going to be great. But does it need to be used flatly across the board? I don't think so. And Anthology, even more than Get Back, seems to be like, we're just going to run everything through this while speak to that.
- [46:41]
Robert Rodriguez
About the audience sound you'd mentioned before we were on the air.
- [46:45]
Jesse Pollock
One thing that I did notice was, and any podcasters out there that have used AI cleanup for your podcasting audio, whether it be Descript or Adobe, you'll notice that AI is still at that point now. Where it hears audience applause and even sometimes just normal laughter. They think it's noise. They meaning the mystical computer people. So it'll wash it out completely. And you have a choice. You can either go, oh, let me go back to the source audio and fly in that laughter and merge the two so it sounds natural again, or you can do what I'm pretty sure they did here and just fly in stock audio. Cause every time they used that quote unquote, and I don't even know if they were using mal on this, some of these things sounded so weird on my sound system that I wouldn't be surprised if they were using freeware like that Lala AI that's out there that a lot of people use. But you could tell that, like, they lost all the audience noise. They lost Jules Holland laughing in the background. Now, they didn't replace Jules laughing. But like, all of the concert sequences, all of the screaming and all that stuff, it's flown in from elsewhere, like on Munich, on some elements of Shay, I think. And it's like, if you're in that world and you know how to do audio engineering like us podcasters do, you can immediately hear that that's a different fidelity. That's way clearer or way less clear. It's like they flew that in from somewh. Even Ron Howard was getting crap for that 10 years ago. Because wasn't he flying in, like, audio from Hollywood bowl and stuff? I mean, even the Beatles did that. Wasn't Twist and Shout taken from Hollywood bowl for the Shea Stadium for Naturally. Oh, my God.
- [48:26]
Robert Rodriguez
For Twist and Shout. If you listen, it's the 63 please please me album Twist and Shout performance. Yes, but you're right for the Beatles Come to Town British Pathe short film. It's the Hollywood bowl, she Loves yous, Your Hero.
- [48:38]
Jesse Pollock
Well, that was a weird thing too. We've seen that British Pathe CL cleaned up to beautiful high resolution for eight days a week and elsewhere. And in this one, they ran it through that AI filter again and it's like it already looked beautiful. What did you do to it? It's just nonsensical to me. I don't know if it's like. I don't want to say it's a monkey with a machine gun, but I think, like, sometimes some of these people working on this stuff are so enamored that they have this supposedly groundbreaking technology to do these things with. And I'm starting to sound like Ian Malcolm from Jurassic park here. It's like, you didn't stop and See if you should, you know. Right, right, right.
- [49:14]
Robert Rodriguez
But it's true. It's completely valid and I think about that at every turn.
- [49:19]
Rich Le
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Jesse Pollock
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Rich Le
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- [49:49]
Robert Rodriguez
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- [50:15]
Jesse Pollock
40% alcohol by volume.
- [50:18]
Robert Rodriguez
It's one thing to remove things that are politically objectionable. Now, it's another thing to remove things that make zero sense because they're iconic quotes like ukuleles and nine months and all that sort of thing. And then it's another thing to, well, if we're not going to fact check this thing, we're going to let the Beatles roll with whatever way they remember things. There's things you could have fixed that are just odd. Apparently 1995 anthology is not so sacrosanct that you can't make cuts because you're doing that all over the place. But something like the Klansmen outside the venue in the wrong city on the screen. You could have fixed that. You could have called up Chuck Gunderson. That kind of thing is easily fixable. I know that Peter Jackson responded to these things with when people were pointing out after it first screened, I think he identified Ivan Vaughn as Gene Mann.
- [51:06]
Jesse Pollock
No.
- [51:07]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it got fixed. It's like, he's flexible. He's like, oh, shit, I gotta get that right. So thank you, Peter.
- [51:14]
Jesse Pollock
Well, it's also like what was up with doing the Day Tripper? And we can work it out. Montage at the tail end of 66. Now in this new version of it, it's like, okay, I can understand flying in Daytripper because again, this is a really weird thing and I'm not trying to sound like this ultra right Maga. Like, you know, I hate Disney. They're woke person because I'm not that person at all. But it's like if you're going to cut out George saying, you know, there were these kind of gay looking boys going Ringo. Because it's like, well, that's not good for kids to hear shit like that on Disney. Then why are you doubling down on all of the men? Wasn't acid flow fun talk in that thing? So I can understand why they put Day Tripper there because it's like we're talking about tripping. But then they cut to, we can work it out. And it's like, that was a year and a half ago. That was an episode and a half ago. Why did we move this to here? It was very weird. It was like, remember in Bohemian Rhapsody when they show them working on another One Bites the Dust five or six years before or after they actually released? It was strange. That's all I got to say.
- [52:21]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, flexible chronologies.
- [52:22]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, yeah. Some. Some liberties.
- [52:24]
Robert Rodriguez
Yes. I thought it was interesting. Like I'd mentioned before, just as an observation, they didn't airbrush the cigarettes out of them. Smoking that would have been a mammoth job for some poor soul to get a sign that I did think it was interesting. Something I picked up on now. And maybe I'm just looking for stuff, but in the Real love footage for 1995, I noticed when they cut to a shot of George sitting there at the studio when he's going to. You could see the little whisper of smoke coming up right next to him that clearly he's got a cigarette at hand. And I'm thinking, wow, was he smoking right up to his throat cancer diagnosis? Because that's a really small window of like three or four years, right?
- [53:02]
Rich Le
I'm sure.
- [53:02]
Jesse Pollock
I mean, maybe it was the incense that he brought to the Red and Blue album CD launch. Who knows?
- [53:07]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, I did think that. Yeah. Jostix.
- [53:10]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah. Yeah. Here's some nag champa for you, right? But I am monopolizing this with my passionate video nerd talk. And honestly, anyone out out there in Sapieland that is listening to this and they're saying, look man, you're nitpicking this to death. It's just the beatles Enjoy it. 100% valid. We're not saying that people should be dragged into the street and beaten with chair legs over this. It's just disappointing because one of the things that I got really excited about this for was we are in the golden era of being able to go back to the original film elements and rescan them at a beautiful resolution. And we've got wonderful computer technology that can color correct and take out Tapis and all of this stuff. And I think in better hands or different hands, the results would have been something that was more carefully curated. Because this stuff is sacred to people like us. We're all Indiana Jones looking at this material, going, it belongs in a museum. And to see it just kind of done haphazardly, it's a bummer when you see people that have an unlimited Disney budget putting out results, results that are poorer than restorations I've seen teenagers do on YouTube, like, that's where it gets a bummer thing, because, you know, they're not going to try again for another 20 or 30 years. And it's like, will we be around to see a better attempt at this? But anyway, I'm monopolizing this. Michael, what are your thoughts on everything we are talking about regarding the video and the audio?
- [54:40]
Rich Le
Look, it's all valid points and I think I'm very much like an everyman when it comes to this stuff. Is that if it's Beatles stuff, I'm going to consume and I'm going to be happy that I'm going to get it, even if it's. I don't want to say subpar, because that's not my judgment of this, but.
- [54:57]
Jesse Pollock
No, I get exactly what you're saying. Like, if it's Beatles, let me have it. I don't care what it is. Give it to me.
- [55:03]
Rich Le
Absolutely. Like, remaster whatever you want. It's funny talking to my wife about this, that I was 17, traveling over to the Philippines, and I was, funny enough, I bought. I bought past masters in a CD shop. And I didn't even realize the irony at the point, you know, like, you know, I'm buying. I'm buying Beatles stuff in a country. They were like, I'm never going back.
- [55:28]
Jesse Pollock
There, you know, Ordinary Passenger. Ordinary Passenger, Yeah, I will.
- [55:34]
Rich Le
Anytime I see anything Beatles, I'm buying it if I have the money to do it.
- [55:39]
Robert Rodriguez
So, sure, you're the dream Disney customer.
- [55:42]
Jesse Pollock
The dream Disney target base.
- [55:44]
Rich Le
Pretty much. I was eyeing up that 1212 LP set, you know, the 400 set. And I was like, ah, maybe.
- [55:52]
Jesse Pollock
I don't know. It's tempting.
- [55:53]
Rich Le
It's tempting.
- [55:54]
Jesse Pollock
It is tempting. It looks nice on a shelf, doesn't it?
- [55:56]
Mike Vaccaro
Absolutely.
- [55:57]
Rich Le
Even better when I'm playing the records. But there you go. Can I complain about certain things? Yeah, sure. The audio Quality on some of the things like you're saying, you know, like, why are you flying in crowd noise from this? Like, if you're gonna take the crowd noise out, because that's your AI filter. Just leave it clean. Show me what you've got out of this. Give me the full. Okay, take the crowd noise out. Let me see what the boys sounded like without all of that. They famously said in a lot of their performances, like, a lot of the sins were covered by crowds. You know, we played like crap. We weren't harmonizing. You know, we were all off key. And it was all hidden by 50,000 people screaming and chanting.
- [56:40]
Jesse Pollock
I thought it was 70.
- [56:42]
Rich Le
So, yeah, so, okay, you could have given it to me, like. Like that. All of those criticisms aside, I'm happy that we got something this year. Yes, so take the criticisms as you will, but it's still a Beatles product. And almost everything I get, whether it's a book or I find some nugget of value in it, we're going to.
- [57:04]
Jesse Pollock
Be getting plenty of books about this. I can't wait to read Aaron Torkelson Weber's book about this in, like, 10 years. And Katie Kapirch's book about this that is coming. These events that we're talking about that seem trivial and nitpicking. Yes, of course they are. But it's also living history. And what we experienced this past week is going to be talked about for decades. Like, oh, and in 2025, further changes were made to the Anthology product by these people. And this is what was done, and this is what we think is why. And then, I don't know, maybe will get more, because that's the thing, too. It's like the story is ever evolving and leaking more details. Because the way that it was sold to us when we were kids was, again, like Robert had mentioned, this is the Beatles finally telling their own story. You're finally going to get the truth. And then when you read, like, Peter Doggett's book, you find out, it's like, wow, George didn't want anything to do with this. He only did it because he needed money. That's sad. What are we going to find out about Anthology 2025 in 15 or 20 years?
- [58:11]
Rich Le
What are we going to get when we get Lewison's new books and when he finally, eventually gets to this point where he talks about, well, not this point, but we'll all be long gone by the time he gets to this point with Anthology 2025. But exactly.
- [58:27]
Jesse Pollock
It's like the end scene of JFK. When, Kevin, like now, I may not live to the day when they Release Tune in Volume 2, but I pray to God my son can walk into Borders and get it right, if there even is a border. But no, we love you, Mark.
- [58:39]
Rich Le
No, but when he gets to the point where he's talking about Anthology, what else is going to come out, you know, from documents, records, phone conversations, edited film that hasn't ever been released or seen by anybody else?
- [58:53]
Jesse Pollock
Well, that's where we're getting into.
- [58:55]
Rich Le
Come out.
- [58:56]
Jesse Pollock
Well, that's where we're getting into kind of tricky territory here because, you know, the word on the street, I mean, you know, Mark has talked about this. He's, as of right now, from what I understand, he's frozen out at Apple for reasons that have not been publicly disclosed. But, you know, a lot of people suspect that it's because of George's kind of rocky relationship with him, especially in the 80s. And Olivia's kind of, at least in her mind, supposedly honoring George's wishes by, hey, George didn't like this guy that much. Maybe we shouldn't be dealing with him. And it's like, okay, understood, if that is the case.
- [59:28]
Robert Rodriguez
But it's also a flexible position to honor George's wishes.
- [59:32]
Jesse Pollock
George didn't want no Carnival of life.
- [59:34]
Robert Rodriguez
That George didn't want it out, but he didn't want. He didn't like now and then either.
- [59:37]
Jesse Pollock
He didn't like any of that stuff. And, and, and, and it's, it's tragic. Like, you can understand where George is kind of coming from because he does have that cosmic sort of attitude of like, well, the, the Beatles. It's already said and done. Why are we scraping the bottom of the barrel here? But also it's like, because everybody loves you so much, they'll gladly take barrel scraps, sir.
- [59:59]
Rich Le
And so it's like, ask for second helpings.
- [60:02]
Jesse Pollock
Exactly. The barrel is never ending. What I'm getting at is there is a lot of inner turmoil going on within Apple and the caretakers of history. I don't want to blow up anyone's spot here, but we all met at Everything Fab Four Fest, and I was talking with a prominent Beatles historian who I will not name. And I asked him, I said, what do you. What do you think about the rumors on, like, the Steve Hoffman forums about, like, we're not going to be getting that rubber soul. But. And he told me, he goes, we're not getting any box sets anymore. And I said, where's that coming from? And he said, that's Coming from the new head honcho over at Apple says they don't make enough money. So that's the other scary thing, you know, and why some of us are kind of jaded looking at the new anthology. It's like, is this it? Is this the last we're gonna see from the vaults in our lifetime? Because supposedly we're not gonna see any more super deluxe editions with, you know, all these great, you know. And it's not just nerd stuff too. I mean, the Revolver box set had some history changing revelations on it. Like for all these years we were led to believe that Yellow Submarine is funny little idea that comes in your head when you're falling asleep and you find out, no, it started life as this beautifully wistful John Lennon folk song like that. It was the most groundbreaking revelation in years, if not decades. And it was all because of a box set that now apparently Apple are looking at as these are diminishing returns. Gaming. Get rid of them. It's like, no, these are important. Please don't. If anyone from Apple is listening, please reverse course if that's the case. Because I don't care if we can't get them on streaming anymore. I'll pay the physical media money if it means we can get these things still.
- [61:48]
Robert Rodriguez
So I think that's the thing. The Beatles used to lead the parade in this stuff. They used to be the one that everybody else followed the lead from. Those days are long, long gone. And I would think the people that supposedly revered them that are running the show these days could be something more than bean count. And look at it as these guys hold a unique, prestigious position in our culture that has been enduring for decades, well beyond what anybody could have seen back in the 60s. This is historic stuff. Why are the Monkees archives being handled better than the Beatles ones? Bob Dylan, an artistic peer who has been doing it right since 1991 with the. Well, I have quibbles with their stuff, but at least they're doing something. It could be done so much better. And it just seems like it's half assed. All based on sales, all based on what's the lowest common denominator, least amount of effort we can put into doing this, rather than treating it as the cultural treasures that it is. The insightful stuff that you've got the most astonishingly productive, advanced game changing team of artists ever. At least the rock pop paradigm in the 1960s that are still selling in great numbers, that you could be presenting their evolution so much smarter and in a way that serves the Hardcores, you can have both. You can have the single disc greatest hits highlights reel alongside the streaming archive, King Crimson style. This is all the studio outtakes for whoever wants it. You're leaving money on the table stuff.
- [63:24]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, yeah.
- [63:25]
Robert Rodriguez
If you want to insist on being a bean counter, guess what, folks, you're leaving a shit ton of money on the table. You could be serving everybody, serving their legacy with the honor that it deserves instead of doing this half assed shit that pleases you. Nobody. It pains me to have to be the guy. A guy. There's three of us here complaining about what they serve up and being dissatisfied with it when they should have within their organization. Forward thinking people, God damn it. I am honored to be serving the Beatles legacy. I should be living up to what they mean to the world. This pocket of joy, this secular religion, whatever you want to term them, aren't they worth it to us to do better than we're doing now instead of making it 1000 Beatles Star wars spin off toy product?
- [64:11]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, it's insane. It really is.
- [64:14]
Rich Le
And to that point.
- [64:14]
Jesse Pollock
Sorry, Mike, go on.
- [64:15]
Rich Le
No, to that point, look at what Paul does on his website, the way he has everything laid out, you know, like, here's all of the lyrics to all of the songs. Here's all. Everything in chronological order.
- [64:27]
Jesse Pollock
He had a thing that is all. You could remix his songs for a little bit too. That was awesome.
- [64:33]
Rich Le
And that's probably the most disappointing when you talk about that, where it's like, it's not a service to the music or to the fandom or to, you know, the thing itself for anybody. Especially when those that created it were so open with what they wanted to do and so about like, no, share the whole thing with the world. I mean, I want everybody to know what we're doing. Except for, you know, obviously like tit and little things that they snuck in in the moment. But you know, even that after the.
- [65:01]
Jesse Pollock
Mention of love and mercy ten years ago, you know, that was a funny scene in a Brian Wilson movie. So it's like, how much pearl clutching can they do about shit that's common knowledge anymore?
- [65:11]
Robert Rodriguez
You know, it's bad optics to look like you're flailing. You start something and you don't complete it because either you've lost interest or as you're suggesting, somebody said it didn't make enough money for them. It's like, we thought you were going to do this service to the fans and to their legacy of presenting these full scale examinations of every studio album. We know you've Got the stuff. Quit pretending you don't. And even if the studio outtakes are slim and we know that's not true, we've got take one of the first song tracks for Please Please Me. We've got the tools to make presentable and listenable the BBC stuff that hasn't been presented, like the Pete Best sessions from March and June of 62. We've got the Cavern acetate, we've got the Cavern rehearsal tape. We've got a Cavern gig apparently From July of 62 with Pete Bested. Surely something could be presented from Star Club, which they've.
- [66:08]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, but that means they gotta pay Pete.
- [66:09]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, well, I do wonder about that, if that's the reasoning. And it could be that could be the reason for the institutional resistance. That's an awfully small.
- [66:18]
Jesse Pollock
It is. Well, I mean, and it also. Speaking of the Best family, it also begs the question of how differently would all of this be shaking out today if Neil Aspinall was still around, I wonder. Yeah, because in both worlds. Yeah, because I mean, he did a great job of curating their legacy. I mean, he was super protective. But at the end of the day, Anthology, the project was Neil's baby. Paul kind of took it over and Paul had just as much passion for it, if not more. But you know, that was. That was Neil. Like, no, this all needs. As early as six. Like within a six month window of the breakup, he was realized like, no, we need to get all the video footage that's out there, all the film reels, everything we need to save this and eventually put a film together. Because this is history, this is important.
- [67:05]
Robert Rodriguez
It was sooner than that. It was like during the wind down because the day that the bombshell of I'm leaving Paul McCartney Daily Mail headline broke, George was at Apple watching a rough cut of Long and Winding Road.
- [67:17]
Jesse Pollock
There was already a rough cut by April of 70.
- [67:20]
Robert Rodriguez
Correct. There was something in place. It might not have been the same thing he shared with Eric Idle, but part of it did exist.
- [67:26]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, that's ins. So again, that just shows how forward thinking Neil was. And I'm sorry, like a lot of people talk about, like, well, you know, Anthology had such a troubled history, even throughout the releases in the news. And it's kind of debatable if you want to consider it a success or not, but that is what got people like, I don't know if I could speak for Mike on this, but for me, like, that's what got me into wanting things like that. Because I had seen the TV special first and then I found out that they were coming out with these CDs. And because anthology is kind of a mystery misnomer, I thought, like, it's another like the Best of the Beatles, you know, like, compilation. Okay, cool. So I kind of ignored it for a few years. And then I was looking at the track listing. I think a friend had a copy of it at their house. And I was like, wait, demo, live version, alternate. What's this? And I put it on and I'm like, oh my God, this is so cool. They did one after 909 and 63 and like, that's what kicked off. Me wanted wanting to, like, if you got a CD of like, alternate versions, I want it, I'll buy it. Let me get a book talking about these sessions. Let me grab Lewison's book from 88. Let me grab the one about the Get Back sessions that came out in the 90s. Like, Anthology was such a gateway drug for my generation. It's not even funny. And the people who are curating this stuff for the Beatles now, I don't think they have enough forethought to like, I know obviously they want to bring a young generation, but they seem to have the mindset of, well, as long as it's in hd and there's a couple quote unquote new things in there. Like, that's enough. It's like, no, that's not enough. If you shut the door on the super Deluxe editions and putting out like as much stuff as you can in a tasteful manner, you're not going to inspire a new generation of super fans.
- [69:12]
Rich Le
And especially not with streaming platforms the way they are. The only way to really, because of the attention span thing, you really have to capture somebody with the documentary and then tag that onto the sales of the physical meaty.
- [69:27]
Robert Rodriguez
That's ain't gonna do it.
- [69:29]
Rich Le
This is the former sales guy in me thinking about this right now is like, hey, you know, how are you gonna package this in a way that's going to actually move numbers and move the needle the way they was with the video?
- [69:41]
Jesse Pollock
It was the first taste is what they're doing.
- [69:43]
Robert Rodriguez
It just makes you wonder how insular they are. And are they truly not paying attention to the way other archive series are being done?
- [69:51]
Rich Le
But they're. That would pure artist. That would. That would track for Apple, wouldn't it? Being, you know, so inside related, not thinking about anything on the outside. We're so. They're up their own rear ends on a lot of things. You know.
- [70:07]
Robert Rodriguez
The vacuum that sucks Itself up.
- [70:09]
Jesse Pollock
Yes. I don't know, it's just a bummer because again, you wonder, it's like, well, is this it? Are we ever going to see, like, is it going to be like another 25, five years before we start seeing stuff? Cause that's how much time went between Anthology 3, the CD set coming out, and the eventual Super Deluxe Editions. Like, I know we got a couple things in there that were just like sort of, we need to protect the copyright on some of these rare recordings. So they put out The Bootleg Series 1963 on streaming. But it was real slim picking for a while when it came to studio outtakes being released officially. And now I wonder, you know, with all these rumblings about we're not getting these box sets anymore is like, again, is this it? Are we gonna have to wait another generation before we hear, I don't know, the sessions behind Help or something like that? And some people might be jaded enough to say, who cares? It's not sergeant Pepper, though. Those early albums aren't that groundbreaking. And it's like, I care because it's cool. It's the Beatles, we love them.
- [71:10]
Rich Le
We're also kind of like completionists in that way. Like, if there's something, I don't care how bad it is, Carnival of Light, I don't care. I want to hear everything. I want to hear.
- [71:19]
Jesse Pollock
What kind of ridiculous shit is it that we don't have Carnival of light in 2025 when, you know, back in the 90s, they at least had a cop out to say, whoa, it's 18 minutes long, or however long it is. We can't fit that on a CD with everything else they're streaming now. Put it out as a web only exclusive. Who cares if it's bad? There's people out there that think Revolution 9 is the greatest thing ever recorded. Carnival of Light will have a home somewhere.
- [71:42]
Rich Le
I like technical death metal. There are plenty of 18 minute songs out there and prog rock songs out there that are 18 minute long. You know, it can definitely ever.
- [71:53]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah. And it's. Again, it makes you wonder if they're even aware of, like, do they know that that's the holy grail of lost, quote unquote, lost Beatles tracks from the vault. Do they even know how important it is to everyone out there? Or are they holding it for another reason? Do they think that that's like, well, that's the golden goose. We don't want to put Carnival of Light out just yet. Or are they holding it cause they think it's embarrassing. Who knows?
- [72:16]
Robert Rodriguez
I'm inclined to think that they're withholding things like they have been. As Doug Sopi had said on the recent show, they finally deem the time has come to put out the Christmas album. So he put it out on the worst, most unlistenable format ever, a series of picture discs, and sell it at an over inflated price. What the actual fuck? That's something that's entertaining as hell. That they could easily not only put out a single disc collating what came out in 1970 as an album, but they've got plenty of outtakes to flesh that out and to make a nice two disc deluxe package of that. What are they waiting for? Something that it would be a terrible shame if all the First Gen fans died now. You guys might remember this sometime. I think between Anthology maybe within a decade of that, were there not licensed toys marketed based on their likenesses in the Beetle cartoon? I seem to remember.
- [73:12]
Jesse Pollock
Okay, yeah, they had them at Hot Topic in Spencer's Gifts in the mall. They had the alligators from. Was it the Angry Bird Can Sing episode? Yeah, they had those. They're worth a lot of money now, right?
- [73:23]
Robert Rodriguez
But at least somebody said yes then in Neil Aspinall's lifetime, so why the hell not? Yes, we know it's bad. Low Z grade animation. Put out the Beatles cartoons so people can enjoy them remastered, just looking great. This is the precursor of Yellow Submarine, folks. Whatever you think of Al Brodac's, this was history. Millions of kids loved them in America, learned to read by the single line.
- [73:47]
Jesse Pollock
And one of those kids was Ken Womack. That's what got Ken into being a Beatles fan. And now he's one of the world's leading Beatles historians and carrying the torch and doing festivals that we get to hang out at. And my kid sister, she's 10 years younger than me and one Christmas I was like, well, she's already seen Yellow Submarine. She loves the Beatles. And I found someone made a bootleg DVD set of all of those Beatles Saturday morning cartoon episodes and I gave that to her for Christmas one year and she wore those things out. Man, there is an audience for stuff that even the most jaded Beatles fan goes, oh, that's crap. The quality. But there's a place for these things. You know, it makes you wonder.
- [74:24]
Robert Rodriguez
The Yellow Submarine reboot they were supposed to do with Zemeckis a while back that got canceled. I wonder about the things that they say no to when clearly they seem to be about the bar of prestige isn't set Awfully high. Going back to Neil Aspinall's lifetime in 85, when sessions nearly came out, what was the mindset that led it to be canceled? But a decade on, we get six discs of Anthology. I'm just wondering what they're thinking is, because it seems like it's awfully confused and ambivalent and they're willing to give us this, but not this. There's not a seeming logic, if you are a fan, to what we get and what we don't get.
- [75:04]
Jesse Pollock
I don't know if that's down to the changing of the guard. Like, we know there's new people in charge over at Apple and there's ever changing opinions within the estates because, I mean, like, you can't lay it all on the foot of one person because you're just dealing with two Beatles that are still alive. And then Yoko's out of the picture. From what I understand now Sean's handling everything we've got Olivia. I'm not sure how much input Danny has, but it's very complicated getting four people to agree to everything and then find out who's distributing this stuff, whether they're cool with everything or not. It has to go through so many damn channels that. I don't know, maybe we're schmucks for this. Maybe we're lucky that we get anything at all because of how complicated things are. Things are. But it is a really unique situation, especially, like you said before, when it seems to be easy enough for Jesus Christ if the Beach Boys can figure out their squabbles to put out a whole 4 CD set about the Holland.
- [76:01]
Rich Le
Sessions, Oasis touring again.
- [76:03]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah. If the Gallagher brothers. Well, I mean, they had a couple divorces. They need the money, supposedly.
- [76:08]
Robert Rodriguez
No, but what's that line about? A camel is a horse designed by committee.
- [76:13]
Jesse Pollock
Yes.
- [76:13]
Robert Rodriguez
You get too many cooks and you end up with these freaks of nature that satisfy nobody. Yeah, I think again, going back to Doug Sulpy, he said the families was the worst thing to ever happen to the Beatles, Getting them involved, because now you've got all these chairs at the table and all of them have veto power. And so, as a result, things are either coming out half cooked or blocked.
- [76:33]
Rich Le
The Drastically different than even the people that, you know, like the. If you talk about the Beatles and then their family, it's not even, like, remotely close to how they would have handled certain situations. So when they say, oh, I'm acting in their wishes, like, are you really, though?
- [76:49]
Jesse Pollock
Maybe. Who knows? We'll never know. And who knows?
- [76:52]
Rich Le
Maybe I mean, they certainly would know them better than a guy like me, please. But.
- [76:56]
Jesse Pollock
Well, of course. But also, like, it could have been even worse off if John was still around. Because for all of Paul's, I don't want to say posturing in the negative sense, but for all of Paul going out there saying, like, listen, I worked with John and I know he would have liked us using AI to separate his voice and clean it up and have the guy from the PLO do production stuff. We've heard John bitching about the Red and Blue collections just because they were put in stereo. You know what I mean? You know, he says, he's like, they took all the balls out of Revolution because they took it out of mono and put it in stereo. So it's like, if that was his opinion in the 70s, like, would he really have been cool with all this shit that's going on now? So who knows?
- [77:39]
Rich Le
Well, that's why these questions are always so intriguing, is because of the what if scenario and. And because it's so unknown why we keep asking these questions about damn near everything in the Beatles lexicon.
- [77:52]
Robert Rodriguez
So just anecdotally, I've gotten a lot of feedback from people in the past week who've watched Anthology, ranging From Carol Tyler, first gen fan, saw the Beatles in 65. She wisely had mentioned how in her lifetime of fandom, she would sometimes step out of being Beatles World and then come back to it. So not to get oversaturated. And her big fear is losing the excitement. And she sat through Anthology, she said she loved it, she cried, it was a satisfying experience for her. And there's nobody here could say, well, it shouldn't have been because they did this and this and this. And I am kind of curious about the Gen Z folk if they're seeing it. Never having seen 1995, is it satisfying to them? Is it making them curious that they want. Want more, they want to dig deeper? Because it was a sanitized telling in 1995. Not as sanitized as is now, but it's still. It was a gateway drug for people that led to an Aaron Weber. You know, that kind of actually surprised me when she told me that she got turned on to the Beatles through Anthology, really, because I Surely you might have been aware of them before that. But she remembers the excitement and the buzz of that dropping and just people talking about it at school. So I think that to myself, well, maybe we're not the best judges of how successful these products are because our criteria is something entirely different. We're history, guys. We've been in this world for a long, long time. We've seen an awful lot that the public has not seen and heard. So maybe this stuff isn't meant for us.
- [79:24]
Jesse Pollock
Maybe it's clearly not. Yeah, right.
- [79:28]
Robert Rodriguez
We can quibble and bitch away about this stuff. If it is creating a new breed of fans, maybe it is hitting that low mortgage mark that apparently Apple has targeted for the new generation. With the audio, you turn the bass up to 11. That'll do them. And this, you take out fat jokes and it'll do them. Will they dig deeper or will they see this as representation of, well, okay, I've got my Beatles down. No, thank you.
- [79:51]
Jesse Pollock
I just think that maybe they're worrying a little too much about that in the sense that I think the Beatles legacy is secure. Other. Other bands that were even peers of them, even bands that were respected by the Beatles in that time frame. We're not seeing the, you know, like, back when Mike and I were kids in the 90s and the. The early 2000s, like, we just assumed everyone from the 60s. It solidified. They're going to be legends forever. But now we're starting to see enthusiasm for a lot of these groups kind of drop off a bit. I don't think we're seeing people going apeshit about the Doors anymore.
- [80:28]
Rich Le
I don't hear anybody talking about Rolling Stone. I work near Princeton University, and I talk to a lot of, like, college now. I, you know, I'm always curious, like, what are you guys listening to? What's the thing that you guys are on? And I always ask about, like, you listen to any classic rock, you listen to 60s, 70s, and none of them say yes. The only time I get anything, I'm wearing my Abbey Road Beatles shirt, and I get six or seven of these college kids going, oh, the Beatles, man. I. I love the Beatle. That's the only band from that era that I get that kind of reaction from.
- [81:04]
Jesse Pollock
They might be. Every once in a while, somebody will.
- [81:06]
Rich Le
Talk, like I said, about the Stones or Queen or anything, but that's a little bit after the fact. But there are very few that have that kind of staying power. The Beatles. Jesse and I have said it many times. We've said it on our podcast. We said it in our presentation. The Beatles will stand the test of time because it's something that everybody can attach to. They send a universal message that everybody can relate to. And the music, music is good. So, you know, you've got a beat that you can't ignore. You've got words that make sense to almost everybody. You know, trousers, nice suits.
- [81:38]
Jesse Pollock
We're joking. We're making Ruddles references. But they are style icons. I think they are the one group from that era that we can confidently say, all right, we've seen a lot of changes in the way the media is consumed over the last 25, 30 years, and they have pretty much made it through unscathed. Are we seeing people with the same amount of enthusiasm for Herman's Hermits anymore? No. Do we see people going apeshit over, oh my God, there's a new Love and Spoonful box set? It's like, don't get me wrong, I love the Love and Spoonful. But will people be talking about them the same way in 30 years that it seems like they're going to be talking about the Beatles? I don't think so. Even personal biases removed, we have seen this ban embraced by the younger culture without corporate push to do so. In an unprecedented way. There's Gen Alpha and Gen Z out there making Beatles meme accounts on social media, getting real weird with it, and it's hysterical. But I don't think that's because someone pushed Beatles 64 on them. I think that it's just like everyone else. There was some sort of weird natural osmosis where this generation, they find the Beatles either through hearing it in a movie or on tv, or they hear their parents listening to it, or they see someone wearing a T shirt and they find him. And like Ken Womack said when we talked to him on our show for an episode that's coming out shortly, he said the Beatles have this knack where everyone always just seems to find them at the right time in their life. And I don't know, call that fate or magic, whatever you want to call it, I think that that is so locked in with them that we really don't need to worry about it. There's always going to be a new generation of Beatles fans. So I think, like Apple and Disney or whoever that's in charge of all this stuff, I think they're just getting a who panicked about, like, oh, God, are we appealing to the new generation the way we should? It's like, look, there's always going to be a new generation of Beatles fans. Don't worry, it's there. Make product that's good and they will buy it. But again, even if they make a Blu Ray series of this, I don't know how many people are going to be running out to buy it. Like Mike and I are Completionists. Even if it came out tomorrow and they were like, yeah, it's 2499. You get all nine episodes. And we got to talk about episode nine real quick before we leave here. But it's like, even if they announced it, I don't know if I would buy it. I don't know if it's that much of an upgrade from the original DVDs. Like, yeah, it's technically in 4K now. Yeah, there's a few new things peppered in there. But is it. Is it worth buying again? I don't know.
- [84:11]
Robert Rodriguez
I would buy it if they restored all the cuts they made in the current streaming version.
- [84:15]
Jesse Pollock
Yes, that definitely stands. I don't think so. But real quick, let's talk about episode nine, because this is where I got really mad here, folks. They touted episode nine as, we are finally going to see a new episode of Anthology. It's all going to be about the 95 and 96 sessions, or, you know, whichever years correspond. I think those were the release years.
- [84:39]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, 94, 95 recording.
- [84:41]
Jesse Pollock
We're finally going to see the Free as a Bird, Real Love and Now and then sessions. And then we get the episode and it's 45 minutes of recap and the same Ain't She Sweet on the ukulele footage that we've seen at that thousand times again. And then it's like the last 17 minutes are. When we finally get to Hog Mill Hill, you know, it's like, where's the episode we were promised? It was such a bait and switch. Like, it's a bummer. There's supposedly like, what, 18 hours of footage in the vault of those sessions. They could have done a whole. They could have done a whole get back just about those sessions. And instead it's like, here's 17 minutes.
- [85:18]
Rich Le
There you go.
- [85:19]
Jesse Pollock
So who knows? I don't know. Maybe Paul was doing the Crip face the whole time and they were like, we can't do anything with this. God.
- [85:24]
Robert Rodriguez
That's the thing. It makes you wonder is what made it unusable. Unless there was George bitching nonstop about being there. Yeah, that could have been it. Or things getting ugly with him and Paul. Or the song is fucking rubbish about now and Then. I don't know. I'd love to see the video of that.
- [85:39]
Rich Le
Yeah. At least if you. You had that and it was just a bunch of footage from George. You could make a drinking game out of it.
- [85:44]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, I don't want to go on the roof. You know, it's. And George's Legacy, like, if that is the factor, I think his legacy is solidified. I mean, let's face it, he's like the hipster choice for who's your favorite Beatle. People that don't want to say John or Paul, it makes them seem pedestrian. They always go, well, George, he was the mystical one. You know, he likes, he likes meditation. And it's also like, he was cranky. Anyone that digs like a little deeper into the Beatles story, it's just like, oh, he was the cranky one. And so I think most people that love the Beatles enough to, you know, sit through a nine hour documentary are probably going to know that already. So, yeah, put George bitching about like, I don't want to do a third song, let alone a fourth. I want to know how much truth there is to what was that the rumored fourth song that they were going to.
- [86:32]
Mike Vaccaro
Right.
- [86:32]
Jesse Pollock
All For Love or. Or whatever.
- [86:34]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, yeah. I don't know what the hell the story is with that. There's been no forthcoming further data about that. So I just wonder if it was just somebody misspeaking about something half heard. I don't know.
- [86:45]
Jesse Pollock
Well, wasn't that what Ringo said? It was all for love.
- [86:48]
Robert Rodriguez
You know, that's not a great thing. Peter Hodgson, the guy that had the tape of 4th and Road that he then traded or gave to, sold to Paul, whatever the deal was, and that he got to go to the studio and that Paul played it for him, that was, I think, what the story was or where it came from. He is like the only witness to speak out on it that claimed to have heard something with that title. Now, all for Love, I don't know if that appears as any lyrics, any songs that we're well familiar with at this point that he could have gotten the name wrong, but I don't know if there's anything substantive to that story, but it'd be nice to get that finally nailed down for good. Paul and Ringo aren't going to remember anything at this point.
- [87:24]
Jesse Pollock
I honestly think it might just have been, you know, because Ringo does use that phrase in Anthology when he says it was all for love, you know, summing up everything at the end. And I wonder if it just amounted to Paul just going, hey, that, that's a. That's a good song title. And then it just never went like that could possibly be all it amounts.
- [87:40]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, absolutely.
- [87:41]
Jesse Pollock
Kind of like eight arms to hold you. It's like that's it, you know?
- [87:44]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. What would satisf. What should they have done if you were the producers behind this thing. If you were in charge of Disney. We've talked about all things that were cut from it. We've talked about the bad technology and we've talked about the bait and switch with episode nine. Is there something that would have been within the realm of possibility of happening that could have redeemed it all for you at this point?
- [88:18]
Jesse Pollock
I think for me it would have just been what I mentioned earlier. It's like do fresh 4K scans of the film elements, the interviews that they filmed, the talk, talking head stuff, and whatever original film elements they had of the Beatles performing. Like, we know as they get further and further into the career, they have the original reels, like Get Back sessions, all that stuff and whatever was on videotape and could not be cleaned up enough. Just leave it in standard definition because at the end of the day people should have the wherewithal to understand. We're watching a documentary about stuff that happened 60 years ago. The footage isn't going to look great all the time. So that would have been just fine for me. I do like some of the stuff that they cleaned up. Audio wise, I don't know if I would have gone as heavy as, you know, using the AI filters on the interview audio. It's like you'd figure the studio condenser mics they used in 1994 would have been fine, but apparently not. But it's like that stuff I would have left alone. Like, I think there should have been like a compromise in the middle. Like again, we'll rescan things but we won't use so much AI. I would have been more than happy with that. And as far as episodes episode nine goes, I would have really liked if they gave us what they advertised, which was an hour long documentary about the 90s sessions. And that's not what we got. We got 45 minutes of an anthology recap and then 10 minutes of footage we've already seen on YouTube and on the DVD. Blu Ray. Not. Not Blu Ray, but the DVD special features from the original anthology release and like maybe four minutes of new stuff. That's my main beef with it, but much. Mike, how about you?
- [89:55]
Rich Le
Essentially, Jesse covered all of my. The biggest thing for me, the episode nine, because I'm with Jesse on that, is that you have all this footage to cull from, you could put together, even if it was a shorter episode. Skip the recap for me and give me a 30 minute episode just on the 90s session. And I would be happy with that because at that point you're not Beating a dead horse. You did eight hours of a documentary prior to this. Even with the cuts that they made from the original, that's it told the story that needed to be told.
- [90:28]
Jesse Pollock
But you know what?
- [90:29]
Rich Le
Now you're missing this one last point, and you flubbed that last episode. Ten minutes.
- [90:35]
Jesse Pollock
But you know what? Maybe what you're describing is coming because this just occurred to me. What was that new clip that they flew in? It looked like it was from a press junket or something. But that clip of McCartney in the night where he says, you would think this is where the story ends, but with the Beatles, you never know. Maybe they threw that in there as an Easter egg. Maybe some. Something bigger is coming. With that footage from the 90s, we.
- [90:57]
Robert Rodriguez
Can carnival like Christmas box set.
- [90:59]
Jesse Pollock
Oh, you know, hey, I'm a sucker for a box set, if you haven't figured it out already. But, yeah, for me, I'm on the same page. It's like, listen, if the biggest compromise that I had to make was if I was in charge of this and Disney was like, hey, man, having John make fun of cripples isn't a good look. Like you think, like, maybe we can cut that out. I would be like, okay, is that all your actual asking for? Well, I don't know. Maybe George calling French boys gay wasn't a good look either. I'd be like, all right, well, we'll cut that out entirely. But what they did was they Frankensteined his sentence. That's what I didn't like. I understand why they wanted to cut that out. But, like, you know, like, we're gonna remix his words after he's dead just seemed kind of weird to me. It's just like they should have just cut that comment out altogether and just ignored it or just, you know, like, you know, they cut out so many other things. They could have just ignored the bulk of the par trip anyway, but, you know, for me, it just would have been like, yeah, don't cut out stuff that's like. I don't know. Like, again, I'm getting into the nitty gritty nerd stuff. But I liked hearing Paul talk about John's mom when I was a kid. Because the stuff that you would read and you would hear about, you would think that, like, Paul never knew Julie. You know, you always just heard John and Paul met and they bonded over having their mothers taken from them at a young age. And then all of a sudden, in Anthology, it's like, yeah, I remember her. She was very pretty, and she played a little UKULELE and it's like, oh, wow. He knew Jul. That's wild. And to have that cut out, it's like, nah, it's not important.
- [92:29]
Rich Le
You know, Mal Evans, a super influential part of both of their journeys. Even if it was short periods of time that Paul was around Julia, you don't think that that had some ins on him? Pretty young mother of one of his best friends who is into rock and roll music and American music and would introduce them the same way she would introduce John to new records, new artists.
- [92:50]
Jesse Pollock
And now it's just turned into John's mom, by the way.
- [92:53]
Rich Le
Yeah.
- [92:53]
Jesse Pollock
Oh, yeah, Paul's mom. She's dead too, Stu. Yeah, he's dead. But we're not even gonna like. That is the weirdest thing about Anthology. It's just like if you didn't know anything about the Beatles and you watched any cut of Anthology, you'd be like, oh, man, what's Stu up to these days? He's dead. Why didn't they say that? You know, it's like the weirdness of it and like cutting out things that humanize people in their orbit. Like, people might think we're weird nerds because it's like, you guys. You guys read a whole like 400 page book about the beat is roadie. Why is that? And it's like, well, we. We watched Anthology when we were kids and they kept talking about this guy Mal. And this guy seems really interesting and cool and funny. And one of the most human moments, that Philippines thing where he says, tell my wife I love her, because he didn't think he was coming back. It's like, you're going to cut that out. Number one, it shows how dangerous that situation was. And two, it humanizes one of the most important figures in their story. Yeah. That some editor was like, we. We need to lose 18 seconds here.
- [93:52]
Rich Le
Cut it.
- [93:53]
Jesse Pollock
It's just. It's nonsensical to me.
- [93:55]
Rich Le
I wish they would have gave more to that in Anthology because I really felt like they kind of glossed over it, you know, they. Sure, they went through the whole thing about we snubbed them, El demarcos. And, you know, we didn't realize how big of a deal that was, watching ourselves on tv, not showing up and all that stuff, you know. Sure. But the Factory was involved.
- [94:17]
Jesse Pollock
We forgot the weed at the airport.
- [94:19]
Rich Le
Yeah, but that the. The military being involved and how prec. That situation actually was at that time in the Philippines with them could have ended really badly. And it feel like it didn't quite get that Gravitas of that situation through. But that's, I mean, again, another nitpick for me because I've read up on that history and I know you know a little bit more about it.
- [94:43]
Jesse Pollock
You've been there, you bought Past Masters.
- [94:45]
Mike Vaccaro
No. Right.
- [94:46]
Robert Rodriguez
What would have redeemed it for me, even in the face of all the cuts for being politically correct, is going to episode nine. If they'd cut all the fluff, all the filler, the recap nonsense that didn't need to be there. What I really would have liked to have seen, and they never promised this because apparently it was a non starter. Although it would have been really the icing on the cake would have been, I don't know, 10 minutes, 15 minutes of anthology at 30. Sitting down Ringo sitting down Paul, Jules, Holland, Bob Smeaton. We've lost a few people. We've lost George, we've lost Neil, Ash.
- [95:19]
Jesse Pollock
What Chips Chipperson's gone. A bunch of other people that were involved on the. I don't wanna say the back end of things, but people that were, you know, working on the edit and all that stuff. Yeah, it's staggering how many people are gone now.
- [95:31]
Robert Rodriguez
What is your perspective now, looking back at what you did in 1995? It's like the 7up series. Yeah, something like that. I would be damn curious to know what you thought when you were making it, what you think now. How does it stand up to you? Have you watched it lately? Whatever. Is there things you wish you could have done differently? Knowing George was running out of time or whatever? It would have been really cool to get their current day perspectives on seemingly they're not doing any press for it, so that would have been gold to me. Just to know what they think about it now.
- [96:01]
Rich Le
Yeah, I didn't even think that that would be a possibility. As you said, it was a non starter right off the bat. But you know that. You're right 100%. That would cap this off perfectly. Because even with all of the crap that they took out and all of the criticisms you could have, that would at least be, hey, this is new Beatles content. Both of them in the same room, whatever.
- [96:24]
Jesse Pollock
They couldn't even get them in the same room for the damn now and then video. I mean, right?
- [96:28]
Robert Rodriguez
But this is the thing, they're both touring, which is an incredibly arduous task for any age, much less in your 80s. Five years from now it might not even be an option.
- [96:40]
Jesse Pollock
And how great is that though? It's just like if you had told us when we were kids in the mid-90s, like, oh, yeah, they're doing an anthology 30 years from now. And, you know, there's no new interviews from Ringo or Paul in it. And it's like, oh, damn, are they gone too? No, they're busy on tour. Are you kidding me? They're rapidly approaching 90 and they're too busy to sit down for an interview because they're touring. Yeah, they're doing great. And making new albums. Yeah, making new albums. Ringo's finally got his career as a beloved country western singer. Like, they're living their best lives, man.
- [97:17]
Mike Vaccaro
Yeah.
- [97:17]
Robert Rodriguez
It's just unbelievable. I look at things. I'm somebody that is acutely aware of mortality. I recognize you guys are historic figures, but you know what? For the ages you guys are at, nobody could have predicted you'd be still doing it and doing it well at the ages that you're at right now, obviously you've got a great concern about your legacy and your history. However you remember it or choose not to remember it, it would be whatever you have to say. At this age, that perspective is priceless. I would love hear your current take.
- [97:49]
Rich Le
Yeah, absolutely. Who knows, maybe we'll think like, when I'm 64. If you, if you had told Paul at that point. No, no, at 64, you're not going to be retired and, you know, have a cottage in the Isle of White. You're going to be. Which you probably do anyway. You're not. You're going to be on tour at 64 and killing it. Not only are you going to be.
- [98:12]
Jesse Pollock
Like Frankie Valley, you're killing it.
- [98:14]
Rich Le
Yeah. You're also going to be doing it another 15 years, 20 years. How much longer are you going to go? This is like Willie Nelson territory now, where, you know, I saw Willie two years ago and they were like, this is probably going to be the last time you're going to see him live. And it's like, no, he's back out on tour this year. It's. No, he's still going. Him and Trigger.
- [98:36]
Jesse Pollock
Oh, yeah.
- [98:37]
Robert Rodriguez
Did you say sad? Like Frankie Valley?
- [98:39]
Jesse Pollock
Yeah, I mean, you know that, like, hey, all, there's a prank, man. But it's like no one is looking at that and getting inspired. People are looking at that situation and going, what is the hotline for everyone? Elder abuse. But people look at Paul and Ringo, Ringo, who's two and a half years older than Paul, it's just like, these guys have stamina. It's not sad they're going, they could easily get away with. We're giving you a 40 minute show tonight. You know, we're retiring the pyrotechnics from Live and Let Die. You know, we're not going to do the 15 minute extended hey Jude. But no, they're going out. They're giving you two, sometimes three hours. They're. They're giving Springsteen a run for his month money. You know what I mean? It's. Yeah, it's a beautiful, wonderful thing. And you know what? If we still get to watch them do that and there's still people out there that get to see half of the group, you know, in the flesh, then maybe we're the fools for bitching about video codec quality on the latest edition of Anthology, you know what I mean? It's an embarrassment of riches, as I've heard you say before on the show, Robert, and I can't, I can't agree more. It's for every misstep, there's always still a million great things. And if I have to say one really positive thing before we go here about the cleanup of anthology was the one revelation to me was watching in 4K, the footage of Paul talking about the movement you need is on your shoulder. And, you know, we've all heard the story a thousand times before, but that, for a lot of us, that was the first time we saw Paul tell that story. And now with the footage in 4K, you can see Paul is tearing up when he says, that's the part where I think of John when I'm playing live. That's the part where I felt choked up. You know, like you were talking about, you know, the feedback you were getting from others and people were crying in Anthology. That's the moment where, you know, it came close to me. It's like, oh, wow. Holy shit. Yeah. And it was still, you know, it was still so fresh. It's only 14 years, you know, you look back 14 years, it's like, oh, that wasn't that long ago, you know, 2011. So it's like for Paul, that's not ancient history. Talking about John being dead at that point, that was the touching moment for me. So if I get that little net positive and it led to getting to hear in my life. Take one and an early version of Nowhere, man. All right, fine, I'll take it, but do better next time, please.
- [101:02]
Robert Rodriguez
Exactly, exactly. We will take this before you change your mind. Keep giving it.
- [101:08]
Jesse Pollock
Yes, man.
- [101:09]
Robert Rodriguez
You could be doing better.
- [101:09]
Mike Vaccaro
Yeah. In fact, you know, sometimes we travel the whole of Liverpool just to go to someone who knew a chord. We didn't know. Remember once hearing about a bloke who knew B7. Now we knew E and we knew A, it was quite easy, but we didn't knew B7. That was kind of the missing part of the link, the other chord, the last chord. So on we got on the bus, trooped across Liverpool, changed a couple of buses, found this fella and he showed us B7. We learned it often, got back on the bus, went home to our mates and went zing. Got it.
- [101:46]
Robert Rodriguez
Something about the Beatles, created and hosted by Robert Rodriguez, executive producer Rick Way. Title song performed by the Corgis. Something about the Beatles is an evergreen podcast.
- [102:10]
Mike Vaccaro
Would like to sing another number. Hey, all right. This is another song, this. And this song's called Nowhere Man.
- [102:27]
Robert Rodriguez
And he.
- [102:31]
Jesse Pollock
He's a real man sitting in his. Point of view knows not where he's going.
- [102:55]
Mike Vaccaro
Sam.