Doug wrote: ↑Mon May 03, 2021 11:04 am
Well said. I've been working on this for my review of the box, and came to the same conclusion. There are multiple levels of unclear or contradictory information in the documentation, which make things difficult, if not impossible to sort out. If we had complete tapes of all of the sessions... maybe... but we don't.
mikec wrote: ↑Mon May 03, 2021 2:29 pm
Excellent graphics !. On page one of this post I described it. That the “Hold On” and “Remember” session especially (as well as a couple of takes from the “Love” session) is a disaster if we focus on what the tape boxes say versus what we can hear in the Bootlegs. My original review had more detailed false starts and rehearsals between takes that were not registered by the engineers, but it sounded too "nerdy" so I cut it out. There are more than 42 “Hold On” takes, for example, if we count the false starts, breakdown takes, incorrect numbering, etc. I think HMC has a couple of tracks in the wrong place ("Glad All Over" one of them, but I have to check all my notes). We see that many of the POB sessions have similar errors in terms of numbering, takes not registered in the tape boxes ("God" from the
Lennon Anthology, one of them, which is a Take that was not annotated in the session of October 7); and documentation in general.
beatlesondvd wrote: ↑Tue May 04, 2021 7:40 am
Here's my breakdown of the 'Hold On' session (sorted out by bootleg.official release).
a collective thousand thanks for those invaluable informations
I’m hard –headed: yesterday i revised all, starting from the scratch and starting from the supposed easier
:
I considered
Remember’s relatively few takes they were easier to ‘reveal’, but i was pretty wrong: it’s a mess, like
Hold On or
Love
First of all it’s necessary to establish a minimal ‘solid ground’ from where to start: that is identifying the ‘big chunks’:
Take 3 (‘8:10’), Take 4 (‘9:00’) and Take 6 (‘9:40’)
HMC 048 has ‘’take 4’’ (8:44), ‘’take 5’’ (9:43) and ‘’take 8’’ (9:42)
In this case takes’ length can be deceptive, but if we take in account only the real ‘musical’ segment ’s length (without chats,pre-takes and whatever) all fall quite in place:
Take 3 (8:10) (‘musical portion’ 8:27) HMC 048 track 6 ‘’take 4’’ (8:44)
Take 4 (9:00) (‘musical portion’ 8:54) HMC 048 track 7 ‘’take5’’ (9:43) (George’s arrival at tape’s end reconfirms correctness of placement)
Take 6 (9:40) (‘musical portion’ 9:39) HMC 048 track 11 ‘’take 8’’ (9:42)
Now we can start to track the rest:
Reel E99485:
HMC’s track 2 is Take 1 (rehearsal 1) from 7 October and the subsequent track 3 obviously belongs to the same God Sessions
HMC’s track 4 is Rehearsal 2
HMC’s track 5 is the new (9 October) Take 1 ---
and Take 2 (Breakdown)
(Mastertape’s Take 2 signaled length (circa 0:54) is ‘distributed’ between the end of HMC’s track 5 and chats at the beginning of track 6)
HMC’s track 6 is Take 3 (8:10)
HMC’s track 7 is Take 4 (9:00)
For this reel HMC sequence seems correct and ‘complete’, so, we go ahead
Change of Reel: E99486
HMC track 8 should surely be an undocumented take ‘x’, placed at tape’s start (0:00-0:46) before Take 5
HMC track 9 and track 10, combined, probably constitute the ‘breakdowned’ Take 5 (2:47)
HMC track 11 is Take 6
At this point of the reel we have five consecutive breakdown/false start takes (7, 8, 9, 10 and 11) , in six minutes
The HMC’s continuing sequence propose 7 ‘arbitrary’ tracks, actually containing 9 breakdowns/’takes’, in 5:40
The total length appears nearly to fit, so the problem seems only to distribute and ‘recognise’ the 5 ‘real’ takes contained in the seven HMC tracks
The mastertape shows that between take 6 end (13:10) and the real beginning of take 7 (14:15) there’s a ‘hidden’ minute that probably contains a further undocumented rehearsal or take ‘y’
So we can assume and summarise as follows :
HMC track 12 is undocumented Take ‘’Y’’
HMC track 13, 14 and part of 15, combined, approximately constituteTake 7
HMC track 15 is roughly Take 8
HMC track 16 is Take 9
HMC track 17 is Take 10
HMC track 18 is Take 11
Considering also ‘Take Y,’ the mastertape notes shows takes’ lengths surprisingly matching with ‘coherents segments’ of breakdowns in the 5:45 section
This is not a conclusive ‘scientific’ attribution, nevertheless the showed correspondings
should be considered more than a coincidence.
HMC track 19 is Take 12
Change of Reel: E99928
HMC track 19 is Take 13, but this is not the ‘backtrack’, this is a later stage, with Jew’s Harp overdubs
At this point of the analysis, when everything seemed to be relatively ‘working’, HMC
shows further 11 minutes of rehearsals –totally not documented- in which John and the other are testing changes in the arrangement of bass lines or piano, we can hear: "
Do you want to know the chords Klaus, it might help ?" or "
Bring me the words and get Mal to bring the electric piano"
Does this ruin everything in the previous reconstruction?
The only way to explain this ‘extra sessions’ is to suppose they continued to rehersal takes after take 13, but in the end they decided to remain on the ‘old arrangement’ and work on the first 5 minutes of take 13, not bothering to document tk 14, 15 etc. on mastertapes notes
Is this credible?
Take 13 lasted 9:00 but on mastertapes we can read: “take continues to 12.49 but this is not required for remix”,
actually we can hear take 13 surely ends at 8:47, so we already have 4 ‘unidentified’minutes that are not part of take 13 jam/coda
A fundamental point in favor of this risky theory is that the reel have more than 11 minutes of reel’s free space, so if it can’t be proven at least it stands in the field of possibility…