A LENNONOLOGY EXCLUSIVE - FOR YOU BLUES (EXCLUSIVE CONTENT ON THE JAPANESE LET IT BE SDE)

[mce1965]

EXCLUSIVE CONTENT ON THE JAPANESE LET IT BE SUPER DELUXE EDITION

For nearly 40 years, nearly since the advent of the CD, The Beatles and Apple have managed to keep the digital contents of the group and solo catalogs strictly consistent around the world. There have been a few exceptions, such as the run of Canadian Help! and Rubber Soul CDs that featured the original 1965 mixes and not George Martin's 1987 remixes, or the initial US pressing of The Capitol Albums Vol. Two which included “folddown” mono mixes rather than the true mono mixes. However, not since the original UK-manufactured CD of Paul McCartney’s Press To Play, with the 10" mix of 'Press', has a single anomaly slipped out to market. Until now.

While listening to the streaming version of Glyn Johns' May 1969 mix of the Get Back album, from the new Let It Be Super Deluxe Edition, keen-eared collector Yosi Noz noted that 'For You Blue' was actually Johns' 1970 mix, which contained a new lead vocal recorded in January of that year. It was once he played his physical copy of the Japanese SHM-CD Let It Be SDE, that he noted the correct "1969 Mix" of 'For You Blue' was in place, rather than the 1970 mix he had heard in the ether.

It has now been verified that the true 1969 mix of 'For You Blue' appears exclusively on the Japanese SHM-CD Let It Be SDE (Disc 4, Track 7). All other digital platforms, including the universal SDE and its hi-res counterpart, include the 1970 Glyn Johns mix (prefaced by the complete introduction with two false starts) which is erroneously labeled "1969 Mix."

Who knows what, if any, corrective action will be taken. It's unknown specifically which of the two mixes Apple intended to put on the package. It is unlikely that more SDEs will be manufactured, so substitution on future editions is unlikely. The most likely course of action would be to make corrected copies of the disc available for exchange. But with profit margins so thin, it is possible that this anomaly will remain buried on the Japanese SDE.

On a side note, in his overview of the SDE's contents, which has appeared in several online outlets, including the Steve Hoffman music forum and The Daily Beatle website, Mike Carrera's assertion that the universal SDE used a copy of Dr. Ebbetts’ fan-released disc Get Back - Glyn John's Mix #2 as its source, for this and other tracks, is unfounded. Other black-market releases of Get Back have used an edited reconstruction of the introduction (specifically Vigotone's 1999 release, Get Back - The Glyn Johns Final Compilation), not to mention that both the 1969 and 1970 editions of the Dr. Ebbetts Get Back discs run at a different speed with the channels reversed and the phase inverted when compared to the new commercial release. That's not to say that Apple didn't construct their own introduction, just that they used a source superior to any of the well-known bootleg releases.

In the end, what is exciting for collectors is that a genuine alternate version, the genuine 1969 Glyn Johns mix of 'For You Blue' has appeared exclusively on the Japanese SHM-CD SDE. It is an expensive proposition to spend an additional $200 on less than three minutes of music, but it is likely that this will remain a bona fide rarity and that copies will dry up quickly.

Chip Madinger & Mark Easter, with special thanks to Yosi Noz.
www.lennonology.com

[Lord Reith]

Hooray! Praised be the careless cd mastering plant!

Hope this one track turns up somewhere. I would feel no guilt about downloading it because it is the version we should have had for real on the set.

As for the SDE being sourced from a bootleg... that is just bonkers.

[powerPC]

Encouraging news!

[mikec]

Only TWO tracks associated with that Bootleg are mentioned (not "others"): For You Blue and Dig a Pony with the wrong mixes from 1970 instead of 1969 which coincidentally are also on the Dr Ebbetts Bootleg and it is clearly mentioned that Apple may have been based or relied (those are the exact words) on that Bootleg to make their own mixes of the Glyn Johns album (thinking they were the correct ones), but it is NEVER mentioned in the review that those two tracks were taken directly of that album.

[zaval80]

Hope this one track turns up somewhere. I would feel no guilt about downloading it because it is the version we should have had for real on the set.

I have no guilt for anything since I've shelled out some hard-earned $$$ back in 1994 for then brand-new Hendrix remasters. Only to find out that the "Red House" track wasn't a proper "British" version but an "American" one.

Always thought that record companies are in the business of waging war on their paying customers

[Lord Reith]

This is all a dastardly plot to force hardcore fans like us to buy two copies of the SDE!

Well, I hope not. But you gotta wonder... how could this even happen? It is a very strange thing indeed. It implies that there was at some point a correct version of the album put together by Apple, and then they deliberately went and ruined it by replacing the correct mix with the wrong one. I had assumed they'd used the 1970 mix by mistake, but to think they actually paid someone to screw it up when it had been okay beggars belief.

[Doug]

It's the same track, just a different vocal. My guess is that there are multiple vocal tracks on the multi-track and they just chose the wrong one. If nothing else, that proves they're not using a bootleg as their source.

[CharlesHawtrey]

It's the same track, just a different vocal. My guess is that there are multiple vocal tracks on the multi-track and they just chose the wrong one. If nothing else, that proves they're not using a bootleg as their source.

1969 mix:
- 19 seconds intro that includes:
- two false starts (0:09 and 0:15)
- glass sound at the very beginning fading in
- taping noises mixed in the right channel with slight echo in the center
- a bass note at 0:04 mixed in the right channel
- George saying "okay" at 0:08 with a little reverb added, and John saying "yeah" very faintly in the center right before the first false start
- some intelligible chat (from what I understand "you're happy Jim?" etcetera...) in the center mixed very low, and that ends less than a second after...:
- John shouts "quiet please!" at 0:16 in the center, followed by very faint whispers and wood tapping/scratching noises in the right channel
- all with natural reverb
- original vocal take

1970 mix:
- 14 seconds intro that includes:
- one false start (at 0:09) which is the second false start from the 1969 mix
- glass sound at the very beginning
- taping noises mixed in the left channel with slight echo in the center
- a bass note at 0:04 mixed in the right channel with reverb
- George saying "okay" at 0:08, and John saying "yeah" faintly in the center with slight echo in the left channel, right before the first false start
- some intelligible chat (from what I understand "you're happy Jim?", etcetera...) in the left channel mixed louder, and that ends less than a second after...:
- John shouts "quiet please!" at 0:10 in the right channel with a lot of reverb, followed by whispers mixed a little louder slightly oriented in the right channel, and wood tapping/scratching noises in the right channel as well.
- 1970 vocal take, except from 1:54 to 2:28 (original vocal take)

the 2021 version found in the EU/US "Let It Be" Super Deluxe Edition:
- 19 seconds intro that includes:
- two false starts (0:09 and 0:15)
- glass sound at the very beginning fading in
- a bass note at 0:04 mixed in the right channel with reverb*
- George saying "okay" at 0:08 with a little reverb added**, and John saying "yeah" very faintly in the center right before the first false start
- some intelligible chat (from what I understand "you're happy Jim?" etcetera...) in the center mixed very low, and that ends less than a second after John shouts "quiet please!", but in the left channel!
- John shouts "quiet please!" at 0:10 in the right channel with a lot of reverb, followed by whispers mixed a little louder slightly oriented in the right channel, and wood tapping/scratching noises in the right channel as well.
- 1970 vocal take, except from 1:54 to 2:28 (original vocal take)

The version found in the EU/US boxset is an edit of both mixes, which cuts exactly before the second false start. You can clearly hear by turning up the volume than the hiss changes at that very moment, and you can see it even by looking at the spectrogram by using a tool like iZotope:

So personally, I wouldn't assume they went as far as using the original multitracks.
In fact, the lower quality 1969 intro being edited into the higher quality 1970 mix makes me think that the mix we have in the EU/US boxsets and on digital platforms is the one that was meant to be released and that it is the Japanese boxset that has the "wrong" mix. Not to mention it was one of the first pre-release tracks. I don't think they would have chose it as an advanced track if it wasn't the mix they wanted to release.

Now, if the only difference between the version in the European boxset and the Japanese boxset is the vocal track being the original one, then we'll still have these 4-5 seconds from the 1970 mix added in.

* : to me, it sounds like this bass note has the 1969 mix EQ with the 1970 mix reverb
** : I could be wrong on this one, but it seems to be a little louder than the 1969 mix

[Doug]

As I posted over at "The 910"...

The version on the U.S. box uses the re-recorded vocal heard on “Let It Be” (probably from January 8, 1970) until the break, omitting George’s comments (such as “go, Johnny, go!” and “Elmore James got nothin’ on this baby”) . The final verse has the original vocal from take 7 (as heard on Glyn’s “Get Back”) except for the last line (“I love you more than ever girl I do”), which is also from the “Let It Be” re-recording. George’s “living the blues..,” which concludes the song on “Let It Be” has also been omitted.

“Get Back” has the original take 7 vocal (DDSI 25.47).

The Japanese box includes the correct “take 7” vocal from “Get Back.”

Since the U.S. version cuts between vocal tracks, I presume they used the multi-tracks.

[mikec]

I have the Japanese track in my hands thanks to a friend who has shared it with me meanwhile my box set arrives. It is not the same EMI master multi-track tape.
The now exclusive track on the SHM Deluxe Japan Edition has the same sound of 'hiss' throughout the track, with the correct 1969 mix.
The track in the Deluxe Edition available for the rest of the world has an edit at 00: 15 where the sound changes drastically and another source is inserted, so they did not use the same multi-track tape and chose by mistake the wrong vocal track, but two different sources were used to edit it.