This is a 50th anniversary remix supervised by Dhani. Thankfully for me, Jeff Lynne got nowhere near this project, as far as I know. It will not make your copy of the original mix disappear. According to Dhani, George repeatedly said that he would like to do a remix of the album. Dhani has said it is not a de-Spectorization of the album, but more a little clean-up and clarifying, and bringing George’s vocals more to the forefront. There are versions ranging in cost from $20 to $1,000. You can see the different versions by going to George Harrison | Official Merchandise – George Harrison | Official Merchandise Some people will like it, some won’t. I am certainly anxious to hear it. It’s going to be released August 6th. Great interview with Bobby Whitlock. Good thing his wife was there to keep it moving. I wish someone would do that for me. |
Here’s a section of a recent Mojo magazine article on the 50th ATMP: Paul Hicks was the guy who actually worked the machines for the restoration. “BACK IN JANUARY 2001, only 10 months before his death, George Harrison expressed his ongoing dissatisfaction with the “big production” of All Things Must Pass in the liner notes for the album’s 30th anniversary reissue: “It was difficult to resist remixing every track,” he noted. Now, for the upcoming 50th anniversary motherlode edition of his already expansive 1970 album (pandemic-delayed and due in August), some tasteful retrofitting has been applied.
“My dad was not a fan of reverb,” Dhani Harrison tells MOJO, on the phone from his family’s Friar Park estate in Henley-on- Thames, explaining that the new, from-the ground-up mixes of the landmark triple album involved painstaking audio restoration and a foregrounding of his father’s vocals, somewhat stripping back Phil Spector’s layers of effects. “It’s like restoring a painting,” Harrison adds. “We’re so careful. Every stage has been A/B’ed [comparing the new and earlier versions] along with the original. When you hear it, it’s just mindblowing.”
The new Super Deluxe All Things Must Pass comprises 70 tracks over five CDs or eight LPs, reclaiming the solo acoustic demos from the hands of the bootleggers. Dhani recalls his dad having a significant conversation with Bob Dylan regarding outtake curation: “I remember him talking back in the ’90s to Bob and saying, ‘You’ve just got to release all your bootlegs. Make it sound great and own it. Take it back.’ We wanted to make it so good that there’s no way you could ever want to bootleg these ever again.”
From the 30 included demos (26 previously unreleased), Dhani singles out the whimsical groover Cosmic Empire, along with the mantra-like Dehra Dun, while other highlights include a different version of Sour Milk Sea from the Esher sketch for The White Album and a Sun Records-style slapback rocker titled Going Down To Golders Green.
Harrison and engineer Paul Hicks (also responsible for recent sonic restorations for The Beatles, the Lennon estate and The Rolling Stones) together mixed a staggering 110 tracks, before making the final selection. Of what Dhani calls the preliminary “small band” versions of ATMP songs (featuring Ringo on drums and Klaus Voormann on bass), he admits that the mixing of an alternate I’d Have You Anytime was an affecting moment.
“It broke my heart,” he says. “I just started sobbing. Paul looked at me and said, ‘OK, so we’re doing it then.’ There was no question as to whether or not this was the right way to go because it’s just so powerful. Ultimately, everything had to be emotional.”
Meanwhile, an Über Deluxe Edition of the album, limited to 3,000, will be housed in a wooden crate along with Rudraksha prayer beads, a seven-inch-tall figurine of George and ¹/ ¹² th-scale laser-scanned gnomes as featured on the original cover, and a bookmark cut from a pine tree on the Harrison estate.
“You actually get a piece of Friar Park history,” Dhani enthuses of the crate edition, modeled on a Victorian ale chest. “I wanted it to be like a time capsule. It looks like it’s lasted years and will last another 100 years.” |
ATMP is my favorite solo Beale album by far and easily in my top 7 favorite albums of all time . Could not help but go for the Uber Deluxe edition.
That is one nice looking Uber set,
gpgr4blu. It doe look like something that will become an heirloom. |
@bdp24, From what I’ve read, mostly on the Steve Hoffman Music Forums where there are plenty of opinions, the mix is the same but the digital may be more compressed than the vinyl. One reason for this is that the bass is turned up (what Dhani considers a more modern sound, I guess) and it is not tight bass but is pretty indistinct and boomy.
In spite of this, most people like the remix in digital. It’s not an In Your Face compression like the Stones’ Blue and Lonesome. To most people the compression is not that offensive. There’s still plenty of reverb and numerous instruments on most tracks, so it’s a somewhat different take on the album rather than something very different. George’s vocals have been removed from the wall of sound and put up front. Some people like that some people don’t. As with all remixes, reactions will vary from person to person.
Many people feel that the demos and alternate takes are the best part of the set (3 not full discs worth) and alone worth the price of the set, which will probably be coming down.
Bobby seems to be upset more because he feels his contribution to the album, which he thinks was major, was downplayed and he was asked to take down some youtube videos talking about the album prior to its release (they’re back up now). I’m glad that Bobby feels free to speak his mind, but I think his very negative reaction may have more to do with his relationship with the Harrisons than the music. Of course there are other people who think the remix sounds like crap too. |
