THE BEATLES – GET BACK with Billy Preston
                        The Steveo Stereo/Mono Assembly                                                                                                                                                   
                     Updated Version III dated 6.13.14

          Assembled, edited and generally fussed with at Steveo’s Chateau
                       (original and revised versions),
                         March 2011 – 13 July, 2012 

     My best stab at correcting everything that still bothered me for this MK 3 version,  
                              May-13 June, 2014 

    Changes in this version: Maggie May/Fancy My Chances With You are now one track instead of two so the medley plays properly (and also makes the album 30 tracks again without losing any music, which is cool), Glyn John’s mix of Let It Be now switched out for the George Martin produced single version, Gone Gone Gone pitch/speed corrected, as well as several edits here and there and some desperately needed volume normalization.  I’ve again rewritten these liner notes to better reflect my current thoughts on this assembly and add some general information material.

“We’ve made Let It Be.  We then mixed it once with Glyn Johns who’d done a very straightforward mix, very plain, but I loved it. Alan Klein was around by this time and he sort of said: “I don’t think it’s good enough”. He pulled in Phil Spector to try and sort of help “reproduce” it as it said on the record.”  Paul McCartney- Let It Be Album Mini Documentary, 2009 Beatles Remasters DVD

Excerpts from the MK III Liner Notes:
Despite having been a Beatles fan since the age of 11 and having heard my share of alternate recordings of them over the years, including some Let It Be material, it was a memory of a friend getting a vinyl copy of the Glyn Johns “Get Back Album” years before (which I’d never had the opportunity to listen to at the time) that finally prompted me to seek out the recordings in March of 2011.  I was extremely taken with them on first hearing but felt they were in need of a better, more carefully considered sequencing as well as some editing. Some sequencing, a little editing, that was the original idea. 

 These tracks (and the versions that appeared on the Let It Be album) have suffered under the curse of this entire Beatles era being pretty much universally undervalued; first by the band themselves, then by the critics and the general audience (with me included prior to March 2011).  The Let It Be album owes its “reproduced” existence to this lack of love.  

Counting Magical Mystery Tour’s latter day LP status the Beatles recorded 12 albums as well as numerous singles and non-album tracks at EMI Abbey Road Studios, with the engineers and staff there and George Martin as active producer or at least producer of record.  By the mid 1960’s their method became usually the modern studio technique of recording the basic track and then adding via overdubs the different parts until a perfect master had been created.  For this one project the band intentionally used a different approach, and despite everything negative, something positive and unique definitely resulted. 

 They played together, the four of them with and without Billy Preston, and with what I refer to as “garage band mixes” on some of the tracks (live in the studio performances with nothing mixed out, not even the awkward bits) courtesy of Glyn Johns, as well as some oldies from the Beatles extensive early live set lists recorded in mono on the camera audio nagra reels, this time it can feel like we really get more of a chance to meet them, not just their records. 
 
So if you’re looking for Sgt. Pepper, the White Album or Abbey Road you’re going to be quite disappointed.  But if you’re looking for those guys who went to Hamburg, came back, and proceeded to rock the living heck out of every room they ever played, good news.  This is them.

“I think it shows on the record that when we were excited, the tracks exciting. It doesn’t matter what we’re going through as individuals on the bullshit level, when it gets to the music, when you can see that it’s really cool, we’ve all put in a thousand percent.” Ringo Starr- Let It Be Album Mini Documentary.