Remasters of the universe

This Beatle fan, for one, has had enough. I just heard the surviving remnants of the Fab Four (that would be Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr) have put their stamp of approval on — gasp! — yet another remastered CD box set version of all 13 of the Beatles’ albums.

(For those of you born in the last 20 years, or visiting from another planet, “The Beatles” were a popular pop-vocal group from the previous century, circa the 1960s.)

Damn you, Fab Two! Just when I’d put the final chink of stone in my Beatles CD collection (it was “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”; I was holding out for some reason, don’t ask why), you bastards turn around and make the original recordings sound 10 times better. It’s like setting up the Taj Mahal right next to some kid’s rickety clubhouse; the whole thing just collapses in comparison.

So what now, Surviving Beatles? I’m supposed to go and shell out $250 (or $500 if you want the British import version) for yet another copy of Wild Honey Pie? Like I really need to hear Maxwell’s Silver Hammer in glorious, remastered sound in this day and age when there’s so much more, er, wonderful and meaningful music to listen to?

But then again… I’m sure the opening crowd noise and slamming guitar chords of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band will sound just knickers in a fresh, post-1987 digital remix. Tomorrow Never Knows will probably blow away the Chemical Brothers in its steroidally-enhanced remastered version. And there’s no doubt that the beautifully crisp opening chords to Dear Prudence off the Beatles’ “White Album” will benefit from some serious bass boosting and instrument separation… 

But no! No! NOOO!! I’ve shelled out and shelled out for you Beatles. I started with LPs (those are long-playing petroleum-based discs that were imbedded with musical grooves when played on a “turntable,” kids). Many of those were scratchy old copies from yard sales, so arguably, I was already taking money away from your greedy little pockets. Those discs cracked and warbled, so I moved on to cassette tapes. Those melted on the back seat of a vintage Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, so I waited around for a few years, stubbornly humming all the tracks from “Magical Mystery Tour” from memory until CDs were finally invented. Still, I resisted. I didn’t take the bait until “The Beatles” (“The White Album”) came out on compact disc. That double CD had so many tracks on it, I couldn’t hum all of them from memory. So I shelled out some $25, put it on… and, well, the sound was less crackly than my old records, but nothing earth-shaking. Still, I felt complete, with the “White Album” yet again occupying shelf space. Then I started to crave more.

Like all nasty drugs, the “White Album” gatewayed me into buying the other Beatle CDs: “Revolver,” naturally, came next because it’s their most overall brilliant album. Sounded great on CD. Next!

I picked up “Magical Mystery Tour” because it has some of the band’s essential singles on it — Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, naturally, but also stuff like All You Need Is Love and Hello, Goodbye. It also contains a lot of filler, but it’s gloriously inspired filler: Baby You’re A Rich Man has this emphatic clippity-clop bass line that sounds like it wants to kick those handclaps’ asses, along with the ass of that kazoo being played by (reputedly) Brian Jones. George Harrison’s Blue Jay Way is the eeriest bit of Beatles music next to Revolution No. 9, proving he was the spookiest Beatle of all. Even the title track puts a smile on your face, with its vari-speeded vocals and closing bit of free-form piano.

I didn’t much care for the band’s earlier, Fab Four-ish recordings, mostly because I’d grown sick of harmonicas, but also because they contain fewer Beatle originals. They packed “Please Please Me,” “With the Beatles” and “Beatles for Sale” with covers of country songs, R&B hits and Broadway tunes, which can get a little grating. So I slapped another cornerstone into my Beatles CD collection by picking up 1965’s “Rubber Soul.”

This was a bittersweet move. My original Capitol LP contained stuff that wasn’t on the 1987 CD version: stuff like Lennon’s It’s Only Love and Paul’s I’ve Just Seen a Face. (Seriously, where does one find those two songs which my memory insists were on the original LP?) Still, “Rubber Soul” has got some of the Beatles’ breathiest, airiest harmonies and crispest acoustic playing on record, and it must sound fantastic in the remastered version. Damn you, Surviving Beatles! Damn you!

I got “Abbey Road” next because who can resist that cover? And then I slapped in the final Rosetta stone by purchasing the “Let It Be… Naked” CD on sale. Sure, it was weird hearing the “Let It Be” sessions in a different running order, stripped down to the Fab Four plus Billy Preston on organ. But this was Paul’s personal revenge on Phil Spector for strangling the band’s so-so recordings with strings and choirs.

Thought I could escape owning “Sgt. Pepper,” but when I saw it on sale at Costco, I figured what the hell? Whom am I kidding? Contrary to recent backlash appraisals, “Sgt. Pepper” is really not that bad of an album. Very solid and experimental, track-wise. If the building was burning down, I’d probably save “Revolver” first, but still.

Things settled down after that. You’d think any self-respecting Beatle fan would have all their needs met by then. But noooo! Then came the “Anthology” series in the mid-‘90s with all its must-hear outtakes and demos. Then two years ago George Martin and his son reengineered a couple dozen Beatle tracks for the Las Vegas musical Love. Hearing those songs pumped up by a fresh set of ears must have got the Surviving Beatles thinking and rubbing their hands together again…

So earlier this year, the Fab Four were reincarnated for the digital-rati: as a video game called “The Beatles: Rock Band.” (The online commercial is incredible: film footage of John and Ringo digitally mingling with modern Beatle fans strolling along that famous Abbey Road crosswalk.)

And now we have “The Beatles Remastered Stereo Box Set.” Thirteen albums, plus one “Remasters” disc with obscurities and B-sides. It’s tempting, very tempting. But I’ve spent pretty much all of my life listening to the Beatles. They still exist in me, with or without those snazzy, jacked-up remixes to renew my fandom. For now, I’ll keep cool. I’m not jumping on the bandwagon just yet, Surviving Beatles. And if I need my current Beatle MP3s to sound a little more “current,” well, I’ll just do what we did in the old days: tweak the bass and treble settings and crank the volume knob up to “11.”