Anthology 3 (The Beatles, 1996)

Yesterday I invoked Anthology 1 as a worthwhile comparison listening experience to A Hard Day's Night, so it's an easy segue into Anthology 3, an under-the-hood look at the final albums the Beatles recorded. The third set is dominated by alternative (usually embryonic versions) of canon songs, with a few unreleased numbers and a handful of ironic oldies thrown in for good measure. It's a more raw document than the previous Anthology, which is not really all that surprising given the back-to-basics posturing the band adopted in the post-India era.

The Beatles songbook is about as close to scriptural canon as rock music can get, so it's pretty jarring to hear versions of what could have been, and to think about how fine a line separates what is very familiar from what was locked away for nearly 30 years. By this time, I think the Beatles themselves were catching on that pretty much anything of theirs that made it on an album would be instantly seared into the history of music and were more than happy to test the limits with avant-garde, nonsense lyrics, general silliness, and few sneaky bits of self-referential material ("Glass Onion"). At the same time, the band was clearly disintegrating as a single performing unit and I am certainly not the first to note that The White Album and its successors sound more like a patchwork of four solo careers than the work of a unified band.

Some stray observations:

• A few of the arrangements here are either enhancements or equivalents of their canonized final versions. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" here is an acoustic arrangement with an added verse, "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da" has a totally different rhythm and horn section, and "Honey Pie" is downright jaunty.
• You can pretty much throw everything you know about what was recorded when, with particular focus on the de-medley-ed "Mean Mr. Mustard" et. al. and early recordings of songs that would end up distinguishing the formal launch of solo careers ("All Things Must Pass", "Junk")
• Makaveli (er....Tupac Shakur) knocked Anthology 3 out of the top spot on the Billboard 200 with The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory. And just like that the 1990's were back!