THE BEATLES AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL

Good actual Lord. Here's a story for the ages. Right at the height of The Beatles' original zeitgeist, when they still played live to fans who wouldn't let anyone actually listen to the music, their record companies tried their darnedest to get a high quality taping of a live performance to ply to eager fans. Unfortunately for their plans, none of their recordings turned out in anywhere near decent quality, when venues and guilds even let them record. Back then, they had the good sense not to drop any of this on the world. But in the Seventies, with Beatlemania II still raging, a different company managed to kick out an even poorer recording of one of the old Hamburg shows. This led a panicked EMI to force George Martin to try and salvage two bad recordings of Hollywood Bowl shows, a year apart, into something they could sell to make up lost ground. And... well, he couldn't really salvage it. SQ remains in the dumps, and there's nothing here for lo-fi to make better. The fans are way too loud and annoying. The haphazard stitching together of the two shows results in both "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!" being the newest Beatles album. It's great to have another version of their cover of "Roll Over Beethoven", but this is worth very little. *sigh* We did need a good Beatles live record, but this wasn't it. Definitely a collectible for fans, but this comes out more like a Dada art project meant to critique the culture of pop music than anything else.