The British band Genesis had a long history before it entered its present state of dormancy. In previous articles, I have discussed the only two members of the group to remain for its entire existence, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, and next year I intend to cover the best known of the other members of the group, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, and Steve Hackett. Another somewhat less well known former member who played an important role in the group’s formative years was Anthony Phillips (born December 23, 1951), who along with Banks, Gabriel and Rutherford was a founding member of Genesis. Though his early departure meant that the vast majority of the band’s best songs were written and recorded without any input from him, it seemed appropriate to do a brief overview of the early years of Genesis with an emphasis on the significance of Phillips in this period.
As noted in my article on Rutherford, he and Phillips became good friends at school and started playing music together, just as their schoolmates Banks and Gabriel did. Soon after arriving at the school in 1965, Phillips formed a group called Anon (sometimes referred to as “The Anon”, even by Mike Rutherford, though Phillips insists that there was no “the”) with bassist Rivers Job, vocalist Richard MacPhail, and drummer Rob Tyrell. Rutherford joined soon after, and the band, whose only recorded song was Phillips’s "Pennsylvania Flickhouse" (a R&B style tune very different from later Genesis songs, though Phillips maintains that the studio demo was not the best version of the song), played together with various lineups until the end of 1966 before splitting up. Rob Tyrell afterwards joined Sour Milk Sea, whose lead singer for its last few months of existence was Freddie Bulsara – later known as Freddie Mercury. Phillips, meanwhile, had started to spend more time playing music with Banks and Gabriel, and began attempting to write songs with Rutherford. Sometime in 1967, Phillips and Rutherford got together with the intention of recording some songs, and Phillips asked Banks to come and play piano. Banks suggested that he and Gabriel also record one of their songs and that Gabriel do the singing, as he had the best voice. So Genesis was born.
The four schoolmates managed to attract the interest of Jonathan King, a pop impresario who had once attended their school, with their demo. King signed them to a contract, gave them their name, and produced two singles and an album for them. The group’s first two singles, “The Silent Sun” and “A Winter’s Tale”, were released in 1968 and were mainly the work of the Banks/Gabriel partnership, with Philips and Rutherford only writing “That’s Me”, the B-side of “The Silent Sun”. On the group’s first album From Genesis to Revelation, recorded in 1968 while they were still at school and released in early 1969, the songs were still fairly simple and pop-oriented. According to Phillips, Banks and Gabriel dominated the songwriting on the first album, though he also contributed a number of songs, some with help from Rutherford and some on his own. An early composition by Phillips was the instrumental “Patricia”, which had appeared on the group’s first tape. Lyrics were later added, apparently by Gabriel, and the song was recorded as “In Hiding” on From Genesis to Revelation. Another song written mainly by Phillips that appeared on the album was “A Place to Call My Own”. According to Tony Banks, this song was one of the first long songs with separate sections done by the group, though they only used the last section on the album. (Note: Though the releases of From Genesis to Revelation that I know of credit all the songs to Genesis, several sources give individual songwriting credits for the songs; only a few of these individual credits are directly backed up by quotes that I’ve seen from the band members, though the few direct statements they have made about the authorship of the songs are not inconsistent with the individual credits given)
After their first album failed to make any impact, the members of Genesis, after some hesitation, made the decision to devote themselves to developing their music. According to Rutherford, Banks and Gabriel were the more hesitant ones, while he and Phillips were more certain that music was what they wanted to do, with Phillips perhaps being the most determined. Phillips and Rutherford began writing songs together on 12-string guitars, creating a sound that became one of the group’s signature sounds, along with Banks’s keyboards. The Phillips/Rutherford team, or Phillips alone, wrote a number of important songs in this period. Phillips had written “Visions of Angels” on piano at the time of the first album, and Phillips and Rutherford wrote “Dusk” and “White Mountain” together, as well as parts of “Stagnation”, though Banks and Gabriel also contributed to the latter. All these songs appeared on the group’s second album, Trespass, released in 1970. But according to Banks, another key early track, though one that was not released until it appeared on a later box set, was “Going Out to Get You”, and while all of them worked on it, Phillips wrote the song part of it. The unreleased song “Pacidy” also may have been a Phillips/Rutherford collaboration, as part of it was included in a piece on a Phillips solo album called “Field of Eternity” and credited to Phillips and Rutherford. Phillips no doubt wrote or co-wrote a number of the other early unreleased songs by the group, but no information on the other songs is available.
Unfortunately, by the time Trespass was released, Phillips had started suffering from debilitating stage fright, and he eventually decided to quit the band. As he had been very important to the group, his decision almost caused the others to give up, but in the end they decided to continue, and in addition to looking for a replacement for Phillips also find a new drummer. The drummer they ended up recruiting was Phil Collins. As Phillips said, “There was a huge silver lining for Genesis which was that me leaving meant…they got Phil. I mean, it’s got to have been worth it to have got Phil.” While getting a replacement for Phillips himself took longer, the person they finally got, Steve Hackett, would also prove to be a good choice for the group. But even after Phillips had left, he still had an influence on Genesis in that some songs that he had been involved in writing remained in their repertoire and in some cases were recorded. The most notable example was “The Musical Box”, which appeared on the first post-Phillips album, 1971’s Nursery Cryme, and became one of the group’s most popular and highly regarded songs from the early part of their career. While, like all the songs on early Genesis albums, it was officially credited to the band (meaning the current group as of the time of the recording), a significant part of the music, particularly the opening sections, had been written by Anthony Phillips (possibly with Mike Rutherford), as can be heard from listening to his 1969 instrumental demo entitled F#, which was released on his Archive Collection Volume 1 (a further development of what became “The Musical Box” can be heard in the Genesis archive track “Manipulation”).
In the years after he left Genesis, Phillips and Rutherford continued to play and write together on occasion. In fact, they originally had intended to release an album together, but because of his Genesis commitments, Rutherford found it difficult to find time to work with Phillips. The music they wrote together was finally released as Phillips’s first solo album, The Geese and the Ghost, along with a number of songs and instrumental pieces composed by Phillips alone. Phil Collins also participated, doing vocals on two songs. A third collaboration between Phillips, Rutherford and Collins was “Silver Song” (named for John Silver, the drummer for Genesis at the time of From Genesis to Revelation), which was recorded to be released as a single but was then shelved, only getting released in 2007 on a re-release of The Geese and the Ghost.
Phillips was clearly very important to Genesis in its early years. He helped push the band in the direction of art rock (or progressive rock as it is now called), though it was a direction all of the group were interested in, and he was at first the most determined to make a career of music. Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford have all stressed his impact on Genesis, with Gabriel going so far as to call him “in many ways the most musically gifted of all of us” and Banks saying that “Anthony for me was kind of the group leader”. He certainly had a major role in the writing during his time in the band, probably about equal to (but not greater than) Banks and Gabriel, though Rutherford had pretty much caught up by the time Phillips left. Though even on the first two albums Banks and Gabriel stand out the most to me as performers (Phillips himself called Banks “the fulcrum of the group”), as I noted above the excellent 12-string guitar playing in tandem that Phillips and Rutherford (and occasionally Banks) did on Trespass became a signature sound of the band, one that they continued to use to good effect in later years. Since I don’t consider either From Genesis to Revelation or Trespass to be as good as the albums that followed it (though the addition of Collins and Hackett and improved performance by the others also have something to do with that), it’s hard for me to consider his departure a disastrous loss for Genesis, but there are still some good songs on those albums (Phillips's "Visions of Angels" is one of the better songs on the latter one), and “The Musical Box” is one of the group’s best early tracks. I can’t judge most of Phillips’ solo recordings, as the only album I’ve heard in its entirety is The Geese and the Ghost, though as far as that one is concerned I concur with some who point out that while it has some beautiful guitar playing and is enjoyable enough to listen to, it is somewhat lacking in drama, which is something that Banks and Gabriel in particular (and later Collins and Hackett as well, at least as performers) contributed to Genesis. For that matter, even Trespass seems weaker in part because it is somewhat softer and less dynamic than the later albums. But it’s also true that without the acoustic guitar passages contributed by Phillips and Rutherford (and later by Rutherford and Hackett), Banks’s keyboards would quickly become overwhelming. Like with most great bands, it was the balance between the different group members that made them good, and it was fortunate that the softer, more acoustic music pioneered by Anthony Phillips remained part of Genesis even after he left.
Anthony Phillips with Genesis
(All songs performed by Genesis except where otherwise noted)
Pennsylvania Flickhouse (Phillips; performed by Anon)
Patricia (Phillips)
That's Me (Phillips/Rutherford)
In Hiding (Phillips/Gabriel [?lyrics])
A Place to Call My Own (Phillips/Gabriel[?])
In the Beginning (Phillips/Gabriel[?])
Window (Phillips/Rutherford[?])
Visions of Angels (Phillips)
White Mountain (Phillips/Rutherford)
Dusk (Phillips/Rutherford)
Going Out to Get You (Phillips[song section], [?Banks/Gabriel/Rutherford])
Pacidy (Phillips/Rutherford[?])
The Musical Box (Music: Phillips/Rutherford[opening section], Banks/Rutherford[final section]; Lyrics: Gabriel)
Which Way the Wind Blows (Phillips; performed by Anthony Phillips with Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford)
Silver Song (Phillips/Rutherford; performed by Anthony Phillips with Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford)
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Let’s Put the Beatles Back Together Again 1970-2010 by Jeff Walker
As today is the 22nd anniversary of the murder of John Lennon on December 8, 1980, it seems like an appropriate time for another Beatles-related article. Earlier this year I bought a copy of the book Let’s Put the Beatles Back Together Again 1970-2010: How to Assemble & Appreciate the 2nd Half of the Beatles' Legacy by Jeff Walker, and I finished reading it a month or two ago. As the title indicates, the author assembles solo songs released by the various ex-Beatles in the decades after the group broke up into Beatles albums. This is of course not a new idea – I have done something similar myself, though I only got as far as the mid 1970s (at least so far) – but Walker is the first person to publish a comprehensive book on the subject.
The first part of the book is devoted to arguments about why it makes sense to assemble the best of the individual Beatles' post-1970 output into Beatles albums. Walker has a tendency to belabor the point about, repeating arguments a little more often than necessary, but he makes a good case. One good point is that the Beatles had already released quite a bit of material that did not involve all of the four and in some cases only involved one. As far back as Paul McCartney's solo recording of "Yesterday" there had been songs released in the Beatles' name that didn't include all of them, and by the time of The Beatles (aka The White Album), many of the songs were recorded without the participation of one or several of the group. In this sense, the post-1970s recordings are just a continuation of this trend, especially since individual members still sometimes recorded together, though of course far less frequently than even in 1968 and 1969, and with far more help from other musicians.
While it is apparent that there is plenty of solo material that is not up to the standards of that released by the Beatles, Walker makes the point that there were at least a few songs released under the Beatles moniker that weren't all that great, and that there are some solo songs that are superior to even decent Beatles songs. I do have a minor problem with one of his examples; while I agree that in the cases of the examples he cites for Paul ("Run Devil Run" vs "Another Girl"), George Harrison ("Any Road" vs "If I Needed Someone"), and Ringo Starr ("It Don't Come Easy" vs "What Goes On") the solo songs are at least slightly better, John's "Nobody Loves You (When You're Down and Out)", while certainly one of his better songs from that period, is by no means equal to "And Your Bird Can Sing" (there are a number of weaker Beatles songs written by John that would have been better examples). Also I disagree with a few of his examples of solo songs that he regards as not "Beatles-worthy", such as "Crackerbox Palace" and "Crippled Inside", with the former in particular being actually quite good. But of course these things are subjective, and the reader can accept his overall argument without agreeing with all his specific examples.
Before he gets down to details on the post-breakup material, Walker gives his reconfigurations of the 1960s albums for CD. While it makes sense to put the singles onto the albums from the same period, I wouldn't go nearly as far as Walker does in messing with the original track sequences, nor would I eliminate as many songs as he does. In fact, I'm not sure that any really should be taken off; while a few early tracks are basically filler, none are truly terrible, and there is some virtue in every track on their later albums (yes, even "Revolution 9"). Admittedly, even Walker does little more than add contemporary singles to the albums from Help on, with the exception of Magical Mystery Tour and The White Album, and it makes sense to assemble a more chronologically-accurate version of Magical Mystery Tour. But I am so used to albums like Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's, and Abbey Road opening and closing as they do in the original formats that I would have trouble getting used to hearing them differently (even if it does make more sense for Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever to be on Sgt. Pepper's than on Magical Mystery Tour), and in the case of even the less unified White Album it would seem a bit odd to hear the track order changed so much. But those who don't want to mess with the original albums can safely skip this section.
Next Walker devotes two chapters to reassessing the Get Back sessions and the material that came out of them. He argues strongly that the negative views of this material and the claims that the sessions were a disaster are wrong. While I agree that some of what has been said and written about the Get Back sessions is excessively negative, Walker overstates his case to some degree. While the Beatles were able to get along better than is often portrayed, the tensions were also quite obvious, and while a much better album could have been assembled from the Get Back sessions than the botched effort by Phil Spector that finally came out as Let It Be, it is still true that overall the songs weren't quite up to the standards of their previous few albums, with a few exceptions like "Let It Be", "Across the Universe" and "The Long and Winding Road". But Walker does provide an alternative viewpoint to the usual critical views of this material.
Though it only starts two-fifths of the way in, the meat of the book is of course the sections on the Beatles' post-breakup songs. Walker uses a fictional alternate history in which the songs that in reality were released on various solo albums instead were released by something he calls the Beatles Releasing Collective (BRC for short), masterminded by a fictional manager named Arnold Zonn (as Walker puts much of the blame for the breakup on the conflict over choice of managers and bad handling of affairs by Allen Klein). I think he spends too much time setting up the BRC concept, which after all is fictional, and I don't agree with the way he groups the releases. While in Walker's fictional timeline singles were released more or less at the same pace as in reality, all the BRC albums are grouped into box sets: Black Box (1973; 3 discs), MoonDogs (1982; 2 discs), Covers (1999; 2 discs), 45 (2000; 3 discs), Live (2009; 4 discs) Singularity (2010; 3 discs) and several bonus sets. Even if the Beatles had agreed to something like the BRC, it is highly unlikely that their songs would have been released in box sets. Box sets were not all that common before the CD era, and I can't think of any significant original releases (as opposed to compilations of previous released material or unreleased outtakes) that were box sets. Furthermore, I'm sure the individual Beatles would have been too impatient to get their songs out on the market to wait years between sets. Of course the advantage to grouping the songs this way is that Walker has a wider selection to pick and choose from, and he can sequence the albums with more freedom. Nevertheless, I prefer my own way of putting together this material, as single albums released more or less annually in the early years and then with less frequency afterwards, though some individual songs might end up getting held back for later release.
Inevitably, I disagree with some of Walker's individual song choices. For one thing, though he argues strongly for Paul being every bit John's equal, something I agree with him completely about, and for both George and Ringo having a lot to contribute as well, his song selections are unbalanced in favor of John's songs. He includes as many or more of John's songs as he does Paul's, even though Paul released far more songs than John. This means he neglects great songs by Paul like "Listen to What the Man Said" in favor of relatively obscure songs by John. I can't judge the merits of all the songs he picks, since there are some I don't have (in particular I don't have the John Lennon Anthology), but from the ones I do know I don't think that the ratio on Walker's sets is justified. It would make more sense to simply decrease the number of John's songs on the later sets when there is less of his material to choose from, or to add more songs by Paul (and to a lesser extent by George and Ringo), to reach a more reasonable ratio. It's also interesting to note that Walker has a definite preference for certain albums. He includes most of the songs on albums such as Paul's Flaming Pie and George's Brainwashed in his sets, while including little or nothing from other albums. I don't necessarily have a big problem with this (Flaming Pie and Brainwashed are certainly among the best solo Beatles albums), but there are still albums that are unfairly neglected. Also, while Walker does have a very useful index of songs which indicates the source albums for each and for the truly dedicated a list of suggested edits (some of which, at least, would probably significantly improve the songs in question, though I'm not likely to take the time necessary to do them), it would have been nice to also have a list organized by source albums, which would incidentally show which ones he got most of his selections from, giving those who haven't bought all the solo albums a clearer idea of which ones would be good starting points. Despite these issues, Walker's choices will be useful references for me to consult when I get around to putting together my own Beatles collections for the later years, and I may even be inspired to reconsider a few of my choices on the ones I've already done.
One of the book's strong points is that Walker talks about every song he has chosen for the main sets in varying degrees of detail. Some of the entries focus on the songs themselves, while others are mainly devoted to background stories. Some go off on tangents with only the remotest connection to the song in question, but for the most part they are still very interesting reading. The entries on John's songs are the longest, and are the places where he most often goes into biographical anecdotes. The only problem with these is that Walker seems to use his various sources rather uncritically, repeating occasionally gossipy stories from different biographies, some of which have been criticized for inaccuracy. One exception to Walker's uncritical use of sources is the entry on "Watching the Wheels" where he mentions the possibly biases of May Pang and Elliot Mintz (who he refers to as Yoko Ono's paid "spin-master"). He is rightfully skeptical of John's claim to have seen a UFO, as related in the entry on "Nobody Told Me", but uncritically relates some dubious stories about John's death. Even if some of them are of questionable accuracy, the background stories are still very interesting, and most fans of the Beatles will learn something new from them. For one thing, the overall picture one gets of John and Yoko's relationship is not nearly as rosy as either Yoko or John when he was alive portrayed it. Interestingly, while Walker doesn't blame Yoko for the Beatles' split, he does make a case for her preventing a reunion, as when John was still with May Pang he was contemplating going to drop in on Paul's recording sessions for Venus and Mars, but when he got back together with Yoko this idea was abandoned, and though for a while afterward he was still fairly positive about the idea of a reunion he soon dropped out of music altogether. The stories he relates (some of which I've heard elsewhere) also tend to portray Yoko as cold and manipulative, though he has some positive things to say about her and her music (among his bonus CDs are ones pairing her songs with those of John's sons Julian and Sean).
While I have focused on a number of flaws and areas of disagreement, I still have to conclude that Let’s Put the Beatles Back Together Again 1970-2010 is a worthwhile purchase for any Beatles fan. For all the books written about the Beatles, there are very few that cover the solo releases of all four of them comprehensively. Fans who have not listened to much of Paul, John, George and Ringo's solo output will find this a very useful reference, and while I (and many other fans) might quibble with some of his choices, I have no doubt that anyone who actually assembled Walker's BRC sets would find them to be truly enjoyable albums on par with most of what the Beatles released in the 1960s.
[Update: For a look at a similar book, see my post from the end of 2015 on Still the Greatest: The Essential Songs of the Beatles’ Solo Careers by Andrew Grant Jackson. Also check out more of my own post-break up Beatles albums.]
The first part of the book is devoted to arguments about why it makes sense to assemble the best of the individual Beatles' post-1970 output into Beatles albums. Walker has a tendency to belabor the point about, repeating arguments a little more often than necessary, but he makes a good case. One good point is that the Beatles had already released quite a bit of material that did not involve all of the four and in some cases only involved one. As far back as Paul McCartney's solo recording of "Yesterday" there had been songs released in the Beatles' name that didn't include all of them, and by the time of The Beatles (aka The White Album), many of the songs were recorded without the participation of one or several of the group. In this sense, the post-1970s recordings are just a continuation of this trend, especially since individual members still sometimes recorded together, though of course far less frequently than even in 1968 and 1969, and with far more help from other musicians.
While it is apparent that there is plenty of solo material that is not up to the standards of that released by the Beatles, Walker makes the point that there were at least a few songs released under the Beatles moniker that weren't all that great, and that there are some solo songs that are superior to even decent Beatles songs. I do have a minor problem with one of his examples; while I agree that in the cases of the examples he cites for Paul ("Run Devil Run" vs "Another Girl"), George Harrison ("Any Road" vs "If I Needed Someone"), and Ringo Starr ("It Don't Come Easy" vs "What Goes On") the solo songs are at least slightly better, John's "Nobody Loves You (When You're Down and Out)", while certainly one of his better songs from that period, is by no means equal to "And Your Bird Can Sing" (there are a number of weaker Beatles songs written by John that would have been better examples). Also I disagree with a few of his examples of solo songs that he regards as not "Beatles-worthy", such as "Crackerbox Palace" and "Crippled Inside", with the former in particular being actually quite good. But of course these things are subjective, and the reader can accept his overall argument without agreeing with all his specific examples.
Before he gets down to details on the post-breakup material, Walker gives his reconfigurations of the 1960s albums for CD. While it makes sense to put the singles onto the albums from the same period, I wouldn't go nearly as far as Walker does in messing with the original track sequences, nor would I eliminate as many songs as he does. In fact, I'm not sure that any really should be taken off; while a few early tracks are basically filler, none are truly terrible, and there is some virtue in every track on their later albums (yes, even "Revolution 9"). Admittedly, even Walker does little more than add contemporary singles to the albums from Help on, with the exception of Magical Mystery Tour and The White Album, and it makes sense to assemble a more chronologically-accurate version of Magical Mystery Tour. But I am so used to albums like Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's, and Abbey Road opening and closing as they do in the original formats that I would have trouble getting used to hearing them differently (even if it does make more sense for Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever to be on Sgt. Pepper's than on Magical Mystery Tour), and in the case of even the less unified White Album it would seem a bit odd to hear the track order changed so much. But those who don't want to mess with the original albums can safely skip this section.
Next Walker devotes two chapters to reassessing the Get Back sessions and the material that came out of them. He argues strongly that the negative views of this material and the claims that the sessions were a disaster are wrong. While I agree that some of what has been said and written about the Get Back sessions is excessively negative, Walker overstates his case to some degree. While the Beatles were able to get along better than is often portrayed, the tensions were also quite obvious, and while a much better album could have been assembled from the Get Back sessions than the botched effort by Phil Spector that finally came out as Let It Be, it is still true that overall the songs weren't quite up to the standards of their previous few albums, with a few exceptions like "Let It Be", "Across the Universe" and "The Long and Winding Road". But Walker does provide an alternative viewpoint to the usual critical views of this material.
Though it only starts two-fifths of the way in, the meat of the book is of course the sections on the Beatles' post-breakup songs. Walker uses a fictional alternate history in which the songs that in reality were released on various solo albums instead were released by something he calls the Beatles Releasing Collective (BRC for short), masterminded by a fictional manager named Arnold Zonn (as Walker puts much of the blame for the breakup on the conflict over choice of managers and bad handling of affairs by Allen Klein). I think he spends too much time setting up the BRC concept, which after all is fictional, and I don't agree with the way he groups the releases. While in Walker's fictional timeline singles were released more or less at the same pace as in reality, all the BRC albums are grouped into box sets: Black Box (1973; 3 discs), MoonDogs (1982; 2 discs), Covers (1999; 2 discs), 45 (2000; 3 discs), Live (2009; 4 discs) Singularity (2010; 3 discs) and several bonus sets. Even if the Beatles had agreed to something like the BRC, it is highly unlikely that their songs would have been released in box sets. Box sets were not all that common before the CD era, and I can't think of any significant original releases (as opposed to compilations of previous released material or unreleased outtakes) that were box sets. Furthermore, I'm sure the individual Beatles would have been too impatient to get their songs out on the market to wait years between sets. Of course the advantage to grouping the songs this way is that Walker has a wider selection to pick and choose from, and he can sequence the albums with more freedom. Nevertheless, I prefer my own way of putting together this material, as single albums released more or less annually in the early years and then with less frequency afterwards, though some individual songs might end up getting held back for later release.
Inevitably, I disagree with some of Walker's individual song choices. For one thing, though he argues strongly for Paul being every bit John's equal, something I agree with him completely about, and for both George and Ringo having a lot to contribute as well, his song selections are unbalanced in favor of John's songs. He includes as many or more of John's songs as he does Paul's, even though Paul released far more songs than John. This means he neglects great songs by Paul like "Listen to What the Man Said" in favor of relatively obscure songs by John. I can't judge the merits of all the songs he picks, since there are some I don't have (in particular I don't have the John Lennon Anthology), but from the ones I do know I don't think that the ratio on Walker's sets is justified. It would make more sense to simply decrease the number of John's songs on the later sets when there is less of his material to choose from, or to add more songs by Paul (and to a lesser extent by George and Ringo), to reach a more reasonable ratio. It's also interesting to note that Walker has a definite preference for certain albums. He includes most of the songs on albums such as Paul's Flaming Pie and George's Brainwashed in his sets, while including little or nothing from other albums. I don't necessarily have a big problem with this (Flaming Pie and Brainwashed are certainly among the best solo Beatles albums), but there are still albums that are unfairly neglected. Also, while Walker does have a very useful index of songs which indicates the source albums for each and for the truly dedicated a list of suggested edits (some of which, at least, would probably significantly improve the songs in question, though I'm not likely to take the time necessary to do them), it would have been nice to also have a list organized by source albums, which would incidentally show which ones he got most of his selections from, giving those who haven't bought all the solo albums a clearer idea of which ones would be good starting points. Despite these issues, Walker's choices will be useful references for me to consult when I get around to putting together my own Beatles collections for the later years, and I may even be inspired to reconsider a few of my choices on the ones I've already done.
One of the book's strong points is that Walker talks about every song he has chosen for the main sets in varying degrees of detail. Some of the entries focus on the songs themselves, while others are mainly devoted to background stories. Some go off on tangents with only the remotest connection to the song in question, but for the most part they are still very interesting reading. The entries on John's songs are the longest, and are the places where he most often goes into biographical anecdotes. The only problem with these is that Walker seems to use his various sources rather uncritically, repeating occasionally gossipy stories from different biographies, some of which have been criticized for inaccuracy. One exception to Walker's uncritical use of sources is the entry on "Watching the Wheels" where he mentions the possibly biases of May Pang and Elliot Mintz (who he refers to as Yoko Ono's paid "spin-master"). He is rightfully skeptical of John's claim to have seen a UFO, as related in the entry on "Nobody Told Me", but uncritically relates some dubious stories about John's death. Even if some of them are of questionable accuracy, the background stories are still very interesting, and most fans of the Beatles will learn something new from them. For one thing, the overall picture one gets of John and Yoko's relationship is not nearly as rosy as either Yoko or John when he was alive portrayed it. Interestingly, while Walker doesn't blame Yoko for the Beatles' split, he does make a case for her preventing a reunion, as when John was still with May Pang he was contemplating going to drop in on Paul's recording sessions for Venus and Mars, but when he got back together with Yoko this idea was abandoned, and though for a while afterward he was still fairly positive about the idea of a reunion he soon dropped out of music altogether. The stories he relates (some of which I've heard elsewhere) also tend to portray Yoko as cold and manipulative, though he has some positive things to say about her and her music (among his bonus CDs are ones pairing her songs with those of John's sons Julian and Sean).
While I have focused on a number of flaws and areas of disagreement, I still have to conclude that Let’s Put the Beatles Back Together Again 1970-2010 is a worthwhile purchase for any Beatles fan. For all the books written about the Beatles, there are very few that cover the solo releases of all four of them comprehensively. Fans who have not listened to much of Paul, John, George and Ringo's solo output will find this a very useful reference, and while I (and many other fans) might quibble with some of his choices, I have no doubt that anyone who actually assembled Walker's BRC sets would find them to be truly enjoyable albums on par with most of what the Beatles released in the 1960s.
[Update: For a look at a similar book, see my post from the end of 2015 on Still the Greatest: The Essential Songs of the Beatles’ Solo Careers by Andrew Grant Jackson. Also check out more of my own post-break up Beatles albums.]
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