Thursday, July 23, 2009

August 15, 1965 - Raw Shea Stadium Recordings

It's no surprise really that the Beatles felt the need to go over their live recordings made at Shea Stadium in 1965 and make overdubs, given the fact that the Beatles did not have monitor speakers (so they were unable to actually to properly hear what they were playing or how they were singing). On January 5, 1966, the Beatles went into CTS Studios in London an overdubbed new bass tracks, an organ track, and made entirely new recordings for "I Feel Fine" and "Help!" while watching their Shea footage on screen in the studio to match them up. Instead of recording a new version of "Act Naturally," they just scrapped it and inserted the original studio version they had done for the Help! LP. The most obvious sweetening occurred during "Twist and Shout," where part of a live version from the Hollywood Bowl (recorded August 30, 1965) was put overtop, briefly resulting in a double-tracked vocal from John!

This was how people heard the Shea Stadium concert (mostly through the TV special) until more recently. The original audio for "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" (a song cut from the special) was included on Anthology 2 and a bit of the live audio feed for "Act Naturally" surfaced in conjunction with a television appearance from Ringo on Phil Donahue's show. The original live audio of Shea Stadium was then sold at auction, followed by a release from His Master's Choice in 2007 of the line recordings called The Beatles and the Great Concert at Shea. This has meant that people with a bit of patience have been able to sync up the Shea footage presented in the original special and the remastered footage from the Anthology series to present the concert as it originally looked and sounded, the results of which are presented below.

Samples


Twist and Shout:


She's a Woman:


I Feel Fine:


Act Naturally:

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