It’s all easy enough to grasp onto and appreciate, though understandable that its rough edges weren’t up to the polish of released Beatles music. On “Don’t Let Me Down,” Lennon’s vocals are rougher and Preston’s solo much looser.
“One After 909,” an early Lennon and McCartney song, really cooks - George Harrison’s crinkly little guitar fills slip in and out of the verses as Preston chugs along on the electric piano to the rhythm of Lennon’s guitar, McCartney’s bass and Ringo Starr’s drums. Tracking through the Get Back mix, you really get a feel for how tight a band the Beatles were. The crème de la crème may very well be the 14-track Get Back mix by engineer Glyn Johns in May 1969. The guitars have more bark on “I Dig A Pony,” “I’ve Got A Feeling” and “One After 909.” The strings, the choir, and the harp drift to the fore in “Across The Universe.” Paul McCartney’s “tack” piano has more snap on “For You Blue.” The surround and Atmos mixes by producer Giles Martin and engineer Sam Okell simply up the ante for those looking for a deeper, more immersive experience. The remixed Let It Be, stripped naked in 2003, is back to its old self, flush with Phil Spector’s overproduction, though pumped and filtered with sonic steroids. They should want his set for that reason alone. Hardcore collectors claim they have it all - which may be true - but the sound quality of the boots is typically inferior.
The real attraction, however, are the mixes - a new stereo mix in hi-res 96kHz/24-bit, plus new 5.1 surround DTS and Dolby Atmos mixes, as well as the elusive 1969 Glyn Johns mix. Even Billy Preston gets to strut his stuff, vocally and on the piano on the 1929 standard “Without A Song.” There’s also rough run-throughs of “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window,” “Polythene Pam,” “Oh! Darling,” “Octopus’s Garden,” and “Something,” which all landed on Abbey Road, as well songs later recorded for solo albums like “All Things Must Pass,” “Gimme Some Truth” and “Teddy Boy” (complete with John Lennon’s incessant “do-si-do” call).
The 15-minute “Dig It” jam didn’t make the cut, but there’s a four-minute version. Pepper ’s Lonely Hearts Club Band(2017), The BEATLES (aka The White Album) (2018), and Abbey Road (2019) the set includes multiple versions of “Let It Be,” Don’t Let Me Down,” “Get Back,” and all the other songs on the original Let It Be. Modeled after expanded anniversary editions of Sgt. In contrast, Let It Be Special Edition features six discs, including the original album, in a far more structured format. Get Back / Let It Be bootlegs have been floating around for decades, though a good chunk of the material is fragmented bits of freeform jamming, oldies and multiple versions of new songs, unreleased songs - and then some. In the meantime, we have Let It Be Special Edition, which includes a host of extras and embellishments that Beatles fans can savor before they spend six hours in front of the tube to see what else happened. That will change when Peter Jackson’s three-part docuseries The Beatles: Get Back finally comes to Disney +.
The 80-minute film provided a skewed view of the Beatles and how they worked it’s been challenged and reinterpreted for years because it didn’t tell the full story. To anyone who watched the Let It Be movie, it was a sad end to one of the greatest success stories in modern times. Yet it retains an aura, an enigmatic curiosity because of the circumstances in which it was made. Let it Be, the last studio album released (though not recorded) by the Beatles, is one of the most maligned albums in history.