"I hope we passed the audition"

Paul McCartney thinks that the Beatles’ last album sounds better without Phil Spector’s overdubs. Robert Hayes looks back at the Let It Be saga and concludes that it’s remarkable anything ever came out at all . . .

I t would appear that Sir Paul McCartney is a man who can hold a grudge. One particular grudge is against one Mr. Phil Spector. If the legendary producer’s current hassles over allegations of murder weren’t enough, Macca has definitively thumbed his nose at Spector by releasing Let It Be . . . Naked. The album represents the Beatle’s own, bare-bones version of the notorious 1969 tapes that — beside a few tracks on Anthology 3 — have until now been only officially available with Spector’s “syrupy” orchestral overdubs.

But why has McCartney decided to release Let It Be . . . Naked now? And why was he so aggrieved about Spector’s version of the record anyway? As all Beatles fans now know, the album that was to become Let It Be was originally slated to be called Get Back — a record that would be the group’s first release of 1969 and a return to the simple, no-overdubs, “live” recordings of their early days. But, due to the tortuous rehearsals over the month of January 1969 in various locations, the uninspiring finished product meant that the album remained incomplete until Spector was handed the project by Lennon. Following a brief polishing and a number of “controversial” overdubs, it …

by Robert Hayes
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