Finally Hearing Sgt. Peppers

When the remixed version of Sgt. Peppers was released a few weeks ago, I paid no attention. I’ve had way too many of my favorite albums and artists released and re-released and remastered to fall yet again for what I thought was just another marketing trick to squeeze a few more bucks out of a band’s aging (but brilliant!) catalog.

I could not possibly have been more wrong.

It was Michael Sippey’s article On the remixed Sgt Pepper that pushed me over the edge. I decided to sit down and really give the new remix a proper listen: sitting in my living room, volume up, negroni at my side, I pressed “play.”

In short, it blew my mind. Imagine walking past a favorite photo every day for several decades: a poster-sized print, but it’s a photocopy of a photocopy of a black and white photo. You can make out the general image, but the details are lost to time.

This remix is as though someone replaced that crappy old photocopy with a high-resolution color print on metal:the details and clarity nearly brought me to tears. There’s so much there there. I’ve now listened to it multiple times on my stereo, my favorite earphones, and just about every other way I could listen to music and it brings a smile to my face every time, from the smash of the opening chord of the title track to the depth of the slippery notes of the tabla on Within You Without You to the fat roundness of the clarinet on When I’m Sixty-Four. I could go on.

I won’t get into the mono vs. stereo fight here, but I’ll just say this: this stereo mix has gorgeous imaging and gives the solid, clear stage to the music that it’s always deserved (and shines a bright light on just how sloppy and amateurish the previous stereo mix was).

More like this please. How about the rest of the Beatles catalog followed by Zeppelin?

Thanks — if you need me I’ll be the guy with his earphones on grinning like a damned fool.