Past Masters is the ugly but brilliant sibling of the Beatles discography. Originally released as two separate discs in 1988, it's a catchall for all the stuff the Beatles officially released during their existence that wasn't intended for their albums (and didn't end up on the after-the-fact album Magical Mystery Tour). It's slapped together chronologically, so it begins with an unprepossessing alternate take of "Love Me Do" and ends with the ludicrous doodle "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)". And, between them, it includes some of the best pop songs ever recorded-- scratch that: some of the best pop singles ever recorded.
It can be hard to grasp the way it used to work if you've grown up with the basic unit of pop music as the album or the individual song, but the model the Beatles grew up with-- and arguably broke-- was the 45 RPM single: two songs sold together, one of them aspiring to popular success and the other one a sort of lagniappe. They treated their own singles not just as hit-plus-filler but as an often-complementary pair: the massive humanist crescendo of "Hey Jude" paired with the corrective political fireball of "Revolution", the frantic urgency of "Paperback Writer" paired with the dreamy involution of "Rain", John Lennon's bitter, betrayed "Day Tripper" paired with Paul McCartney's hopeful, clear-eyed "We Can Work It Out".
For that matter, their singles weren't simply teasers for an album: Of the 22 singles (and two EPs) the Beatles released in the UK between 1962 and 1970, more than half weren't initially part of a bigger unit. Their first non-album single, "From Me to You", came out all of three weeks after Please Please Me; "I Want to Hold Your Hand" emerged a week after With the Beatles. "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" was actually released-- as a double A-side-- the same day as Rubber Soul, on which neither side appeared. By that point, they were basically just showing off.
Most of the first disc of Past Masters is the product the Beatles were being pushed to crank out over the first three years of their recording career: The three-covers-and-a-leftover Long Tall Sally EP, German recordings of a couple of hits, a version of Larry Williams' "Bad Boy" that filled out an American LP. It also features the two phenomenal, headlong late 1963 singles that transformed them from a perfectly nice Liverpool band to The Goddamn Beatles: "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand". It's a testament to the Beatles' gamechanging originality that the opportunistic American bands who tried to make a few bucks by covering those songs over the following few months couldn't even play them right-- the harmonies of "She Loves You" and the delicious rhythmic trick that introduces "I Want to Hold Your Hand" flummoxed every one of them.
The astonishing stuff continues on the second disc: seven A-side/B-side pairs, plus an alternate version of John's devotional "Across the Universe". "Paperback Writer"/"Rain" was the single where they moved away from their great subject of love, and where Ringo Starr perfected his uncanny ability to shift the beat just enough that the band seemed to be hovering a few inches above the ground. George Harrison's "The Inner Light"-- a spaced-out setting from the Tao Te Ching, on which he's backed up by Indian musicians-- is a momentum-killer in the context of an album (as it is here), but it made sense as part of a yin-and-yang pair with Paul's earthy Fats Domino homage "Lady Madonna".
And then there's their biggest-selling single and deepest pairing of songs, "Hey Jude"/"Revolution". McCartney is singing about Lennon's son, Lennon is shouting about the system and culture about which they're embedded; "Jude" wraps its arms around the world and gets everyone to join in its mantra, "Revolution" pushes the idiots away with the nastiest noise the Beatles had ever made. It was also the first release on the Beatles' own label, Apple Records-- or, rather, one of two singles that came out the same day. (The other was Mary Hopkin's "Those Were the Days", which knocked it off the top of the British charts after a couple of weeks.) As a seven-minute song on an album of three-minute songs, "Hey Jude" inevitably overpowers its context; as a free-floating sound file without "Revolution", it's missing the sting that tempers its sweetness. But if you find yourself taking advantage of the reissue-and-"Rock Band" frenzy to sit down and really listen to the magnificent recordings that have spent the last four decades or so as inescapable background music, remember the way much of these two discs were meant to be heard and understood: two by two.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]
