The Beatles Sgt Peppes

The Beatles: The Collection was a vinyl box set of UK released Beatles LPs, remastered at half speed from the original stereo master recordings. Each album was pressed on virgin vinyl by the Victor Company of Japan (JVC) ensuring the best sound quality possible…

The Beatles: The Collection was a vinyl box set of UK released Beatles LPs, remastered at half speed from the original stereo master recordings. Each album was pressed on virgin vinyl by the Victor Company of Japan (JVC) ensuring the best sound quality possible…

Picking up where 1962-1966 left off, the double-album compilation 1967-1970, commonly called The Blue Album, covers the Beatles' later records, from Sgt. Pepper's through Let It Be. Like The Red Album, The Blue Album was released in the wake of a pair of widely advertised quadruple-LP bootlegs, Alpha Omega, Vols. 1-2: The Story of the Beatles, which had appeared early in 1973. And like its companion volume, this set contains a mixture of hits, including singles like "Lady Madonna," "Hey Jude," and "Revolution" – which had originally appeared only as 45s – plus important album tracks like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," "A Day in the Life," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," and "Come Together," as well as orphaned tracks such as the single versions of "Let It Be" and "Get Back," which had never been on any LP before.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Beatles intended Abbey Road as a grand farewell, a suspicion seemingly confirmed by the elegiac note Paul McCartney strikes at the conclusion of its closing suite. It’s hard not to interpret “And in the end / the love you take / is equal to the love you make” as a summation not only of Abbey Road but perhaps of the group’s entire career, a lovely final sentiment. The truth is perhaps a bit messier than this. The Beatles had tentative plans to move forward after the September 1969 release of Abbey Road, plans that quickly fell apart at the dawn of the new decade, and while the existence of that goal calls into question the intentionality of the album as a finale, it changes not a thing about what a remarkable goodbye the record is.