The Beatles: I Always Give Them My Money

Shortly after my seventh birthday, Dad bought home the newly released 1962-1966 (aka Red) and 1967-1970 (aka Blue) eight-track tapes by The Beatles. The tapes immediately became the most played tapes in his 1968 Chevelle SS 396, his portable General Electric M8615A Solid State Stereo, and the Panasonic RS-820S Stereo Recorder Receiver in our basement. The more than half-a-year reign of popularity of those four wonderful tapes came to an end when Ringo was released late in 1973 though I remember he kept rotating them back into the tape case he kept in the car.

I absorbed all those Beatles songs through many repeated listens and gravitated toward the songs on the so-called Blue Album. The two 1967-1970 tapes were my favorites, with the first tape 1967-1970 Part 1 containing nearly all of my favorite Beatles tracks then and now.

Around 1983, I welcomed the first Beatles records into my collection with brand-new copies of both double albums on vinyl. They are the 1976 represses and still reside on the vinyl wall despite multiple reissues and opportunities to acquire replacements. I dubbed both albums to three TDK SA90 cassettes to listen to on my Walkman and in my car. Many songs from those albums also made their way to the many mixtapes I made in the mid to late Eighties.

The Red and Blue albums debuted on the CD format in 1993. The discs were something of a revelation sound-wise and, as the new millennium dawned, were among the first albums to be ripped and added to my first iPod using MusicMatch Jukebox in 2002 as iTunes software hadn't been released for Windows yet. Those first CD pressings featured 1962-1966 issued in a red "Fatboy" style case and 1967-1970 issued in a blue "Fatboy" style case. According to a brief initial report in ICE issue 77 from August 1993, the CD release date was originally scheduled to be September 21, 1993, but was then pushed back to October 5th, according to this follow-up report in issue 78 of ICE:

When the Red and Blue albums were released again in 2010, they featured cardboard tri-fold packaging with the fresh remastering from the much-heralded Beatles album reissue campaign of 2009. Once again, I plunked my money down without hesitation. By that time, I was keeping my CDs in CAN-AM drawers rather than on shelving units and I was thrilled at how small the packaging was for these digipaks, taking up about a third of the space that the "Fatboy" cases did.

When it was announced late in October 2023 that both Red and Blue were going to be re-released yet again with newly expanded tracklistings and extensive remastering from Giles Martin, I preordered the digital versions (compact discs in Digisleeves and 24/96 hi-res files) and then tried to avoid the comments on and reviews of these new (old) albums until hearing them. It was well worth the wait with only one track failing to impress and the less said about it, the better. The newly remixed and remastered songs sound almost transcendent to these weened-on-the-eight-track-version ears; in many instances, it was like hearing the songs again for the first time. The discs and files were all that I listened to for a solid ten days and when folks would ask about them, I'd testify to the joy the music continued to bring after fifty years.

After years of ingrained listening to the original running order, the rejiggered tracklistings took some getting used to during the first few listens. Soon enough, the songs settled into their new sequence and sounded more like a natural flow rather than a strange new playlist. When a friend shared rips of his 2023 vinyl versions of the Red and Blue albums a few months later, I rearranged the files before loading them into the Vox app so that the tracklisting matched the compact discs because that is how I prefer to hear the albums now.