Sound quality is so poor it is hard for me to enjoy

Poor sound quality, but an essential record for Beatles collectors.

Liner NotesIn 1959, on the eve of an important audition, a budding Liverpool rock 'n' roll group was wanting a lot; a bass player that could play, a drummer, even a name. The last was the easiest to get. Charter members Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison were big fans of Buddy Holly and The Crickets, but besides the group's music they especially like the group's name. Thinking of Crickets, John toyed with other insect names until beetles came to mind, except he spelled it Beatles to play on the idea of beat music. The casual name survived to become the synonym for a musical revolution, the symbol of an era.Eventually, the Beatles did get their bass player (Paul made the switch) and their drummer (Pete Best signed on in 1960), and by 1962 the quartet had bloomed, not in Liverpool, but in Hamburg, the German equivalent of the boys' northern port hometown.How they went from Liverpool to Hamburg was via Alan Williams, sage nightclub man and part-time impresario. Williams had dispatched Derry and the Seniors to Hamburg in 1959, the first Liverpool groups to perform there. Their success proved a market for additional imported talent was there. The Beatles were also successful. An odd amalgam of rockers and artsy intellectuals gradually coalesced around them and proved loyal, and lucrative, enough to warrant additional engagements in the city.The Beatles' third stint in Hamburg took place in April-May, 1962. This time they arrived by plane, the idea of Brian Epstein, the group's self-signed, first-time manager. Now they were playing the brand-new Star Club, the largest club of its kind in the city, and although considerably more prestigious than their earlier gigs, it still meant the grueling, on-again, off-again pace (sometimes twelve hours straight) they'd come to know during their first Hamburg date.Between sets, the Beatles had a chance to sit around with friends and recoup their forces before hitting the stage again. One of their friends was Richard Starkey - Ringo Starr.Like the others, Ringo was a product of Liverpool, but he first met the Beatles at the Kaiserkeller, a club in Hamburg. He found his way to Hamburg in much the same way as they did, arriving as an imported British band member. Ringo did a few stand-in engagements with the Beatles at the Star Club, then joined the group permanently in Liverpool on August 16, 1962.Those sets at the Star Club marked the Beatles' first performances with Ringo, and the tapes made then now comprise the first live recordings of the Beatles as we came to know them - with John, Paul, George and Ringo together.The Historic First Live Recordings were originally recorded rather haphazardly by fellow Liverpooler King Size Taylor (of King Size Taylor and The Dominoes). His careless recording technique created some problems a decade later when the tape was rediscovered and its release on record planned. Needless to say, Taylor's tape, made on a monaural home tape recorder, left much to be desired in the way of sonics. But the historic value of these early performances clearly warranted extraordinary measures being taken, so before the sound was stamped in vinyl the tape was subjected to a pair of electronic face-lifts costing well over $100,000.First the tape was converted into a 16-track recording. Then each track was meticulously separated by an array of noise suppressors, equalizers and noise gates to remove extraneous crowd noise and restore the appropriate prominence of the lead and background vocals. The final remix is as faithful as humanly possible to the sound of the Beatles' first 1962 performances.Now at last we can hear what till recently only a handful of Hamburg club goers had ever experienced - the Beatles live, at their career's inception. These two discs comprise some of the most significant rock 'n' roll recordings ever made available. They reflect the state of the art of four revolutionary musicians before the honing of international superstardom, and recall the primal building blocks of artists moving to echo and change a world ready to listen.- Howard Brinkman