I’m listening this morning to one of the great albums of the early 1980s, Jim Carroll’s Catholic Boy. Vastly better than his Basketball Diaries, it doesn’t let you go. There are no slow spots, no filler songs, and its most well-known song isn’t even close to its best.

I joke about this frequently, but this is my roots music. Directly descended from the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith, straight-up New York City punk, about a Catholic boy whose financial circumstances were quite different than mine (and who is closer in age to my parents than me) but with all the baggage that comes along with growing up Catholic in NYC. I skipped the heroin and the prep schools, not to speak of the basketball stardom, and none of my friends died when I was in high school, but in the end, that’s not what Catholic Boy is really about.

And they can’t touch me now
I got every sacrament behind me
I got baptism, I got penance
I got communion, I got extreme unction*
Man, I’ve got confirmation

I was a Catholic boy
Redeemed through pain
And not through joy

And now I’m a Catholic man
I put my tongue to the rail whenever I can

*”Extreme unction” is the sacrament of last rites, the one you get when you die. He certainly didn’t have that sacrament then, and I doubt he has it now, but the way he sings that line is perhaps the best moment on the entire album.

No thanks to Jerks & Rudeness on Park Row, I finally got my Beatles In Mono box yesterday. (And thanks to rosiebird for suggesting barnesandnoble.com; I cancelled my Amazon order which was to ship somewhere between Sept. 16 and Sept. 27.)

Obviously I haven’t had a chance to listen to all of it yet. The first thing I put on was the mono Sgt. Pepper, which I’d never heard. Wow. It really is a different and better album in mono.

Let’s back up for a moment. Why mono? When the Beatles first began, only audiophiles had stereo equipment and the music usually released in stereo was for that audience — classical and jazz. Pop music was played on record players. Not turntables, not stereos, but record players, like the kind we had at home when I was young, with a cover that latched down and a handle so you could lug it to your friends’ house. And it was broadcast on AM radio. All of which were monaural, meaning, just one channel. No left and right channels like we’re all used to in our headphones. I listened to most pop music in mono, on a cassette player, on my little red-ball AM radio, until I was in high school.

The Beatles, mindful of their audience, released all their music in both stereo and mono mixes for their entire careers. And for two-thirds of that period, the mono mix was the more important of the two. That was the one they supervised personally, and listened to when they were deciding what to release. Stereo mixes were usually done later, sometimes years later, by staff engineers, perhaps overseen by George Martin. It wasn’t until the very last of their albums that they worked primarily on the stereo mix, with a mono mix being created by “folding down” the stereo mix, centering both channels. The original mono mixes were not created like that; the albums were specifically mixed for mono, and then stereo versions were created later from the master tapes.

Have you ever noticed that “I’m Looking Through You” has a false start sometimes, and sometimes doesn’t? The stereo mix had the false start and the mono mix didn’t. Have you ever noticed the moment in “If I Fell” where Paul’s voice breaks badly trying to hit a harmony note? That’s only on the stereo mix.

Sgt. Pepper in mono is quite different. A number of the songs are faster in mono than they were in stereo. Some songs are longer or shorter, and the emphasis changes for some of them. “Good Morning, Good Morning,” one of my favorite obscure Beatles songs, really caught my attention. The kickoff is crisper, the brass and guitar are much higher in the mix, and in general it’s a hotter song. Overall, it’s a better album and I can now understand the disappointment of people who replaced their original mono copy of the album with a stereo version.

I’ve also listened to the “Mono Masters,” the singles and other songs that never appeared on the original UK albums. Some of them are magnificent — “Paperback Writer” in particular. The guitars punch and the bass (pushed higher in the mixing and mastering over the objections of conservative EMI engineers after the Beatles demanded to know why the bass sounded so much better on American pop records) really drives the song.

I’m listening to the White Album right now and I hear all sorts of things — different instrumental fills, different solos, changes in endings, etc. These differences are subtle; many would probably be unnoticeable to most listeners. But I spent a lot of time listening to Beatles music, at a very impressionable age, and I know every damn note of these songs, and they’re surprisingly different. And better.

Some of this may also be due to the remastering process; I’ll be very interested to compare these albums to the stereo box that I hope will arrive on Monday. And I should also say, to all the purists, that I don’t think the mono versions of their early albums will ever eclipse the U.S. stereo versions that I grew up with (which, as Bruce Spizer points out in this excellent essay, are not nearly as bad as some critics like to say), which were released a few years ago on the Capitol Boxes (which I wrote about at length when I got them a few years ago).

(Side note: I was wildy amused to see that J&R quoted a post I wrote a little while ago about how much I like to buy albums there. I wonder if they’ll delete the comment I just made, linking to my post from Wednesday about my attempt to buy the Beatles boxes.)

I like record stores. I am thankful that the last major record store in NYC is the locally owned J&R, rather than Tower or Virgin. They’ve always had a better selection and better prices, and I’ve been climbing those stairs now for something like 25 years.

But today, they made me reconsider. Today is the release date for the newly remastered Beatles albums. I could have ordered them on Amazon, but I wanted to go buy them in person (I’m old fashioned that way) and I wanted to do so at J&R. So I showed up there at 9am, when they open, to see a line all the way down the block. OK, fine. I got in line, hoping to score one of the box sets. They let people in very slowly, maybe five people every ten minutes, and then announced they were sold out. Despite repeated questioning, they never offered any details on why the line was moving so slowly or how many boxes they had in stock. They never came out to tell people like me, farther back in the line, that there was no chance we’d get a box. They just pushed us around, ignored questions, and then shouted “No more.”

One of the employees (you’d recognize him if you were a regular shopper) came down the line asking if we wanted to advance order the set. No, I said, based on the way you treated us, I’ll be ordering it online. “Good luck finding it online,” he snarled. But I’d been browsing Amazon on my phone, and had already ordered both sets (the stereo as well as the mono, which he said was “plain gone”), and they will be here in a few weeks.

So, I’m disappointed not to have the set today, but I will have them soon, and at considerably cheaper prices than J&R charges, and without the hassle and the rudeness. I generally try to buy things locally, especially books and records, whenever I can. Between music, computers, and stereo equipment, I’m sure I’ve spent well over $10,000 at J&R over the years, maybe quite a bit more. But experiences like this make me much less likely to bother.

Anyone get their hands on a Beatles box today? Where?

Last week’s New York Times magazine had an article about the upcoming release of Rock Band: The Beatles. A while back I posted about my one and only experience with Rock Band’s competitor, Guitar Hero, which left me not only unimpressed by the game but depressed at the thought of kids practicing for hours to flap a flipper when they could be learning to play real music.

This article made me think a bit about that, although it doesn’t really change my mind. Apparently Rock Band is a little more cooperative than Guitar Hero — you play with other players, not against them — and the Beatles version in particular has no scoring or points mechanism.

In some respects I’m intrigued by the game. Giles Martin, an original Beatle once-removed (he’s the son of George Martin, their producer) has worked very carefully, under the direction of The Shareholders (Paul and Ringo, along with George’s son and widow, and Yoko Ono) to decompose the Beatles’ songs into playable parts and map them to the fake instruments. Decomposing these often-intricate songs like that is interesting.

One game developer says, “Ringo is going to earn a lot more admirers when this gets out in the world and people see how sophisticated and challenging some of his drumbeats actually are.” Of course, the drums are the one instrument in the game whose controller actually resembles the real instrument; I doubt anyone will gain an appreciation for George’s guitar skills or Paul’s (prodigious) bass skills.

But overall I still think it’s a waste of time. Changes like that are probably necessary to make the game enjoyable; my issues with it are much more basic. This is not playing music. One of the game’s designers says it “gets you maybe 50 percent of the way [towards the feeling of playing music] with 3 percent of the effort.” I don’t think that’s true; I don’t think it gets these kids any closer to playing music than I got flailing at a piece of wood lathe in time with Beatles songs when I was a kid. It has the same relationship to music as pornography does to sex; I’m sure the day is not far off when we’ll have interactive sex toys, but they won’t be anything like actual sex.

Everybody seems to think I’m lazy…