By Eliot Wilder / "This is a new phase Beatles album," it read on the back cover, "... essential to the content of the film, Let It Be was that they performed live for many of the tracks." Which they did, sort of. But because being a Beatle at the time wasn't so fab, many of the performances were, as John Lennon commented, "the shittiest load of badly recorded shit." As the story goes, the tracks were eventually farmed out to Phil Spector, mostly at Lennon and George Harrison's behest, and what was eventually released in May 1970 was the album history has come to know as Let It Be. End of tale. But not quite.

Although Paul McCartney was there at the time to accept an Oscar for Best Soundtrack, he has down the years been vocal about his disdain for Spector's tinkering, which amounted to adding choirs, orchestras, horns and the kitchen sink - in other words, Spector did what he had always had done - to the mix.

Especially irksome to McCartney was the Wall of Soundman's over-egging of "The Long and Winding Road," which McCartney says he'd written with Ray Charles in mind, but which wound up sounding more worthy of Ray Conniff. What started an earnest attempt for the Beatles to get back to where they once belonged - the pure and simple approach of their earliest works - ended being anything but. And yes, it was terribly ironic that master of overkill Phil Spector was handed the production reins on a project that was intended to be Beatles Unplugged. But the fact of the matter is that, looking back, Let It Be reflects exactly where the Beatles were with both themselves and with their art: in almost total disarray but still not without a clutch of decent songs in their kit.

I'd be the first to admit that Let It Be is not my favorite Beatles record (that'd be the White Album), but, still, it's fucking Let It Be. Brilliant or not, it's an untouchable monument stuck in time. Which is why I'm finding it tough to get behind the recent Let It Be ... Naked.

First, the title sucks. Second, Naked is a misnomer. I've been listening intently to the tracks on headphones, and even though they are incredibly warm, clear and even raw, they aren't, as the ad tagline originally went, "as nature intended." Not to be picayune, but I do hear overdubs (with McCartney on tack piano, who is playing the bass line on "For You Blue"?), and many of the edits that Spector made to the material - such as deleting the "All I want is you" phrase from the beginning and end of "Dig a Pony," doubling the length of "I Me Mine" and adding acoustic dubs on "Two of Us" - are still there. Also, someone has futzed with the ending of the newly nuded "Across the Universe," ProTooling on a beautiful but not-of-its-time coda.

Granted, Naked is still a charming, albeit modest, record, one I'm happy to have and one I will likely play lots. But my issue is not whether Naked comes off artistically or not, but how McCartney, now that Lennon and Harrison are no longer with us, is rather opportunistically rewriting history. Bad form, man. It was disconcerting enough when he recently sought to transpose the iconic Lennon/McCartney songwriting credit on certain tunes. Hey, we all know that it was you who wrote "Yesterday," OK? Sheesh! You're only tainting your own legacy, because such actions only make you look desperate and a bit pathetic.

It's not that I can't understand the tendency to want to go back and re-record that vocal that didn't quite come off or put the drums in the center of the stereo spectrum or overdub a flubbed note on a guitar solo or take out all that overwrought Spectorian stuff. But imagine if, say, late in life, Picasso had decided that the whole cubist thing had been a goof and decided to repaint his work using an airbrush.

C'mon, Paul, let history be.

From Amplifier magazine