The Beatles (16 page)

LIVE AT THE BBC

In 1982 Kevin Howlett looked through the BBC’s archives of radio sessions with the Beatles and produced a programme called
Beatles At The Beeb.
Shortly afterwards, discussions began between EMI and the BBC to get the material released. However, it wasn’t until 1994 that the right climate prevailed between the Beatles, Apple and EMI which enabled the project to be actualised.

Howlett took the BBC tapes to George Martin at Abbey Road where Martin digitally remastered the 58 tracks which survived from the 88 songs which the Beatles had played live on BBC radio. In fact, only 57 of the tracks had survived in the BBC archives. The 58th was secured from a fan who had contacted Howlett in 1988, during the transmission of another Beatles series.

These robust live performances didn’t have the benefit of multitrack recording facilities, overdubs or remixes and so provide an undoctored example of what the Beatles sounded like during the peak of their performing career. John and Paul learned to write songs by emulating the great singles of their youth. Trying these cover versions out on audiences taught them what worked and helped them to understand why. Bit by bit they began to drop the cover versions for songs of their own which created the same mood.

Live At The BBC
illustrates this growth. Of the songs they cover, 76% were from between 1954 and 1959, when they were serving their apprenticeship in Liverpool. Almost half the cover songs were written by a handful of writers they revered – Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, Goffin and King and Leiber and Stoller.

The double album
Live At The BBC
was released in November 1994 and went on to sell over 8 million copies.

I’LL BE ON MY WAY

‘I’ll Be On My Way’ was the only unreleased Lennon-McCar tney song to be included on Live At The BBC and, as such, the first Lennon-McCartney song played by the Beatles to be released since May 1970.

Written by Paul in 1961 in emulation of Buddy Holly it was included in the group’s reper toire over the next two years but wasn’t played at the Decca audition, an indication that it had already fallen out of favour. It was given to their stable mate Billy J. Kramer who used it as the flip side of ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret?’ in April 1963.

The lyric serves as a reminder that the Beatles didn’t start out as artistic visionaries but simply rearranged existing clichés. Here ‘June light’ turns to ‘moon light’ (naturally) and the lovelorn narrator is forced into exile where ‘golden rivers flow’ and ‘the winds don’t blow’. It sounds like the rim of an active volcano, but maybe Paul had something else in mind.

John, typically, poured scorn on the song when asked about it in 1980: it was precisely the sort of pop that had always made him uncomfortable because it stifled the individual point of view with a raft of stock phrases. Paul wasn’t quite so harsh when he looked back. It was “a bit too June-moon” he conceded, but it had “worked out quite well” for the group in their early shows.

ANTHOLOGY 1–3

The three double albums that comprise the
Anthology
set owe their genesis to an exercise in 1984 when engineer John Barrett was given the task of collating all the Beatles material in EMI’s archives. Out of hundreds of hours of recordings he identified three unreleased tracks. EMI made test pressings and approached the remaining Beatles with the suggestion of an album. At the time, no agreement on a release could be reached.

Five years later, in an unrelated move, Apple’s long-time manager Neil Aspinall revived a documentary idea he’d abandoned in 1969. He wanted to collect together all the best film footage of the Beatles for a television series that would tell their story in their words. He wanted the remaining Beatles to come together and record some new incidental music. The project would be called
The Long And Winding Road.

The album of unreleased songs and the documentary series eventually coalesced into
Anthology.
The planned incidental music was dropped in favour of recording two new Beatles tracks. “As the thought of the three of us sitting down in a studio got nearer, I got cold feet about it,” said Paul. “I thought, Does the world need a three-quarter Beatle record? But what if John was on, the three of us and John, like a real new record? If only we could pull off the impossible, that would be more fun, a bigger challenge.”

The apparently impossible was pulled off when Yoko agreed to let them use two demo cassettes of unfinished songs by John as the basis for new Beatles tracks. These eventually became singles which helped to promote not only the six-hour documentary series but the
Anthology
albums.

Anthology
was not a soundtrack to the documentary series but an aural counterpart made up of alternative takes, unreleased tracks, live performances, early demos and brief snatches of interview. Out of the 139 songs on the collection, 28 were cover versions.

The greatest interest was naturally in the 21 new Beatles compositions, some of which had only previously been heard performed by other artists or on rare bootlegs. These ranged from poor-quality home recordings that were purely of historical value to completed studio tracks that had been ousted from albums only for reasons of space.

The general critical response to these rarities was that the Beatles original judgment to drop them or give them away had been sound. They could probably have had a hit with ‘Come And Get It’ and it’s hard to see why ‘Not Guilty’ didn’t find a place on
The White Album
but otherwise none of these ‘new’ songs enhanced their reputation. They merely confirmed what we had assumed, which was that the Beatles had already given us their best.

FREE AS A BIRD

‘Free As A Bird’ was essentially a novelty single designed to attract attention to the
Anthology
project. The novelty was that it would be the first new Beatles single in 25 years and would, in sound at least, reunite the most popular pop group the world has known.

There was feverish media excitement surrounding the release of the record, which was encouraged by EMI’s publicity department. An early press release read, “The single, copies of which are currently under armed guard outside the UK, will be released worldwide on MONDAY DECEMBER 4 [1995].”

Nothing could hope to live up to these expectations but, in the event, ‘Free As A Bird’ was plausibly Beatles-sounding (circa 1969) although obviously hampered by the restraints of having been built around a discarded fragment of a John Lennon song that had been recorded on a cassette machine.

The events that led to the recording began on January 1, 1994 when Paul called Yoko to wish her a Happy New Year This act of reconciliation led to further conversations and then a meeting when Paul attended John’s induction into the Rock’n’Roll Hall Of Fame. During this time together they discussed the possibility of the remaining Beatles working on John’s home demos. Yoko offered three tracks for consideration – ‘Real Love’, ‘Grow Old With Me’ and ‘Free As A Bird’.

“I liked ‘Free As A Bird’ immediately,” Paul said. “I liked the melody. It had strong chords and it really appealed to me…The great thing was that John hadn’t finished it. On the middle eight he was just blocking out lyrics that he didn’t have yet. That meant that we had to come up with something, and that now I was actually working ‘with John’.”

John probably first worked on the song at home in New York during the latter part of 1977. On October 4th of that year he and Yoko held a press conference in Japan to announce that they were both putting their careers on hold to concentrate on raising their son Sean.

Several of the songs he began during this period dealt with his new life as a house husband. In ‘I’m Stepping Out’, ‘Watching The Wheels’, ‘Beautiful Boy’ and ‘Cleanup Time’ he wrote of the strange sense of freedom he felt in abandoning the life of a celebrity for domestic duties.

Like many people psychologically wounded in early life, John craved attention and then spurned it when it came. Interviewed by
Rolling Stone
in 1970 his first comment was, “If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It’s no fun being an artist.” His final comment, after being asked how he saw himself at 64, was in a similar vein. “I hope we’re a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland or something like that – looking at our scrapbook of madness.”

For John, a stable family home had been the one thing that had always eluded him. With Sean and Yoko, he was determined to hang on to what he had got. ‘Free As A Bird’ was written to express his delight at being set free from the demands of celebrity and from the artistic pressure of having to compete with his earlier selves. He was, as he sings, ‘home and dry’.

For the middle section of the song John had only the couplet ‘Whatever happened to/The life that we once knew?’, lines reminiscent of the belief he had expressed in ‘Help!’, ‘Strawberry
Fields Forever’ and ‘In My Life’ that his childhood was the most idyllic time of his life. Paul’s additional lines subvert this train of thought, turning it into a longing for healed relationships – presumably his own with John.

Recording took place in February and March of 1994 at Paul’s studio in Sussex with production credits being shared between the Beatles and former Electric Light Orchestra vocalist/guitarist Jeff Lynne. John’s original cassette was transferred to tape and the sound digitally remastered. “We then took the liberty of beefing the song up with different chord changes and different arrangements,” said George Harrison.

The project was approached as if John was still alive and that he and Paul were still working on each other’s unfinished songs. “We came up with this holiday scenario,” said Paul. “I rang up Ringo and said let’s pretend that John’s gone on holiday and he’s sent us a cassette and said, ‘Finish it up for me’.”

George Martin, who had produced every other Beatles single, gave it a cautious blessing but felt that it lacked dynamics because they hadn’t been able to successfully separate the piano and vocals on the original cassette and had put it in a rigid time beat to make overdubbing easier.

“They stretched it and compressed it and put it around until it got to a regular waltz control click and then they were done,” he said. “The result was that, in order to conceal the bad bits, they had to plaster it fairly heavily so that what you ended up with was quite a thick homogeneous sound that hardly stops.”

‘Free As A Bird’ reached number two in the British charts and number six in America.

REAL LOVE

‘Real Love’ was a song John had worked on for at least two years and, although many people weren’t aware of it, a version was used in the 1988 soundtrack to Andrew Solt’s documentary
Imagine.

It began as a song called ‘Real Life’, the verses of which later became ‘I’m Stepping Out’, posthumously released on
Milk And Honey.
The remaining chorus – ‘It’s real life/Yes, it’s real life’ – he obviously thought too good to throw away. The theme of the tune – I’m back to what really counts in life – was the essential theme of all his post-Beatle work. He was still stripping away myths, dispensing with the unnecessary and in this case, getting down to the reality of kitchens, cigarettes, babies, newspapers and early morning blues.

The revamped song was coming closer to the version that the Beatles would work on. The references to ‘little girls and boys’ and ‘little plans and schemes’ were now there.

When he finally changed the chorus from ‘real life’ to ‘real love’ the theme became the transforming love of Yoko Ono. He said many times in interview that he felt that she was the woman that all his longings for love and acceptance had been directed towards even before he met her. She was the ‘ girl with kaleidoscope eyes’. She was, as he wrote in his essay
The Ballad Of John And Yoko
, “Someone who I had already known, but somehow had lost.”

In February 1995, Jeff Lynne deleted extraneous noises on John’s cassette copy of ‘Real Love’ and transferred the mono recording to two 24-track analogue tapes at Paul’s Sussex studio. Paul, George and Ringo added guitars, drums, bass, percussion and backing vocals. At one point Paul even used his upright bass which once belonged to Bill Black and was used on Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.

CHRISTMAS TIME (IS HERE AGAIN)

Particularly for the British, the Beatles became inextricably linked to the Christmases of the 1960s. Six of their albums were released to capitalise on the Christmas market and four of their singles were Christmas number ones. In 1963 and 1964 they presented special Christmas shows in London theatres which were a mixture of music and pantomime and had support acts ranging from the Yardbirds to Rolf Harris.

Between 1963 and 1969 they produced a flexidisc exclusively for members of their official fan club which offered spoken greetings from each Beatle and some light hearted conversation. The earliest messages were clearly scripted but as their music developed so did the discs. In 1965 they fooled around with a version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and the next year Paul wrote a mini-pantomime for the group.

‘Christmas Time (Is Here Again)’, the only original song written for fan club members, came out in 1967, the year that
Magical Mystery Tour
was being screened on Boxing Day. The unedited version, recorded on November 28th, was over six minutes long and parts of it were used to punctuate a satirical sketch written by all four Beatles.