Rare recordings/obscure songs/alternate versions of well known songs, etc. | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Joe said:

Hey Happy Nat – thanks for joining us!

It’s a great site, and one I’ve spent plenty of time on.

Do drop by here if you’re able and post updates on new additions. I generally don’t deal with bootlegs on the main site (though I’m happy for YouTube clips to be embedded in the forum), but it’d be great if you could keep us informed on what’s new.

How about a list of your top 10 unreleased clips from the site?

I gotta say the top 10 thing is kind of tough for me because I like just about everything. So I’m not going to order by most favorite to least favorite or anything but I will try to pick out ten goodies and list them randomly. Here goes:

1) What You’re Doing (take 11)

2) Sour Milk Sea (demo and Lomax cover)

3) Helter Skelter (take 2 unedited)

4) Return To Pepperland (out-take)

5) Hey Jude (out-take)

6) Revolution 1 (Take 20)

7) And Your Bird Can Sing (alternate take)

8) The Luck Of The Irish (2 demos)

9) Run Of The Mill (early take)

10) Cage (Wings out-take)

and two runner-ups:

a) Glass Onion (alternate take)

b) If I Needed Someone (Cherry bomb version live in Memphis)

Has anyone checked out the recent Lennon 2-CD collection called At Home? It’s is all home demos, mostly from The Dakota period. The first disc is all guitar demos and the second is all piano demos. A few of these are duplicated from Acoustic and The John Lennon Anthology and a few more are duplicated from the huge CD set The Complete Lost Lennon Tapes. But some of the ones from LLT sound better on At Home. Then, most importantly, there is some new demos not previously heard anywhere. There is a couple different recordings of Grow Old With Me , and Woman , and two demos which were completely new to me. One is called Say It Again (possibly an older version of You Are Here – the Mind Games song) and the other is called I Ain’t Got Time. I might put something from this material on one of my Beatles Rarity of the Week posts sometime soon.

McLerristarr said:

Where do you get your music from?

LOL…..I’m a collector of both rare vinyl and bootlegs so I guess the answer is a million different places. Some are in Russsia, Brazil and even Mexico. Yeah, I know it’s weird that this music winds up there somehow. Often these days, it’s downloads online, Ebay, Musicstack and other websites like that. I’ve been at this since the late seventies. A lot of people around the world do mp3 trading too. If I learn of something I don’t have, I usually get a little “ancy” until I can find it. It’s amazing how stuff is still surfacing after all these years. Happy 40th b-day for Let It Be .

McLerristarr said:

I don’t understand how it ever left Abbey Road in the first place. They mustn’t have had good security. You would think that George Martin should be able to trust his own assistants not to copy the tapes and sell them around the world.

Oh, well, all the better for us.

Yeah…everything has just trickled out in pieces over the years thanks to people with inside contacts to EMI…..I guess it’s kind of like pharmaceuticals, or something. Sometimes the info that circulates with the recordings ends up being wrong though causing some screwed up history that is hard to sort out for us record-keepers (ha! I made a pun there…record-keepers), not to mention sometimes recordings are a half-step too slow or a half-step too fast, or tampered with somehow by people “after the fact”. Especially these days when people are more technically savvy with audio tinkering with their computers.

Yes….and I’m sure EMI was thrilled to realize that. I believe the late sound engineer John Barrett was involved in creating some mixes for that project. I have some boots of those mixes and some are quite amazing. Anyway I just posted a new BROW for the week if you guys want to check it out. It’s got an early take 2 & 3 of A Hard Day’s Night.