by Steve Szilagyi
The appetite for Beatles product cannot be sated. Last month, Apple Corps Ltd. released Anthology 4, a new compilation in The Beatles Anthology series, as part of a broader thirtieth-anniversary remastered Anthology Collection. The Anthology series, for those who don’t know, consists of newly mixed outtakes of Beatles songs, previously unreleased tracks, and updated mixes of the two “new” Beatles songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.” That is 155 tracks of Beatles music presented in alternate versions—versions that are, in most cases, markedly inferior to the originals.
Most Beatles fans already own these songs in their original incarnations on LP, CD, and MP3—along with the many remastered, remixed, reordered, and reissued versions that have appeared since the Beatles’ catalog was belatedly released on CD in 1987. Since then, we’ve had authorized issues of the BBC radio recordings, the failed Decca audition tapes, and the long-circulating Star-Club Recordings. And serious Beatles obsessives have, for decades now, been trading bootlegs: hundreds of alternate takes, studio chatter, Christmas messages, and fan-club recordings.
Yet despite this surfeit, Anthology 4 debuted in the Top Ten on five Billboard album charts. This comes only a few years after the public turned Peter Jackson’s eight-hour Beatles band-practice documentary, Get Back, into a critical, financial, and strategic success for Apple Corps and Disney+.
Aren’t you people sick of these guys yet? Apparently not. Love for the Fab Four has now lasted at least three generations and seems only to intensify with time. Paul McCartney’s age-defying concerts remain an artistic and commercial phenomenon, and even Ringo Starr continues to fill auditoriums. The idea that the Beatles’ arrival on the world stage in the mid-1960s was a culture-changing event—and that their music is of lasting, even classical importance—goes largely unchallenged. Arguing about the Beatles’ music, their interpersonal relations, and their history has become intellectually respectable. Economists Tyler Cowen and Scott Sumner obsess over the Beatles and Paul McCartney on blogs otherwise devoted to monetary policy, interest rates, and the elasticity of demand.
But from the beginning, it was always about the music. That is what people wanted, and it is still what they want. The story of the Beatles’ musical journey has become lodged in the culture like a modern Odyssey. We know every stage: the transformation from scruffy rock-and-rollers into a charming boy band; the emergence of their latent songwriting genius, which effectively turned Lennon and McCartney into a two-man Tin Pan Alley; and then, under the combined pressures of drugs, ambition, and boredom, their evolution into bold musical experimenters, psychedelic gurus, and finally fractious individual artists.
Revolver is generally cited as the inflection point. Of the fourteen songs on the British version of the album, several—“She Said, She Said” is an obvious example—offered a jarring preview of what lay ahead: a darker, more inward-looking, and more experimental approach that pushed beyond the conventions of mainstream pop.
Many Beatles fans are of two minds about this divide. They admire and respect the post-Revolver albums, from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band through Abbey Road, but often with reservations. Everything happened so quickly. One moment it was “Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you,” and the next it was “Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye.”
Hit-seeking missiles. Some listeners would gladly have taken more of the Beatles we had from Please Please Me through most of Revolver: bright, melodic, unapologetically hit-seeking songs with buoyant harmonies and unpretentious lyrics. Records steeped in American R&B and Brill Building pop, pulsing with love for the Shirelles, Buddy Holly, and Carl Perkins. Songs that wanted to be hits, and usually were.
It feels plausible—at least emotionally—that the Beatles might have given us one or two more albums in this vein before shrugging it off and leading popular music down the long, druggy road that ended with the final grooves of Abbey Road. What would have happened if, instead of taking their abrupt artistic turn at Revolver, the Beatles had continued in the direction established across the six albums that preceded it? What if they had kept producing taut two-and-a-half-minute marvels like “I Feel Fine,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and “I Saw Her Standing There”?
That is the question this essay sets out to answer. And the answer, unexpectedly, is good news.
Although the Beatles released only about two hundred original songs between 1962 and 1969, that was not the end of the story. There is a Great Lost Beatle Album out there that you have almost certainly never heard. It has been assembled, piecemeal and unintentionally, over the past sixty years by hundreds of musicians inspired by the freshness and ardor of the early Beatles—musicians who picked up the standard the Beatles themselves dropped halfway through Revolver.
These are not Beatles tribute bands in Sgt. Pepper uniforms. Nor are they parody acts like the Rutles. They are rock-and-roll groups who found, in the front half of the Beatles’ career, a musical grammar rich enough to absorb into their own melodic intelligence, original voices, and emotional sincerity. Their relationship to the Beatles resembles that of bluegrass bands to Bill Monroe: derivation without imitation, lineage without mimicry.
Wandering off into Pepperland. The first band to take up this fallen standard was the Merry-Go-Round, led by the gifted songwriter Emitt Rhodes. Their self-titled 1967 album appeared just as the real Beatles wandered off into psychedelic Pepperland. After the band dissolved, Rhodes recorded two remarkable solo albums, The American Dream (1969) and Emitt Rhodes (1970). The latter comes closer than almost any single record to being the Great Lost Beatle Album. It has often been described as “the solo album Paul McCartney should have made after the breakup,” and released the same year as McCartney’s own debut, it invites an uncomfortable comparison.
As the Beatles approached their own demise, they passed the torch to the band Badfinger, whose first hit, “No Matter What,” was written and produced by McCartney and released on Apple. Over the course of eight albums, Badfinger demonstrated that the mid-career Beatles model still had enormous creative potential. Their tragedy (two members committed suicide – evil manager) has obscured this fact, but it should not erase it.
By the mid-1970s, frustration with album-oriented rock, mellow folk, and progressive excess had given rise to a loose constellation of bands—the Raspberries, the Poppees, Artful Dodger, the Flamin’ Groovies, 10cc—working to revive the immediacy and exhilaration of the pre-Revolver Beatles. Listening to these groups, what you hear is not the Fab Four, but what the Fab Four made possible – a road not taken.
A sub-genre of Power Pop. This lineage continued through New Wave and into Power Pop, a genre that flourished largely outside the mainstream and made almost no one rich. Power Pop’s discipline—short songs, melodic hooks, emotional directness—released a torrent of creativity. You are not allowed to sound jaded in Power Pop. The best practitioners approach each song as though rock and roll has just been invented and they cannot quite believe their luck.
But this is not an essay in praise of Power Pop, which cannot praised often enough. It is a message to Beatles fans—especially those who continue to spend money on archival crumbs, alternate takes, and endlessly repackaged nostalgia—that they do not have to settle for stale or second-rate Beatles product.
The Great Lost Beatle Album is out there. The only problem is that it isn’t contained on a single LP or created by a single group or artist. Its songs are scattered across the recorded output of dozens—perhaps hundreds—of bands. What follows is one attempt, off-the-cuff but in earnest, to assemble a Great Lost Beatle Album: songs that would have sounded entirely at home on a Beatles record, had history taken a slightly different turn.
- “You’re a Very Lovely Woman” — The Merry-Go-Round (1967)
- “Ever Find Yourself Running?” — Emitt Rhodes (1970)
- “Fresh as a Daisy” — Emitt Rhodes (1970)
- “Dennis” — Badfinger (1974)
- “Starting Over” — Raspberries (1974)
- “Here I Go Again” — The Spongetones (1983)
- “Whenever You’re Around” — The Spongetones (1995)
- “I Just Want to Touch You” — Utopia (1980)
- “If She Cries” — The Poppees (1977)
- “I Tried” — Brad Jones (1995)
- “Yes, It’s True” — Flamin’ Groovies (1976)
- “I Don’t Remember Your Name” — The Records (1979)
- “A Whole New World” – the Cobbwebs (2002)
- “I Don’t Wanna Cry” – The Keys (1981)
- …
Wait. Assembling this album is a mad enterprise. To be honest, any song off of Emitt Rhodes’s first two albums, or almost any album by the groups and individuals named above would make the cut. So would any songs by Pezband, Australia’s the Innocents, Beathoven, Bill Lloyd …
A priceless collection. This list must stop only because it has to. This Great Lost Beatle Album—whatever its final contents—would almost certainly have to be a double, triple, or even quadruple LP. And unlike George Harrison’s three-disc post-Beatles let-down All Things Must Pass, every song on it would be good.
Perhaps it would resemble one of those late-night television classical-music anthologies, the ones advertised by a tuxedoed announcer who sighs, “Ahh… a priceless collection.” Even then, it would still be incomplete by the standards laid out here.
Here is a final truth. We keep buying Beatles products not because there is more to learn, but because something was left unfinished. The Great Lost Beatle Album exists because the Beatles didn’t make it. It remains an open-ended project. And as long as people still want a particular kind of joy—direct, melodic, unpretentious joy—we can only hope that there will continue to be musicians and songwriters eager to pick up this dangling thread of Beatledom.
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I’d like to acknowledge my debt to Bruce Brodeen, a heroic Power Pop obsessive and music retailer and founder of Not Lame Records, whose richly descriptive catalogue prose introduced me to some of the bands mentioned above, and many more.
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