Beatles' Let It Be (33 1/3) (13 page)

Get Back, Glynis
also includes “The John Barrett remixes.” Barrett was an engineer who worked at Abbey Road. He had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and began the task of listening to and cataloging all the Beatles’ recording sessions in 1982, a task that was eventually continued and magnificently completed by Mark Lewisohn. There have been various accounts of why Barrett first began the task. While it has been stated that he was given it as a way to help him through his ordeal, it has also been surmised that he had a very specific reason to begin this task. His work would help
gather interesting unreleased material to be used for the 1983 “Abbey Road Video Show,” a multimedia extravaganza staged at Abbey Road Studios. Barrett’s remixes on the
Get Back, Glynis
CDs include a handful of oldies, mostly from January 26, 1969.

Other bootlegs of Barrett-related material that have turned up over the years were taken directly from cassette dubs that he made from all periods of the Beatles’ Abbey Road recordings. One far-ranging, multi-volume set, entitled
The John Barrett Cassette Dubs,
features a varied selection of unreleased recordings, mixes, material used for the “Abbey Road Video Show,” lots of “Get Back”/“Let It Be”-related material, and even solo Beatles tracks. Another bootleg set contains a more condensed version of the same material and, owing to the sometimes morbid mythology that has been created by Beatles fans and bootleggers, is entitled
Turn Me On, Dead Man—The John Barrett Tapes.
It is not clear how Barrett’s tapes ended up in the hands of bootleggers, but all indications are that they were obtained after his death.

The other kinds of bootlegs derived from the period are more varied and sometimes not as easy to categorize. Two early ones,
Kum Back,
which came out first, and
Get Back to Toronto,
were both released in 1969 on vinyl. Both were made from tapes, taken directly from radio broadcasts, of the aforementioned Glyn Johns mixes.
The source material for the radio broadcasts could have been obtained from one of many different sources. It has been suggested that the source material originated via an acetate of John Lennon’s that had been prepared by Johns, and that Lennon may have given to a journalist in Toronto. There has also been conjecture that advance promotional copies were given to journalists or DJs, although EMI has no records of any such advances being prepared and sent out.

In 1973 came the bootleg
Sweet Apple Trax,
which featured more unreleased material from the “Get Back” project, including Twickenham performances. The bootlegged material apparently came from an ex-Apple employee, and at some point an American Beatles collector bought it.

Other bootlegs which were later released and which included even more material were
The Beatles Black Album, Twickenham Jams,
and
Watching Rainbows.
In 1987 came the 11-album set,
Get Back Journals,
on vinyl, and an upgraded set was put out on CD in 1993.

Over the years, other bootlegs from the period with names like
Celluloid Rock, Leaning On a Lamppost, Rockin’ Movie Stars, Ultra Rare Tracks, Unsurpassed Masters,
and
Jamming With Heather
have illuminated the sessions by offering varying song selections, or long stretches of dialogue. Some of them are still favorites of collectors, but later bootlegs with better sound quality and more
material quickly made some of these once treasured bootlegs obsolete. For example,
Jamming with Heather
gained its title and place in bootleg lore for one simple reason. The disc contains one recording that features vocal support on “I’ve Told You Before, Get out of My Door” (a reference to “You Can’t Do That”) by Linda McCartney’s daughter Heather.

Reflecting the sometimes gray area between legitimate Beatles releases and the brazen approach of bootleggers is a bootleg entitled
The Let It Be Rehearsals, Vol. 5; The Auction Tapes, Vol. 1.
It contains more material from the “Get Back” sessions from Twickenham. It was obtained by the bootleg company Yellow Dog at an auction at Sotheby’s in 1993. When this bootleg came on the market in 1994, it didn’t exactly offer anything new to collectors, but the fact that it had been sold openly by a legitimate auction house was very curious.

More and more of the material from the project has continued to surface through the years. It seems that there is no end to the many ways those recordings can be released by bootleggers. The sound quality and lavish packaging, including extensive liner notes and track annotation, rival—and in some cases exceed—the quality of anything commercially released by the major record labels who specialize in box-set reissues. Advances in recording and playback technology, including recordable CDs, MP3s, and the ability to download music
from the Web, have allowed bootleggers and buyers the anonymity, the ease and the speed with which to gather the music inexpensively and frequently.

Author Scott “Belmo” Belmer has offered the most comprehensive overview of the group’s unreleased recordings in his now defunct
Belmo’s Beatleg News
newsletter and his books on Beatles bootlegs. In fact, in his book
Beatles Not for Sale,
published in 1997, Belmo detailed nearly 125 different volumes of bootlegs specifically related to the “Get Back” sessions in over 37 pages. And the list does not even cover all the bootlegs available. Further updates from Belmo are expected.

Doug Sulpy has become the Boswell of the “Get Back”/“Let It Be” project. He has been publishing a series of updates to his self-published book on the “Get Back” sessions, entitled
Drugs, Divorce and a Slipping Image,
which was originally put out by The 910 Magazine. His book entitled
Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles’ “Let It Be” Disaster
was published in 1997, and includes the most comprehensive diary of the sessions available by a trade book publisher. The book chronicles every single moment of the sessions that were available to him and his co-writer Ray Schweighardt up until that point. Sulpy continues to self-publish updates to his books, with no end in sight. His work has had a decisive impact on the mythological status the sessions have achieved. It has also been instrumental
in keeping the period alive as something to be continually analyzed, dissected, and categorized.

The continuing availability of new material from the period has added new layers to the Beatles’ story. No other album in history has been so scrutinized, and as each new bootleg becomes available, the
Let It Be
album remains an inconclusive and unfinished work. Yet, even after poring over many bootlegs and studying the daunting scholarship of Belmer, Sulpy, and others, the year 2003 proved to be the year when
Let It Be
reared its head like it had never done before.

The year 2003 marked a pivotal time in the “Let It Be” saga.

For the average Beatles fan, aside from an occasional listen to the old vinyl release or to the 1987 CD reissue,
Let It Be
had become just an old Beatles album. As detailed earlier, it had a life of its own in bootleg form, known mostly by a small cult of rabid Beatles collectors.

Then, in early 2003, newspaper reports in relation to the album appeared around the world. The accounts, including a prominent news item in the
New York Times,
recounted the results of a year-long investigation conducted by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in the U.S., the U.K., Europe, and Asia, in consultation with the City of London Police Central Detective Unit. A joint covert operation between
the London police and the Dutch police led to the arrests on January 10, 2003, of two people in West London. There were also arrests in Amsterdam. Reports vary as to whether two or three people were arrested in Amsterdam and some accounts indicate that two of the people who were arrested there were British. The arrests were made after the recovery of some 500 16-minute tapes that had been stolen in the early 1970s.

The tapes were from the same “Get Back”/“Let It Be” sessions that had been so widely bootlegged throughout the years. Most of the tapes were most likely not multi-track audiotapes designed for use in a recording studio; instead, they were film-sound reels. As stated earlier, there were two Nagra tape machines used for the filming of the rehearsals and of the sessions. Nagra tapes are quarter-inch, reel-to-reel-like tapes used with Nagra tape recorders—commonly used, until the mid-90s, to record sound for films. Manufactured by the Kudelski company of Geneva, Switzerland, they are portable, rugged, and reliable analog tape recorders. Their main feature is what is called the Neo-Pilottone system, that allows data to be recorded on tape in the middle of the audio track, but without cross-talk onto the program recording. Basically, they allow for the ability to easily synchronize sound and film and with excellent fidelity. As such, they are perfect for location documentary filming. The unit most likely used at the
time was the Nagra IV-L model launched in 1968, six years after the first machine was introduced for film work. It is monaural and it has two microphone inputs and a built-in audio limiter.

The police did not disclose the names of those arrested and said that authentication of the tapes was pending. While the arrests were conducted in London and Amsterdam, it would appear that the tapes had actually been stored in Amsterdam.

The reaction from various quarters was mixed. Beatles scholars, who had already heard most of the material related to the “Get Back”/“Let It Be” project, did not think much of it. The Beatles’ company, Apple, had no comment. Naturally, the fact that the investigation was conducted some 30 years after the tapes were found missing fuelled speculation that it came about at the urging of Apple. Apple was about to prepare a reissue of the
Let It Be
album and of the film. The Beatles’ fan-and-collector grapevine buzzed with the news, concluding that those who were busted were part of the Luxembourg-based bootleg label Yellow Dog, whose
Day by Day
bootleg collection includes nearly all of the recorded material from the period.

One month later, more news on the recovery of stolen Beatles’ tapes surfaced, this time in Australia. At 8 a.m. one early February day, in suburban Sydney, reel-to-reel tapes of Beatles recordings from the summer and
fall of 1968 were found locked in a safe in a two-story, yellow-brick house. The man who was arrested was 27-year-old Branko Kuzmak. Kuzmak claimed he had bought the tapes from a man at a 1991 music collector’s fair for $1,000. Police were alerted to Kuzmak’s possession of the tapes when he ran an ad in
The Trading Post,
an Australian newspaper, on January 9. It stated, “Beatles most valuable collectors items,
Abbey Road
and
White Album
on tape reel, direct from Abbey Road Studios in London, extremely extinct, mint condition.” Kuzmak was subsequently released and was not charged. The tapes, believed to be stolen from Abbey Road Studios in 1969, were to be authenticated and then returned to EMI.

The first phase of the legal proceedings involving the tapes recovered in Amsterdam has received no news coverage. The only word on the current status of the case is that there is a trial going on in The Hague.

If the news that the 500 tapes had resurfaced after 30-odd years and that an official re-release of
Let It Be
was forthcoming were not enough, a celebrity scandal that had a dramatic and significant connection to the “Let It Be” saga rocked Los Angeles. Phil Spector was questioned as a possible suspect in the February 3 shooting murder of actress Lana Clarkson. Clarkson died of gunshot wounds in the early morning hours in Spector’s hilltop mansion in Alhambra, California. After Spector
called the police to report the shooting, they came to his home and found her in the foyer of his house.

The news came at a time when the reclusive and often eccentric genius had been putting his life back together. Most significantly, Spector was working again. After failed attempts at completing an album with Celine Dion, Spector was working with Starsailor, a young British band that had been signed by Capitol Records. The results were two tracks that would appear on the group’s early 2004 release,
Silence Is Easy.
When word got out about what had happened on the fateful night, many people weren’t entirely surprised. Reports of alleged gunplay by Spector during projects with John Lennon and other unconfirmed accounts of Spector’s anger when dealing with family, friends, and business associates have surfaced over the years. If Spector is indeed responsible for Clarkson’s death, it could spell a tragic end to the long, tortured career of one of the few figures in pop music who could truly be called a genius. Spector was released on $1 million in bail, although no charges were brought against him. On September 20, 2003, the death of Lana Clarkson was ruled a homicide by the Los Angeles coroner’s office. The Los Angeles district attorney’s office said the death was not an accident or a suicide. Spector had contended that after grabbing a bottle of tequila, the actress shot herself.

On November 18, 2003, Apple Records reissued the Beatles’
Let It Be
album. It had been a long and winding journey from the album’s conception to its reissue.

The new CD, entitled
Let It Be … Naked,
had a very different form and sound from its initial release in May of 1970. It also included a bonus disc called “Fly on the Wall,” which consisted of 22 minutes of conversations between the Beatles, bits of music, and the beginnings of songs that did not end up being part of the
Let It Be
album, but that wound up instead on
Abbey Road
and post-Beatles solo work. The bonus disc drew from unused material from the January 1969
Let It Be
filming and album sessions.

A chance meeting in February of 2002 prompted the reissue. Paul McCartney ran into the film’s director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, on an airplane. McCartney, who had long detested the way that Phil Spector overproduced the final album, particularly the way he added strings and a choir to “The Long and Winding Road,” decided then that the
Let It Be
album should be rereleased. The film, which was originally scheduled to be re-released around the same time, is now slated to be re-released at the end of 2004.