So begins "Rare Beatles Audition Tape Surfaces in a Vancouver Record Shop/The recording appears to be from the band’s 1962 audition for Decca Records, which notably rejected the group" (NYT).
"As the men began posting about their discovery on social media, clues about the provenance of the recording began to emerge. Jack Herschorn, the former president and founder of Can-Base Records, a Vancouver label, said that a producer at Decca gave him the tape in the early 1970s and suggested that he could use it to make bootleg recordings. But he said he had qualms about doing so. 'I adored the Beatles,' Herschorn said. 'I wasn’t going to do anything that was not morally correct in my mind.' Herschorn, who now lives in Mexico, said that he put the tape into storage before leaving the record label, which later went bankrupt."
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10 comments:
Paul and Ringo will probably pay a pretty penny for it.
Yeah, not much there. Like the article said they released some of better tracks on the first Anthology album. At least it settled the Pete Best/Ringo Starr controversy. Pete wasn't much of a drummer.
Surf rock.
AI will make "lost" Beatles recordings for all of us. The only problem will be getting a tape machine and some old-fashioned recording tape. It will also be fun when AI gets people remembering Rajiv, the fifth member of the group.
I have a different take. I suppose my expectations were lower so I thought this recording was pretty damn good. Decca passed on them, guitar groups not being the future or some rot.
Barely related story from Lee Sklar. He knew the guys who became the Eagles as studio musicians in LA. One of them approached him and said they were thinking of forming a band called Eagles. What did he think? He said he was the wrong guy to ask. He thought Beatles was a stupid name for a band.
Reel to reel tape recordings can be problematic these days. They were great in their day, but they're getting old and any recordings on tape should be digitized ASAP. Decades ago, The Smithsonian did an audio preservation project where they tried to save old records by putting them on reel to reel. They found out decades later that the original recordings sounded better today than the reel to reel tapes did. (Because the quality of the tapes had degraded so much while in storage.)
"The tape sat unremarkably on the shelf."
I used to oversee a collection of reel-to- reel tapes (among other items).
They all did that.
…the sound quality coming from the video of the recording playback is kind of remarkable…
There are already recordings of this in wide circulation, for example at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uRqbY6I9NQ
Mark Lewisohn speculates that Decca didn't see this as an audition so much as a recording session for a potential album. If you look at it that way, the decision is more understandable. It's all cover songs, doesn't have a clear lead singer who could be marketed in the sense of "John Lennon and the Beatles," and doesn't have nearly the energy and wit of their first big albums.
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