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Remember these four English lads? An ailing record
industry hopes you do.
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I have posited on many occasions that there is no music industry magic bullet that would magically cure its many and varied ills. Imagine my chagrin at being proven patently wrong by a recent joint investigation between Dutch police and Scotland Yard. When police in Amsterdam arrested several people in connection with the '70s theft of 500 tape reels made by The Beatles at their infamous and soon-to-be-final Get Back sessions and recovered those missing tapes, they provided the industry with the single most powerful talisman that could resurrect its sagging fortunes: unreleased Beatles material.
According to David Fricke in a Rolling Stone cover story, the Get Back sessions are jammed with songs that have never been heard. The Beatles jamming on old Rock songs dating to their Hamburg days as well as a handful of George Harrison compositions that wound up on All Things Must Pass. The Beatles working out arrangements for songs that would ultimately comprise Let It Be, long before Phil Spector submerged them in the tar pit of his murky creative vision. The Beatles on the Apple Studios' roof playing the living hell out of everything they attempt, with little regard for technical proficiency. The Beatles getting up one another's noses about every little real or perceived slight.
Can grails get any holier than this? Beatles fans have shelled out millions of dollars over the years for bootlegs of some (some, mind you) of the contents of these reels, the majority of them suffering from sonic, graphic or physical production inferiority complexes. Fricke is quick to point out the reels are three and half decades old and subject to the era's restrictive recording technology and the adverse conditions under which they were recorded.
Because of these considerations, there are tangible doubts that the Get Back sessions will see daylight as legitimate releases. There are whispers that their release would tarnish The Beatles' reputation as one of the 20th Century's greatest Rock & Roll bands.
You want to talk tarnish? Michael Jackson owns a sizable chunk of The Beatles' catalog and has used it to sell Nike sneakers and line his own pockets. Paul McCartney has played fast and loose with the Lennon/McCartney songwriting marquee (Sir Paul forgetting his agreement with John and his alphabet in one fell swoop). Bad TV movies have portrayed the Fabs without benefit of their music for exposition, and countless Classic Rock radio stations perpetuate The Beatles legend by hammering the same 20 songs onto their playlists with little thought to the depth and breadth of the band's output. These are stains that would send the Oxy-Clean guy back to his lab.
Get real while you get back. More than 6 million people bought the greatest-hits collection, 1, after its 2000 release, and there wasn't one solitary scrap of new business on the album beyond the revolutionary concept of having The Beatles' chart-topping singles on one disc. Oo-rah!
That's the sort of thing downloading music was designed to achieve. And even with the Napster monkeys making their own versions of 1, the album still took in tens of millions of dollars and topped the charts redundantly for months.
Given all this, how much revenue would be generated by (conservatively) six albums of never-before-heard Beatles music? The industry might actually be forced to count into the skadillions and come up with a sales mark higher than multi-platinum (like skadillianium, for instance).
So, with this runaway sales potential locked, loaded and aimed straight for the dollar-sign bull's-eye, naturally the industry that's run out of locations on its feet to use for target practice has tentatively decided to put the safety on with regards to the Get Back sessions. We can't be too careful with The Beatles' legacy, you know. We wouldn't want to sully the image of the group that inspired one of their number to toss off a little ditty entitled "How Do You Sleep."
Hey, if the powers that be were so worried about The Beatles' spotless image, how did the White Album ever get through editing? "You know that what you eat you are/ But what is sweet now, turns so sour," Harrison wrote and sang on "Savoy Truffle." "We all know Ob-La-Di-Bla-Da/But can you show me where you are?" Meow.
Wake up and smell the profit, oh keepers of the reels (whether it's down to EMI or the power block of Yoko and Ringo). You have the power to drive people back to record stores in literally uncountable numbers and for a really good reason for once. Your hesitation on a point of honor is comical, considering the stuff the labels have been begging us to buy lately.
Worried about the sonics? Pro Tools could make a cat's proctology exam sound good. Worried about The Beatles' good name? We have a feeling they'll get through the publicity in pretty good order. Again. ©
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