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The following information was collected for personal use from the multitude of various magazines and interviews issued around the time of the Anthology. At the time, much of the material was quickly collected without any reference to its source, however most of the information sources used have since been identified. No attempt is being made to claim authorship nor infringe any copyrights and the material is reproduced here for private use by Beatles fans.
If I've unintentionally neglected to credit anybody for either information or images then I offer my sincere apologies; please contact me and I will rectify the omission or if preferred remove the material.
Many thanks to Paul and Steve for offering to host the material at http://whizzo.ca/beatles/rs/gobnotch.html and http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/ respectively.
The material follows roughly the same format as Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Recording Sessions book, and does not cover any of the Anthology related promo CDs, none of which seemed to include any exclusive musical material not also released on the comercially available Anthology releases.
Amendments, suggestions and new material would be warmly welcomed.
When Paul, George and Ringo finally began their joint recording project in February, they told insiders they were working on "a surprise". The nature of that surprise leaked out at the start of March, when the New York Times reported that the trio were "adding new vocal and instrumental lines" to an unissued composing tape made by John Lennon in the late 1970s.
Paul: It was actually when the business problems got solved. The first thing we started talking about after the dust had settled was maybe we could do something together, maybe we don't have to live our lives completely separately from here on in. Just for the joy of getting together and doing something, Neil Aspinall at Apple said it could be an Anthology, the whole thing, CDs tracing the whole Beatles history.
George: Different ideas had been talked about, that we could do the background music or even write a new song or something.
Ringo: We took the easy route, which was to do some incidental music, because what else can we do? There were four Beatles and there are only three of us left. We were going to do some incidental music and just get there and play the instruments and see what happened.
Paul: But we never did get around to that. It just never felt like a good idea.
Ringo: Then we thought, well, why don't we do some new music? And then we always hit the wall, and OK, Paul had a song, or George had a song, or I had a song, well that's the three of us, why don't the three of us go in and do this. And we kept hitting that wall because this is the Beatles; it's not Paul, George, and Ringo.
Paul: As the thought of the three of us actually sitting down in a studio started to get nearer and nearer, I got cold feet about it. I thought, does the world need a three-quarter Beatle record? But what if John was on, the three of us and John, like a real new record? If only we could pull off the impossible, that would be more fun. A bigger challenge.
Ringo: So Paul asked Yoko if there was anything of John's that never came out. Maybe we could work with it.
Paul: She was a little suprised to get a phone call from me because we'd often been a bit adversarial because of the business stuff. She said she had these three tracks, including Free As A Bird.
Ringo: And she sent us these tapes and that's how it came about. It was just a natural thing which gradually evolved. It actually took about three years for all this to happen.
George: This became the perfect vehicle because we always had a thing between the four of us that if any one of us wasn't in it, we weren't going to get kind of Roger Waters and go out as the Beatles, so therefore the only other person who could be in it was John.
Yoko Ono has revealed that it was George Harrison and Neil Aspinall who initially approached her with the idea to add new instrumentation and vocals to existing John Lennon demos. In January 1994, when Paul came over to New York to induct John into the Rock Hall Of Fame, Yoko apparently gave Paul tapes of at least four John Lennon compositions (the exchange definitely involved more than three songs). Neil Aspinall claims he believes the transaction consisted of "two cassettes" of John's songs, "It might have been five or six tracks."
Yoko: It was all settled before then, I just used that occasion to hand over the tapes personally to Paul. I did not break up the Beatles, but I was there at the time, you know? Now I'm in a position where I could bring them back together and I would not want to hinder that. It was kind of a situation given to me by fate.
Paul: Yoko said 'I've got a couple of tracks I'll play you, you might be interested'. I'd never heard them before but she explained that they're quite well known to Lennon fans as bootlegs. I said to Yoko, 'Don't impose too many conditions on us, it's really difficult to do this, spiritually. We don't know, we may hate each other after two hours in the studio and just walk out. So don't put any conditions, it's tough enough. If it doesn't work out, you can veto it.' When I told George and Ringo I'd agreed to that they were going, 'What? What if we love it?' It didn't come to that, luckily.
Three of the songs the group concentrated on had already been heard before in public. Grow Old With Me was included on John's Milk And Honey LP; Real Love (Yoko's favourite, perhaps because John's voice is clearer) was included on the Imagine documentary soundtrack; while Free As A Bird was broadcast on the US radio series The Lost Lennon Tapes.
Paul: I played these songs to the other guys, warning Ringo to have his hanky ready
The Free As A Bird late 1977 demo took off from a basic doo-wop chord sequence, taking in some of the stately changes of Grow Old With Me as it progressed. Agonisingly slow, it was written at the piano around a maudlin set of chord changes that virtually guaranteed an air of sadness. The lyrics, certainly incomplete, explored different ways of conveying the metaphor of the title, quite clearly it was the concept rather than any particular lyrical phrase which had been the initial inspiration. Lennon filled the second half of his demo with wordless vocal lines and repetitions of the title phrase, picked up by the tiny mike of a portable tape player placed on top of his piano.
Paul: I fell in love with Free As A Bird. I thought I would have loved to work with John on that. I liked the melody, it's got strong chords and it really appealed to me. Ringo was very up for it, George was very up for it, I was very up for it. I actually originally heard it as a big, orchestral, forties Gershwin thing, but it didn't turn out like that. Often your first vibe isn't always the one. You go through a few ideas and someone goes 'bloody hell' and it gets knocked out fairly quickly. In the end, we decided to do it very simply.
This was a tune of great promise that seems to have been written at the piano one day, preserved on tape and forgotten by John. But despite its incomplete lyrics, it had an air of majesty that deserved further attention. What stayed in the mind was the mood, an air of phoenix-like hope drifting uncertainly out of a fog of depression - and that haunting melody.
Paul : It's crazy really, because when you think about a new Beatles record, it is impossible, because John is not around. I invented a little scenario; he's gone away on holiday and he's just rung us up and he says "Just finish this track for us, will you? I'm sending the cassette - I trust you." That was the key thing, "I trust you, just do your stuff on it." I told this to the other guys and Ringo was particularly pleased, and he said "Ahh, that's great!" It was very nice and it was very irreverent towards John. The scenario allowed us to be not too, ahh, the great sacred fallen hero. He would never have gone for that. John would have been the first one to debunk that - "A fucking hero? A fallen hero? Fuck off we're making a record."
Ringo : At the beginning it was very hard, knowing that we were going in there to do this track with him. It was pretty emotional. He wasn't there. I loved John. We had to imagine he'd just gone for a cup of tea, that he's gone on holiday but he's still here. That's the only way I could get through it.
Paul : Once we agreed to take that attitude it gave us a lot of freedom, because it meant that we didn't have any sacred view of John as a martyr, it was John the Beatle, John the crazy guy we remember. So we could laugh and say, 'Wouldn't you just know it? It's completely out of time! He's always bloody out of time, that Lennon!' He would have made those jokes if it had been my cassette.
George: Because it was only a demo he was just plodding along and in some places he'd quicken up and in some places he'd slow down.
Production duties for the sessions were shared not by George Martin, but by George Harrison's fellow Traveling Wilbury, Jeff Lynne.
Paul : George (Martin) wasn't involved, no. I was originally keen to have George do it. I thought it might be a bit insulting not to ask him to do this. But George doesn't want to produce much anymore because his hearing's not as good as it used to be. He's a very sensible guy and he says, 'Look Paul, I like to do a proper job,' and if he doesn't feel he's up to it he won't do it. It's very noble of him, actually, most people would take the money and run. Plus George Harrison was keen to make sure we had someone really current with ears. He knew Jeff Lynne. I was worried there might be a bit of a wedge but in fact it wasn't like that, it was great. Jeff worked out really well. As I said to him, a lot of people are very wary of your sound. I said, you've got a sound. He said, Oh have I? He's got a way of working but it's very similar to some of the ways we worked in the Beatles. When George Martin heard it he was very pleased with it, so that was nice.
Ringo : We started off with a cassette that Yoko gave us, but the cassette wasn't in the greatest condition. So with the benefit of modern science, Jeff Lynne did a great job putting it into time and cleaning it up. Only then could we begin overdubbing.
Paul : We took a cassette of John's, it was him and piano, interlocked. You couldn't pull the fader down and get rid of the piano.
Lynne: It was very difficult and one of the hardest jobs I've ever had to do because of the nature of the source material. It was very primitive sounding, to say the least. Free As A Bird however, wasn't as quarter as noisy as Real Love, and only a bit of EQ was needed to cure most problems. I spent about a week at my own studio cleaning up both tracks on my computer. So it took a lot of work to get it all in time so that the others could play to it.
Paul : Before the session we were talking about it, and I was trying to help set it up, because we never even knew if we could be in a room together, never mind make music together after all these years. So I was talking to Ringo about how we'd do it, and he said it may even be 'joyous'. We'd not met for a long time, and the press didn't bother us because nobody guessed we'd be down there.
George,
Jeff, Paul & Ringo
Lennon's son Sean, 20, had warned McCartney, "It's going to be a bit spooky hearing a dead guy on lead vocal. But give it a try."
Paul: We know we can't do anything better than the Beatles, but for old time's sake, we thought it would be nice to give it a whirl.
George, Paul and Ringo eventually began work at The Mill, McCartney's Sussex studio, in February (an original set of sessions booked to begin on 11th January had to be cancelled when Ringo went on a skiing holiday!).
Set in a converted windmill on a hill, the studio overlooks, beyond some gently rolling farmland, the English Channel. Around the coastal sweep is a nuclear power station, but the location is otherwise idyllic. It's also quite remote, which helped preserve the virtual secrecy that surrounded this reunion. In a corner outside the control room, with an aging map of Liverpool on the wall, was popped one of Paul's treasures, the upright double bass that belonged to Bill Black of Elvis Presley's original combo. McCartney, in passing, would sometimes pluck it for luck.
When Lynne brought the treated Lennon tapes to McCartney's studio for the overdub session, all concerned were adamant that analogue equipment and die hard techniques should be used wherever possible. The Beatles experimented on several songs before deciding to focus their attentions on Free As A Bird.
McCartney says there was some tension between him and Harrison when it came time to write a few new lines for the song but it passed quickly.
Paul: When we were working on Free As A Bird there were one or two little bits of tension, but it was actually cool for the record. for instance I had a couple of ideas that he didn't like and he was right. I'm the first one to accept that, so that was OK.
Lennon had left one half-finished verse behind: "Whatever happened to/the life that we once knew?" George and Paul finished it off and took turns singing the first new verse in decades: "Can we really live without each other?/Where did we lose the touch?/It seemed to mean so much/It always made me feel so..."
Paul: John hadn't filled in the middle eight section of the demo so we wrote a new section for that, which, in fact, was one of the reasons for choosing the song; it allowed us some input, he was obviously just blocking out lyrics that he didn't have yet. When he gets to the middle he goes, 'Whatever happened to / The life that we one knew / Woowah wunnnnn yeurrggh!' and you can see that he's trying to push lyrics out but they're not coming. He keeps going as if to say 'Well, I'll get to them later'. That was really like working on a record with John, as Lennon / McCartney / Harrison, because we all chipped in a bit on this one. George and I were vying for best lyric. That was more satisfying than just taking a John song, which was what we did for the second, Real Love. It worked out great but it wasn't as much fun.
George: If you hear the original version you know that John plays very different chords changes in it as well. Historically, what we'd say would be, 'Well, hang on, I'm not too sure about that chord there, why don't we try this chord here?' So we took the liberty of doing that, of beefing the song up a bit with some different chord changes and different arrangements.
Soon, Lennon's high, wavering voice was in their headphones. 'Free as a bird / It's the next best thing to be / Free as a bird / Home, home and dry / Like a homing bird I'll fly'
Paul: It was very good fun for me to have John in the headphones when I was working, it was like the old days and it was a privilege
Ringo: We were all hanging out together in the studio, but we didn't do it like we used to. Back then, the four of us would just kick in and get the backing track. We couldn't do that.
John's original mono cassette was expanded into analogue 48 track form. Ringo started the song off with two beats on snare. George broke in with a bluesy slide guitar riff and continued with a slide solo. The demo was further augmented with George's and Paul's acoustic guitars, Paul's bass guitar and piano (which doubles with John's original) and new vocals from George, Paul and Ringo.
Paul: We just got on with it, and treated it like any old tune the Beatles used to do, fixed the timing and then added some bits. George played some great guitar, we did some beautiful harmonies. What I liked was I played very, very normal bass, really out of the way, because I didn't want to 'feature'. There are one or two moments where I break a little bit loose, but mostly I try to anchor the track. There's one lovely moment where it modulates to C, so I was able to use the low C of the five-string. That's it, the only time I use the low one, which I like, rather than just bassing out and being low, low low. I play normal bass, and there's this low C and the song takes off. It actually takes off anyway because a lot of harmonies come in and stuff, but it's a real cool moment that I'm proud of.
George: We did the total new record, then we just took his voice and we dropped it in every line where we needed it until we built up the lead vocal part.
Lynne: Although a long time has passed since they last recorded as one unit, they worked terribly well together. Being in the control room watching and listening to them interact with each other was fascinating. Paul and George would strike up the backing vocals and all of a sudden it's the Beatles again. They were having fun with each other and reminding each other of the old times. I'd be waiting to record but I was too busy laughing and smiling at everything they were talking about. It was a lovely, magical time. But it was very scary because it had never been done before and there were no points of reference. What do you do on a Beatles record when the singer's not there?
Paul: It came to the backing harmonies and George said to me 'Jeff is such a big Beatles fan, he'd love to get on this record, he'd just die! Even if he goes 'hey!' he can then say he was on it'. And I was a little bit reluctant. I'm a bit sort of precious, a bit private about who's in the Beatles and we didn't do too badly on that philosophy. Even when Billy Preston came in I was in two minds. The others were so definite that I went with their thinking, as I always did, because I knew they had right-on opinions. Well Ringo says 'You know why ELO broke up? They ran out of Beatles riffs.' One off Jeff's great prides is that he met John once - obviously a huge fan of John's - and John said 'I really like all that ELO stuff man.' That was the highspot of Jeff's life! He was vindicated. John said it was alright! So we got Jeff on Free As A Bird.
Ringo was reported as saying that the reunion sessions had gone "much better than expected" and been extended from a week to almost a month.
Paul: I am quite proud of it. I think it worked great, it's actually a Beatles record. It's spooky to hear John singing lead, but it's beautiful. People said beforehand we shouldn't do it, but that kind of focused us up a bit. I thought, fuck you! We'll fucking show you! It's fatal if they come out in the papers and say we shouldn't do it, because I want to do it even more. It was a joyful experience, it was magic, it was a really good laugh to be making music together again. Me and George ended up doing harmonies and Ringo's sitting in the control room. He says, 'Sounds just like the Beatles!'
Ringo: Oh I was shocked, it just blew me away. I don't know why I didn't think it is us anyway, but, I just had a moment there of being far enough away from it to look at it like a real thing. And it's just like them, it was a mind blower. It sounds like the bloody Beatles, it sounds like a Beatles track. It could have been recorded in 1967. So much has gone down since those days, twenty odd years ago, but when I played the track, I thought, 'Sounds just like them!' Of course it does, because we're on it. Doing this project has brought us together. Once we get the bullshit behind us, we all end up doing what we do best, which is making music.
Paul: It was better when there were three of us than when Ringo said "Oh I've done my bit" and left me and George to do it. Me and George, as artists, we had a little bit more tensions. But I don't think that's a bad thing. It was only like a normal Beatles session; you've got to reach a compromise.
There is a segment of backwards vocals from John (the old George Formby catchphrase, 'Turned out nice again'), banks of Harrison / McCartney harmonies which support the wordless Lennon vocals, and a majestic Harrison solo that leads the track from a Starr drumbreak to the end of the song.
Paul: We pulled it off, that's the thing, and I don't care what anyone says. We could work together. We did a bit of technical stuff on tape, to make it work, and Jeff Lynne was very good. We had Geoff Emerick, our old Beatle engineer; he's solid, really great. He know how Ringo's snare drum should sound.
Geoff Emerick: We hadn't seen each other or been together in 25 years, and suddenly we were all working like before. The old magic was there instantly.
Paul: And there was a kind of crazy moment, thinking, oh yeah, 'cause, not having done it for so long, you become an 'ex-Beatle'. But of course getting back in the band and working on this Anthology, you're in the band again. There's no two ways about it. And it was good, it was good being them again for a little while. We work well together, that's the truth of it, we just work well together. And that's a very special thing. When you find someone you can talk to, it's a special thing. But if you find someone you can play music with, it's really something, y'know.
George: It was interesting to actually get back together. For Ringo, Paul, and I, we've had the opportunity to let all the past turbulent times go down the river and under the bridge and to get together again in a new light. I think that has been a good thing, it's like going full circle, and I feel sorry that John wasn't able to do that, because I know he would have really enjoyed that opportunity to be with us again.
Most of the track was completed by the end of February with the addition of George's closing guitar part.
Paul: I was worried because it was going to be George on slide. When Jeff suggested slide guitar I thought (dubiously), it's My Sweet Lord again, it's George's trademark. John might have vetoed that. But in fact he got a much more bluesy attitude, very cool, very minimal, and I think he plays a blinder. Free As A Bird is really emotional. I've played it to a few people who've cried, because it's a good piece of music and because John's dead. The combination of that can be emotional. But I love that. I don't have a problem with something that grabs you by the balls so you've gotta cry. I rather respect that.
George: Free As A Bird does sound like the Beatles, only a more modern version. But we went through a lot of changes musically in the 1960s so it's hard to actually put your finger on what was the Beatles sound. When you say it sounds like the Beatles, people may expect it to sound like 65 or 68. It's very similar in some respects to Abbey Road because it has the voicing, the backing voices like Because. But the whole technical thing that has taken place between 1969 and 1995 is such that, you know, it sounds a lot more like now.
Paul: No, we didn't go "We'll go for Beatles circa 1967." It was Beatles now.
Julian Lennon: I heard the song for the first time when I was last in New York visiting Sean and Yoko. It's a great song. I love it. Although I must say I find it hard to hear Dad's vocals.
The Beatles rounded off with a trip to the local pub and a visit to Paul's neighbour, Spike Milligan.
Paul: When we'd done it, I thought, we've done the impossible. Because John's been dead and you can't bring dead people back. But somehow we did - he was in the studio
George : We always said the Beatles was us four and if ever one of us wasn't in it then it's not the Beatles, and the idea of having John as the singer on the record, it works, it is the Beatles. There was talk about us doing stuff on our own but I have no desire really to do a threesome.
Paul: The only recording session I've ever written about was Free As A Bird. It was an exciting week and shortly afterwards I went on holiday to America. On the plane I wrote down what had gone on at the session. Just to remember the facts really, before they were forgotten.
Sources include: Apple Corps Free As A Bird Press Releases; Q Magazine Dec 95, Jun 97; The Art And Music Of John Lennon (John Robertson - Onibus Press); Today Night (Seven Network Australia); Mojo Magazine Nov 95, Jun 97; Daily Mail Nov 95; Beatles Monthly No. 214 Feb 94, No. 216 Apr 94, No.218 Jun 94, No. 220 Aug 94 , No. 228 Apr 95, No. 231 Jul 95, No. 236 Dec 95, No. 242 Jun 96, No. 249 Jan 97 (Beat Publications Ltd)
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June 22 1994
