#3: "It's too hard to sing."

The greatest rock band of all time consisted of four lads from Liverpool.  Don't argue with me on this.  It is a fact.  There are, to be sure, other bands who may have a reasonable claim to this title.  The Rolling Stones come to mind, Velvet Underground and Sex Pistols too, Led Zeppelin and the Beach Boys.  Different people will have different suggestions.  That's not my point here.  Let's accept the notion that the Beatles are it.


With that, it's sometimes easy to forget just how good they were, as if somehow the music was beyond them and they are merely the conduit for producing it.  You hear a lot about that from artists of all sorts, but I think in a way that's bullshit.  Yeah, I guess there's a thrust of inspiration when you create something that seems to come out of nowhere, but really it's simmering and floating underneath some hidden reaches of the brain and soul that just needed a reason to surface.  (That's my unsubstantiated theory anyway.)  And so we forget the process it takes to be great.  The craft of it all is ignored.  Perhaps that's due in many cases because we, as lay people, don't have that knowledge.  But because of that, though we may tend to overpraise artists (and other entertainers and athletes) in terms of hype, we probably undervalue them in terms of skill.

And that's why the Beatles' Anthology series makes this list.  I have a loved the Beatles since, well, as long as I can remember.  If there is one indelible cultural hand-me-down given to me by my father, it is this love.  But in a way, they were just songs, music recorded 10-20 years before I was born.  In my head, there was no idea that they were made, they just... were.  And to be perfectly honest, when the first Anthology CD was released in 1995, I sort of didn't get it.  What were these weird-sounding, unfinished versions of songs I knew by heart?

It wasn't until maybe a couple of years or so later that it really started to grow on me.  Suddenly, the false starts, alternate takes, and demos were fascinating.  I was hearing the original concept of these songs and right in front of me I was hearing the band make a tweak here and another tweak there that turned it into the song I always knew.  I was starting to realize that songs aren't created and finished out of thin air, but that it's a gradual process.  It's an idea with which I still struggle constantly in terms of writing.  I imagine that what I'm writing is the final draft, rather than something that will need to be edited and re-edited.

But that makes it sound like work.  Listening to all these half-finished songs, you still come away with the notion that it was fun for them, especially in that first Anthology record.  Missung lyrics were followed by laughter--so were notes sung off key.  Even though we thought they were perfect, they weren't.  And they were okay with that.


The original demo for "No Reply". Starts out a bit too fast. Paul has a great vocal on it though.


Take 2. A little slower, then Ringo goes crazy on the cymbal.


Final version on Beatles for Sale. Ringo's tighter and there's a better groove, especially when it picks up with the hand claps and the John and Paul harmonies.


Takes 2 and 3 of "I'll Be Back". John struggles to hit a high note.


Random outtakes.