Published on Dec 31, 1998
I am very much an impulse buyer when it comes to music. If I
find something that even slightly tickles my fancy, I’ll snag it
(as long as I have the funds, and as long as my wife isn’t with
me). I can’t begin to count how many albums, tapes and discs are in
the Pierce Memorial Archives – many of them from my escapades at
the used CD stores – that seemed like a good idea at the time.
For example, I honestly cannot explain why I bought a new copy
of
Live At The BBC by The Beatles. I’m not a big Beatles junkie
(although I have the entire
Anthology video series), and I don’t even come close to
owning all their albums. This one just seemed like something I
wanted at the time. And after listening to it for only the second
time in a long while, it actually contains some very good material,
if just a tad heavy on covers.
The Fab Four – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and
Ringo Starr – are captured here over 69 tracks – some of them just
spoken word – all taken from sessions they did for the British
Broadcasting Corporation. Widely bootlegged over the years
(according to accounts I’ve read), the selection of tunes here is
interesting as a snapshot of what pop music was like in Britain in
the early 1960’s.
What is surprising is that a few of the numbers here are of
bootleg quality – one such that comes to mind is “I Forgot To
Remember To Forget”. Granted, these are tapes that were locked away
for the better part of three decades, but I find it hard to imagine
that better quality numbers didn’t exist, and that the only option
was to put a few tracks on this set (which appears to be
out-of-print) that were of dubious audio quality.
For the casual Beatles listener,
Live At The BBC might be a slightly confusing portrait of
the Beatles. After all, over half of these tracks are covers. But
there is a lot of gold that is there to be mined in these dusty
classics. It’s interesting, for example, to hear a pop vocal
version of “A Taste Of Honey” (a track you may know better thanks
to Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass); this version breathes some
new life into a track I’ve heard for most of my life. The obvious
devotion to artists like Chuck Berry is obvious with covers of
songs like “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”.
When it comes time for the lads from Liverpool to tackle their
own material, well, that’s no slouch, either. Tracks like “I Saw
Her Standing There”, “Ticket To Ride”, “A Hard Day’s Night” (I
never knew that the solo was on piano – and that it was George
Martin who played it!) and “Thank You Girl” are all pleasant
additions to this collection.
The only real negative is that near the end of the collection,
the covers tend to drag down the whole project a bit. I would have
liked to have heard more originals in these sessions, or at least
had the covers broken up a bit more. Still, I guess this is a small
point to object to on a solid collection.
Live At The BBC is a set that the diehard Beatlemaniacs – or
those who haven’t been hoarding bootlegs for years – were drooling
about for some time, and did seem to set off the chain reaction of
a rebirth of interest in The Beatles. If you can still find this
collection out there – and I didn’t see a listing on Music
Boulevard or CD Now – then it’s worth investing in.
(Editor’s note: Since this writing, Music Boulevard was bought
out by CDNow… and the set was re-released by Capitol.)