The Beatles - Rock and Roll (At The Beeb) Volumes 1 & 2 - 1976

In 1976 The Beatles' contracts with EMI and Capitol expired. One of the side effects of this was that the labels were now free to recompile and release new albums. These new albums had the stipulations that the band members had final say in how their music was used. The details were vague but they did specify no remixes although that was not adhered to.

Until the release of the first BBC set followed by the Anthology series the only album of unreleased material we got was the Live at the Hollywood Bowl album. EMI/Capitol did come close to releasing an LP of unreleased studio recording called Sessions but once the band found out about the project the album was dropped. We also got the Star Club tapes but that was released on a different label.

Capitol was the first one to release new product. That album was Rock and Roll Music. A two disc set (later rereleased as two separate discs as Volume one and Volume two) that contained previously released songs with a rock and roll feel. I bought the album and enjoyed it but what if instead of rereleasing old material they dipped into the BBC vaults and gave us all new songs.

Side One
01 I Got A Woman
02 Too Much Monkey Business
03 Keep Your Hands Off My Baby
04 I'm Talking About You
05 Young Blood
06 A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues
07 Some Other Guy

Side Two
01 Sweet Little Sixteen
02 Lonesome Tears In My Eyes
03 Nothin' Shakin'
04 The Hippy Hippy Shake
05 Glad All Over
06 Beautiful Dreamer
07 That's All Right (Mama)

Side Three
01 Soldier Of Love
02 I Just Don't Understand
03 So How Come (No One Loves Me)
04 Carol
05 I Forgot To Remember To Forget
06 Clarabella
07 I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Cry (Over You)

Side Four
01 Lend Me Your Comb
02 I Got To Find My Baby
03 Memphis, Tennessee
04 Ooh! My Soul
05 Sure To Fall (In Love With You)
06 Lucille
07 Don't Ever Change

Reality Notes

I thought I had posted this as part of my Alt-Beatles timeline. Apparently I didn't so I'm posting it here.

The Beatles in the early days were a top notch rock and roll band. Before the madness of Beatlemania the band made numerous appearances on a variety of programs for BBC radio. They even had their own weekly show for a while. During those performances they would dip into their setlists and play songs that they would never record for their albums. Especially once they stopped including cover songs on their LPs. This is an attempt to gather as many of those never recorded songs in one place. I used the original album as a template (yes, it's still a double album! but of course, reissues were released as separate volumes) but adhered to the following criteria:

• No original songs
• No ballads or showtunes
• No cover songs that appeared on a previous album.

My intention here was to present only those songs that have never appeared on a Beatles album before. To have an album of new material in 1976 was every Beatles fan's dream even if it was an album of "moldy oldies". The bulk of these songs come from the first set of BBC recordings released in 1994. The rest are from the second volume with a couple more coming from the unofficial Complete BBC Recordings.

I first heard of the BBC recordings while listening to the radio show The Lost Lennon Tapes. I taped every episode I could and compiled my own personal bootlegs from all of the unreleased tracks that they would play. This included some BBC material but being a Lennon focused show they only played songs that featured a Lennon lead vocal. I also had a small handful of BBC songs on the few vinyl Beatles bootlegs I had.

The cover was made at a time when I was making best-of comps for my 30gb iPod. I wanted to be able to read the text on the small screen so I was using a lot of large block type fonts.

Sources
Live at the BBC
On The Air (BBC Volume Two)
The Complete BBC Recordings (10 CD bootleg)