Before History Took Over

By JAY COCKS

Early Beatles tapes from the BBC will be aired this weekend

They are 20 years old, some of them, and still sparkle. Most songs--pop songs generally, rock specifically--dim with age. The present can paralyze the past; anything off the charts sounds like an antique or a novelty item. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about a group of 48 previously unreleased Beatles performances, found in the BBC vaults and to be broadcast over the Memorial Day weekend on 350 stations, is their insistent presence. Old songs in the present tense, simple, lively and made of magic.

Performed between March 1962 and June 1965, the tunes were searched out by Producer Kevin Hewlett as he prepared a program to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Beatles' first broadcast for the BBC. "The Beeb" had given the lads air time on teen variety shows like Saturday Club; then, in June 1963, they got their own program, Pop Go the Beatles. When they were first heard on the air they did not even have a record contract. Within 18 months they had four hit singles, the show and the beginnings of a myth.

The musical trajectory is astonishing. The three-hour show, The Beatles at the Beeb, begins with Hippie Hippie Shake, a good bar-band rave-up, and ends three years later with the jet-stream harmonics of Ticket to Ride. That's a little like getting into outer space before everyone is certain you have even left the ground.

Most of the 48 songs are versions of American rockers or renditions of early Beatles smashes performed in styles that never stray far from the records. There is, however, a Beatles version of an obscure Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas single, a Lennon-McCartney composition titled I'll Be on My Way. It is the sweetest surprise of the package. With a chorus that sounds as simple and sentimental as a child's school rhyme ("As the June light/ Turns to moonlight/ I'll be on my way"), the song shows the Beatles at their most wistful.

If it was this quality of sassy innocence and calculated sentiment that endeared the Beatles to the world, this new material is a welcome reminder that the foundations of the group were built on solid rock. Memory, sentiment, tragedy and official cultural status make it easy to forget that the Beatles were a scruffy bunch of working-class rock brats. It was a great part of their strength and some of their glory. Although The Beatles at the Beeb includes a version of the lamentable 'Til There Was You, there is also an esoteric tune titled I Just Don't Understand, which turns out to have been introduced in an Ann-Margret movie (take that, cultural anthropologists) and does not seem completely worthy of the obscurity into which it has fallen.

The best stuff here, though, is the flat-out rock 'n' roll: John blow torching his way through a couple of Arthur Alexander scorchers, Soldier of Love and A Shot of Rhythm and Blues; Paul lighting into That's All Right Mama and striking sparks off Carl Perkins' Matchbox. George gets to sing at least once on his own (a very snug version of Nothin' Shakin' but the Leaves on the Trees); and Ringo turns in an exuberant rough-house performance of I Want to Be Your Man. These songs all have the blind energy, nerve and joyful rowdiness of genius before history took over.

A reminder, however: because of thorny copyright problems, the material on The Beatles at the Beeb will probably never make it to record. This may not be an insurmountable problem in an age of technological marvels. As Bruce Springsteen used to tell listeners at home when he did his own radio shows: "Roll them tapes!"

--By Jay Cocks

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