It’s not every album that gets six hours of advertising on national television…and I can’t think of many artists who need less publicity! We’re talking about the Beatles. Just the mere rumors of a double CD with lots of unreleased early material would have sold millions of copies of this…but the six-hour television miniseries probably didn’t hurt sales. The first two CDs in the six-disc Anthology collection are rife with early material, including the first notes ever recorded by the Beatles and a huge number of live tracks, many of them quite good since they predate the era of the huge stadium shows where the fans were too busy screaming at the top of their lungs to allow the band to be heard. Of course, one of the main draws is a reconstructed version of an unreleased Lennon demo recording, “Free As A Bird”, co-produced by Jeff Lynne, though my favorites aside from that one include the almost silly-
sounding “Ain’t She Sweet” and the clips from the Morecambe & Wise show. There are also versions of “Love Me Do” and “And I Love Her” that I like better than the masters to which we’re all so accustomed. A lot of the material on here makes no sense without the accompanying text of the CD booklet, and there’s probably a lot of it that has no value to any but the most die-hard Beatles listeners.
Disc one
- Free As A Bird (4:24)
- speech – John (0:13)
- That’ll Be The Day (2:07)
- In Spite Of All The Danger (2:45)
- speech – Paul (0:18)
- Hallelujah, I Love You (1:13)
- You’ll Be Mine (1:39)
- Cayenne (1:14)
- speech – Paul (0:07)
- My Bonnie (2:42)
- Ain’t She Sweet (2:13)
- Cry For A Shadow (2:22)
- speech – John (0:11)
- speech – Brian Epstein (0:18)
- Searchin’ (3:00)
- Three Cool Cats (2:25)
- The Sheik of Araby (1:43)
- Like Dreamers Do (2:36)
- Hello Little Girl (1:40)
- speech – Epstein (0:32)
- Besame Mucho (2:37)
- Love Me Do (2:32)
- How Do You Do It (1:57)
- Please Please Me (1:58)
- One After 909 – false starts (2:22)
- One After 909 (2:54)
- Lend Me Your Comb (1:49)
- I’ll Get You (2:08)
- speech – John (0:12)
- I Saw Her Standing There (2:48)
- From Me To You (2:05)
- Money (That’s What I Want) (2:52)
- You Really Got A Hold On Me (2:58)
- Roll Over Beethoven (2:22)
Disc two
- She Loves You (2:50)
- Till There Was You (2:54)
- Twist and Shout (3:05)
- This Boy (2:22)
- I Want To Hold Your Hand (2:37)
- The Beatles appear on the Morecambe & Wise Show (2:06)
- Moonlight Bay (0:50)
- Can’t Buy Me Love (2:10)
- All My Loving (2:19)
- You Can’t Do That (2:42)
- And I Love Her (1:52)
- A Hard Day’s Night (2:44)
- I Wanna Be Your Man (1:48)
- Long Tall Sally (1:45)
- Boys (1:50)
- Shout (1:31)
- I’ll Be Back – demo (1:13)
- I’ll Be Back (1:58)
- You Know What To Do (1:58)
- No Reply – demo (1:47)
- Mr. Moonlight (2:47)
- Leave My Kitten Alone (2:57)
- No Reply (2:29)
- Eight Days a Week – false starts (1:25)
- Eight Days a Week (2:47)
- Kansas City / Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey! (2:44)
Released by: Capitol
Release date: 1995
Disc one total running time: 65:23
Disc two total running time: 57:31
