Live At The BBC
The Beatles
Apple / Capitol Records, 1994
http://www.thebeatles.com
REVIEW BY: Christopher Thelen
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 12/31/1998
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.
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