The Smiley Smile Message Board

Has anybody heard anything of worth about Capitol doing things for the upcoming Beatles' 50th? And does it appear to be anything remotely similar to what we've had for the BBs of late?

(Please, God, not a greatest hits collections and a $100 souvenir pen...)

Maybe we'll have a reunion of the surviving  Beatles - Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Pete Best, and ??? Is Tony Sheridan still alive?

they re release the beatles stuff so often its nuts. i haven't seen any news about it tho.

I'm hoping for "MMT" and "LIB" on dvd with maybe a couple new/unreleased songs "Now and then", "carnival of light" etc or a cd of unreleased stuff..

And a nice "Shea" DVD. And maybe Japan, if it can be presented well.

 There is no anniversary as the Beatles called it a day in 1970. Make way for the Beach Boys and the Stones.  ;)

Holograms!

Well, gee, Sgt. Pepper had a 20th anniversary and he didn't last more than one album!

It's a marketing thing. 50 years since Love Me Do. 50 years of Beatle product.

I'm all for exploiting it, if we can be guaranteed a raft of new, previously-unreleased product.

They really don't LB, at least not in truest sense of the word.  A good way of looking at this is for the perhaps the greatest and certainly most prominent band in the history of music, it took them over twenty years before they got a decent sounding representation of their catalog on the market with the 2009 stereo/mono remasters.  The Beatles are very good at marketing merchandise whether it be t-shirts or posters or novelties but as it pertains coming up with innovative ways of marketing their music they are far behind almost all of their contemporaries.  

Now obviously there has never been any type of definitive answer as to why this is so but speculation ranges from fear on the part of "Camp Beatle" (Paul, Ringo, Yoko, Olivia & Dhani) about what would happen to the Beatles brand if they released an "outside of the box" project and it didn't sell well to speculation that there is significant dissension and ill feelings within the voting parties of the group that exist to this day which is precluding any new Beatles product from reaching the market.  If you didn't know this already, before any potential Beatles release can hit the market, it needs to get the approval of the two surviving Beatles and the estates of the two deceased Beatles.  If one party dissents, the potential project is immediately killed dead.

That being said I would not be at all surprised if nothing of any significance gets issued this years to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the dawn of "The Beatle Years".  Perhaps they will issue a commemorative 45 of "Love Me Do/PS I Love You" for "Record Store Day" in November but that might even be a stretch.

There's a Record Store Day in November?

There was last year.  It was during the mad rush just after Thanksgiving. ("Black Friday").  The Beatles put out a little box set of four 45s and a poster that was distributed exclusively to indie record stores to commemorate the occasion.

*yawn*

Just read the Giles Martin is working on a "super secret" Beatles project.

My hope is that it is the impossible: a completely "new" Beatles album.

I know a lot of people wouldn't dig it ("it messes up the Canon!"), but I would.

As would I.  I would like to see some new Beatles product on the market instead of the same old reissues now featured in digipak cases.

It should be noted though the problem isn't the initiative of people like Giles Martin or others like him which is causing any new Beatles releases from getting to the public.  It's the voting parties who can vote down any proposal handed to them by the Giles Martins of the world and as I mentioned it only takes one dissenting vote to strike a project dead.  So Martin could come up with whatever top secret/fantastic projects he wants to.  It doesn't mean that we'll ever get to hear what he's working on.  

PS: The fact that Martin is being so extremely secretive about this project of his to me doesn't bode well for it ever being released.  If it was something truly within the scope of potential release he would say something like "I'm working on remixing the catalog" or something to that extent.  Instead he says “No, it is so secret. (If) I say something, I might as well kill myself, and I will try to avoid that” which tells me it's something he's yet to present to the voting parties and the reason he's not speaking about it publicly before that is he knows it's far from a lock to gain their approval.

That's OK. If he doesn't get their approval, he can simply arrange for the "tapes" to be stolen and issued by a "Sea Of Tunes" distributor

Tony Sheridan is indeed still alive.  And milking his 'Beatle' (cough) status for all it's worth.

Every now and then, the topic of a 'new' Beatles album comes up.... despite persistent legends, there aren't THAT many unreleased Beatles songs.  A lot of those titles - "Colliding Circles", "Always and Only", "I Should Like To Live Up A Tree", etc, are fictitious.  To the best of my knowledge, here is a list of 'unreleased' recordings.

* Besame Mucho, 1962 (released in edited form on Anthology 1)
* How Do You Do It, 1963 (released in edited form on Anthology 1)
* You Know What To Do, 1964 (released on Anthology 1)
* Shout, 1964 (released in edited form on Anthology 1)
* If You've Got Trouble, 1965 (released in edited form on Anthology 2)
* That Means A Lot, 1965 (released in remixed form on Anthology 2)
* Hold On, I'm Comin', 1965 (not the Sam and Dave track, but rather, an unreleased John demo from the Rubber Soul era... probably out on a bootleg by now)
* Rubber Soul, aka 12-Bar Original, 1965 (released in heavily edited form on Anthology 2)
* Anything, 1967 (unbootlegged 17-minute Sgt Pepper outtake)
* Carnival of Light, 1967
* Hey Le-La-Lu, 1968 (unbootlegged Yellow Submarine outtake, appeared on rough track lists for Anthology 2)
* Circles, 1968
* Sour Milk Sea, 1968
* Child Of Nature, 1968
* Junk, 1968 (released on Anthology 3)
* What's The New Mary Jane, 1968 (released on remixed form on Anthology 3)
* Not Guilty, 1968 (released in a ridiculously butchered form on Anthology 3)
* Etcetera, 1968 (unbootlegged White Album outtake)
* Watching Rainbows, 1969
* Mailman Bring Me No More Blues, 1969 (released in a ridiculously butchered form on Anthology 3)
* Teddy Boy, 1969 (modern-day edit released on Anthology 3)
* Rocker, 1969 (brief track from the "Get Back" LP)
* Save The Last Dance For Me, 1969 (ditto... not worth releasing)
* The Walk, 1969 ("Get Back" reject)
* Who Slapped John, 1969 (oldies jam from "Abbey Road" sessions)
* Be Bop A Lula, 1969 (oldies jam from "Abbey Road" sessions)
* Grow Old With Me, 1994 ("Anthology" sessions)
* Love Me Do, 1994 ("Anthology" sessions)
* Now and Then, 1994 ("Anthology" sessions)
* All For Love, 1994 ("Anthology" sessions)

Other than the piles of garbage from January 1969, that's pretty much it.

P,G, and R worked on Grow Old With Me? That is the first I have read that.

*shrug*  I was always under the impression they did.... I even remember seeing that as the first track on "Anthology 3" in a rough tracklist.

That was the plan, but they didn't actually do any work on GOWM.

I read that GH lost interest in the idea of completing John's demos after the so-so reaction to FAAB and Real Love.

The 50 year anniversary of the recording of the single Love Me Do came and went without so much as a peep from The Beatles, Apple or EMI, which is really a complete shame and a travesty!  The Single That Started It All.  (WTF?)

A lot of fans (well me) would like something "completely different" to celebrate a band called The Beatles.  Releasing the Hollywood Bowl concerts, the Shea and DC concerts on DVD and CD, there are about 8 more CDs of quite exciting BBC shows that could be released, the Let It Be DVD, the complete Sweden concerts and the Blackpool shows, plenty more interesting outtakes and live LPs, to excite new fans and old.

And.
Yet.
We.
Get.
(...............)

I rather think the Beatles 50th should fall in 2013, rather than 2012. That is when their first album dropped and when "Beatlemania" began.

They could go that way, who knows, but the fact is their first EMI single, The Single That Started It All, was recorded June 1962, 50 years and one month ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Me_Do

Or they could wait for 2014...50 years since those long haired lads came to America. "How do you find America?" "Turn left at Greenland"

Hate to break it to you, but the beatles are a defunct act as of 1970.

They didn't have the staying power of the Beach Boys.

Sorry.

I thought they reunited in 1995?

Wow, you must be some sort of genius. You know what anniversary means?

I've seen some Japanese imports I've been meaning to pick up at my local indie record store, and I'm most certain there was a CD with the Hollywood Bowl pictured on the cover.