Meet The Beatles: On DVD, still more of the Fab Four
NEW YORK √≥ It has been a long and winding road since three surviving Beatles “reunited” eight years ago to record Free as a Bird and Real Love, and to tell their story as part of The Beatles Anthology TV special, CDs, videos and books.
Since then, of course, George Harrison died, reducing the living members of the Fab Four to two.
On April 1, EMI releases The Beatles Anthology box set on DVD, featuring 10 hours of material from the eight-episode series, plus more than 80 minutes of never-before-seen fodder recorded during the Anthology period. The $80, five-disc set was previewed Tuesday at the New York Public Library for Performing Arts in Manhattan.
Among previously unseen highlights:
* With George and Paul McCartney on ukuleles, the trio is seen sitting on a lawn singing Baby What You Want Me to Do.
* Beatles producer George Martin plays an early tape of John Lennon singing A Day in the Life with the orchestra and Paul’s middle part missing. “John wasn’t expecting 32 years later people to be listening to it,” Martin says.
* Paul remarks: “We always thought that people like The Supremes made a ‘good record,’ but then they repeated the good record and the next record was sort of the same. … We liked the first one really, the second one was not good. … So I think we were conscious of trying not to repeat ourselves.”
Next: Apple is readying a Let It Be DVD, and David Munns of EMI indicated it won’t be long before Beatles tunes are available for legitimate download on the Internet.
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