Harry And His Box Set (V1, 2, 7, 10, 12, 15, 14 update.)

[Lord Reith]

Beautiful Dreamer was partly Caroline's recordings. It was the album that plugged the hole in the BBC canon back then, gathering together all the songs that hadn't appeared so far. I searched long and hard for a copy back in the 80s and was chuffed when I got one after maybe three years. I particularly loved the liner notes on the back. Definitely one of the classic Beatlegs. Even the cover is nice, despite being from completely the wrong era!

[eclipsed1]

The worst of the worst would have to be a mid-70s boot on Wizardo records called Happy Birthday
(https://www.discogs.com/release/4215795 ... y-Birthday)
The quality was horrid, though I think it was the first bootleg of the Happy Birthday Saturday Club performance.
As I recall the speed wobbles on that and Memphis were so bad they'd have been impossible to correct -
It was also the first time I'd heard BBC versions of eitherLucille or Johnny B Goode, although JBG ran WAYYYY too slow.
But I fondly remember how exciting it was to hear these tracks, even with the poor sound quality.
I cherish these old boots and would never part with them,
but I probably won't pull my copy of this one out again unless I really want to punish myself.

Yeah I have or had that one too... think I sold it back in the 80s. As you say it really plumbed the depths but it did allow me to make an edit of Johnny B. Goode to complete the incomplete version on Beautiful Dreamer (which was slightly better "quality" if you acn grace it with such a term). Those were the days when every BBC track seemed to be missing either a start, a finish, or a middle! I can remember adjusting the speed of the record (I was one of the lucky ones with a varispeed turntable), then striking PAUSE at what I hoped would be the exact right instant, then changing records and adjusting the speed of the second record, then waiting for the magic moment to release the pause button. And then hoped when you played it back it would actually sound okay. It was frustrating but kind of fun. I did enjoy all that stuff, planning how I was going to reconstruct a bootleg track and then spending an entire evening doing it. The great thing to me about the advent of digital editing was not so much that it meant I could do things faster, but that I could spend more time on fixing other things like making sure the two were a similar eq. Now it's all done to forensic standards with tools I couldn't even have imagined then. But I did have fun mucking around with my lps and cassettes, and my horrible source material! To be a Beatleg collector back then usually meant being a budding sound engineer too... the alternative was to listen to everything at the wrong speed and with bits missing.

I did the exact same thing! Pitch control turntables are so handy, and I became a master at pecision pause button editing!
And as much as I like to disparage the quality of all those old bootlegs, just like mitchellmichael I really love them all - the hours spent listening to every detail through the murk, feeling as if I was one of the select few who was 'in the know' about the very existence of such wonders outside of the officially available stuff....

[Ziggy C]

I'm glad I wasn't the only one to try to reconstruct stuff and fix stuff which was so obviously "wrong." Waiting for the exact right moment to release the pause was fun....and frustrating to no end. I rarely got it on the first try. Fast forward to today, well into the nascence of the digital age. Things that we think we can slam right into and get done on the fly within "a few minutes" turn into (at least for me) unfathomable nightmares of sitting and waiting for a slow-moving barometer bar to crawl across my screen as things progress. And then....well,....maybe it worked.

The Beatles BBC material holds a wonderfully nostalgic place my heart. The first I heard of what turned out to be BBC material was on a local radio station. It was in the late 70's/Early 80's. Either KMET or KLOS; I can't remember which. They had some rare Beatles music that they had got hold of and were broadcasting one track a night at a particular time. Of course, I sat with my cassette deck at the ready. The only ones I got, or still remember, were Long Tall Sally and Can't Buy Me Love. As broadcast, they were low fidelity and pitched too fast. Sound familiar? Anyway, as time went on, more and more of this stuff got out and now we have a fine representation of all available material, placed into context as much as possible. When I play these shows, I am transported back to a time a year or two before I was born. It's a marvelous escape from my day-to-day.

[eclipsed1]

I'm glad I wasn't the only one to try to reconstruct stuff and fix stuff which was so obviously "wrong." Waiting for the exact right moment to release the pause was fun....and frustrating to no end. I rarely got it on the first try. Fast forward to today, well into the nascence of the digital age. Things that we think we can slam right into and get done on the fly within "a few minutes" turn into (at least for me) unfathomable nightmares of sitting and waiting for a slow-moving barometer bar to crawl across my screen as things progress. And then....well,....maybe it worked.

The Beatles BBC material holds a wonderfully nostalgic place my heart. The first I heard of what turned out to be BBC material was on a local radio station. It was in the late 70's/Early 80's. Either KMET or KLOS; I can't remember which. They had some rare Beatles music that they had got hold of and were broadcasting one track a night at a particular time. Of course, I sat with my cassette deck at the ready. The only ones I got, or still remember, were Long Tall Sally and Can't Buy Me Love. As broadcast, they were low fidelity and pitched too fast. Sound familiar? Anyway, as time went on, more and more of this stuff got out and now we have a fine representation of all available material, placed into context as much as possible. When I play these shows, I am transported back to a time a year or two before I was born. It's a marvelous escape from my day-to-day.

KMET - I remember those!
It was around 82, just before the first BEEB special aired - I think I still have a tape somewhere from the night they played 'Clarabella' as the featued track of the day, with the DJ making some inane commentary about how those nutty brits chose an oddball name like Clarabella for one of 'their' tunes, instead of a Sally or Jenny or Susie - totally clueless to the fact that it was written by an American.... I also remember them playing the Black Album one night

[Lord Reith]

Yes part of being a hardcore Beatles fan in those days was always being alert for rare stuff broadcast out of the blue on radio. I can remember my total astonishment when listening to The Days In Their Life in 1982 and suddenly "Take Good care Of My Baby" comes on! I only had five deccagone singles and had never heard of this song or knew it existed. And then to top it off, they played "How Do You Do It" as well! Fortunately I was recording as this happened but the special didn't finish to about 2 in the morning that day, so I had to wait like 8 hours before I could play back those two songs! But it was great.

I also remember (and have on tape) the "Top Of The Pops" E.P. being played in the middle of a Beatles radio special produced locally. I had the songs from the Beatles At The Beeb but had never heard Things We Said Today with the clean intro.

I even remember making an audio recording of Spielberg's I Want To Hold Your Hand when it played on tv, just in case they played some original Sullivan audio (they didn't).

Yes, it was all so totally random back then. You'd wander into a new part of town, go into an arcade and find a little shop with Beatlegs. Once I found a shedload of cheap Beatlegs in a dirty book shop! Actually I was underaged so I wasn't allowed in the dirty section but I didn't give a toss (literally) about that because all I was interested in was their crates of records!

They were great times and it'd be great to go back for a week, but I'm under no illusions that we have it 1000 times better now. The music is vastly more plentiful and better quality. But it's not nearly as much fun as it was then, as anyone who lived through it will attest. The 80s were a great time to be a Beatles fan.

[Lord Reith]

To those who are wondering what is happening with Caroline's stuff, I was going to upload my tapes the other day but more has since turned up so we will wait until it's possible to do her justice.

[Lord Reith]

And in the meantime here is a clean rip of the Beautiful Dreamer lp in all its grungey glory:

http://tinyurl.com/exp-feb-23

(original rip by atlasstar)

[mitchellmichael]

And in the meantime here is a clean rip of the Beautiful Dreamer lp in all its grungey glory:

http://tinyurl.com/exp-feb-23

(original rip by atlasstar)

Nice! Thanks for the appetizer while waiting for the main course

[beatlesondvd]

I don't think Chris or Kenny would actually have pretended it was a recording by Paul.

The evidence suggests that's exactly what they did. Paul does not appear in the 25 Nov 1967 edition of "Where It's At", except for a brief clip sourced from the 26 May 1967 edition (which was taped on 19 May).

In the November broadcast, Everett mentions that the show will feature an interview with John taped 'the other day' but nothing about Paul being there, which leads me to conclude that Paul wasn't involved in the November interview taping session at all, otherwise they'd have included parts of it.

So they made up a tune, recycling the melody of the just-released "Hello, Goodbye", and pretended it was Paul singing it. I'll admit it's a pretty good imitation.

[MP3J]

And in the meantime here is a clean rip of the Beautiful Dreamer lp in all its grungey glory:

http://tinyurl.com/exp-feb-23

(original rip by atlasstar)

thanks...i never did buy this LP
It seems the Fabs invented Lo-Fi too!