Bootles Beatlegs

If there is one thing that separates the people who merely like a performer or band from those who are fans, it's bootlegs. I guess this means I'm not a true fan of Bob Dylan, because although I own several of his albums and enjoy them, I'm not the least bit interested in collecting bootlegs of his music.
But with The Beatles, it's another matter. I think I must have first heard about bootleg albums when it was rumoured that Tyrrell's record store, in Market St, Newcastle was selling copies of a prototype of Let It Be called Get Back. I think they were selling them from "under the counter." They cost more than a regular album; maybe twice the price. I forget.
When I got my copy home, and opened the brown paper bag it was sold in, it had a plain, aquamarine cover, and little or no information about the tracks on it. It got worse! Because when I put it on the turntable, it was mainly surface noise. You could hardly hear any music at all.
Later on, there was a nice record called Sessions, with an attractive cover, and information on the back, which provided maybe about thirty minutes of interesting versions of songs, and some of those hard-to-hear tracks from that old Get Back LP, earlier versions of songs such as I'm Looking Through You, and never-released songs such as Leave My Kitten Alone.
Over the years, record collectors' markets have had albums with titles like Ultra Rare Tracks, volume six. These albums have cost about $40, and have had about fifteen minutes of music on them! Some of them have been very interesting, while others have consisted of The Beatles practising a few bars of  Help, over and over.
The alternate versions and previously unpublished songs on the Anthology set of CDs are fascinating. And the advent of YouTube has killed off those expensive bootlegs. Most of the material is up on YouTube, though occasionally copyright holders will take down some things.
I was interested to discover today that there are "work in progress" versions of Strawberry Fields Forever on YouTube that I had never heard before, and are not included on the super deluxe box set of Sgt Pepper. (Strawberry Fields was the very first song recorded for that new album, though it ended up as a double A sided single, and didn't make it onto the final disk.)
But, today I started listening to the disks of "work in progress" versions, included in the box set. The Strawberry Fields tracks sound terrific. Giles Martin has remixed these tracks, as well as those on the main album. They sound so much better than the versions that have been put up by fans on YouTube.

PAGE THIRTY-EIGHT: from girlfriend to fiancée

I loved having a girlfriend who did cartwheels, played the flute and piano beautifully and who was such fun to be with. Joan was doing the second year of the performer's DSCM (Diploma of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music), when she was in sixth form, while I was in first year Dip Mus Ed at Newcastle Conservatorium and Teacher's College.

We were excited to discover that we both had to attend the same Acoustics class. I can't say I remember a lot about Acoustics, though I do remember Eric Aubert, taking out a tuning hammer and demonstrating how a piano is tuned. I also remember who I sat next to for each lesson.

The next year, our choir conductor, Michael Dudman, noticing that Joan and I seemed to enjoy being together, asked us if we would arrange the orchestral reduction in the Bach Mass in B Minor vocal score to be played by two pianos. We only had to do a little reorganisation, and were soon happily practising the Gloria section, which was the first part the choir was going to perform.

I also loved the way that Joan expressed her new-found Christian faith by making posters and putting them up on the walls in her home. I can't help thinking of this when I read some of these passages in the Bible. One of these came to mind last week, when Pastor Mark Sutton was preaching from Peter's first Letter:

Humble yourselves therefore,
under the mighty hand of God
that he may exalt you in due time.
Casting all your care on him,
for he careth for you.

And I also remember the verse that Joan put on a poster in the kitchen in her Colarado St home:

Whether you eat or drink
or whatever you do
do it all to the glory of God.

In the second half of 1972, I was accepted to be part of a Youth For Christ team travelling to Singapore, Sri Lanka, India, Bangla Desh and Nepal, in January, 1973. The plan was that we would meet at the YFC Gold Coast camp and rehearse for a couple of weeks, before leaving for India, with Eric Leach, who was to be the speaker.

I thought I was going along to play the piano, but there were three pianists in the team, and my friend Mary Patty was chosen as the pianist. My role was to sing. Now, although I had sung in school choral groups and choirs, I had never sung professionally and have not been favoured with much of a voice, though I can sing in tune and hold a part.

They did allow the three pianists to play a piano trio arrangement of Ralph Carmichael's song, He's Everything To Me, which we enjoyed doing. But it wasn't easy for me to play a piano that was a semitone sharp, in one of the towns we visited briefly. My acute sense of pitch made this an excruciating experience, because when I played a chord that looked and felt like B major, it would come out sounding like a C. Very off-putting.

From the time that Joan and I began spending time together, I couldn't imagine ever splitting up, or wanting to be with anybody else. But I was only nineteen, Mum would remind me. However, after I was accepted for the team travelling to India, Mum told me that this might be a good time to give Joan some security by announcing my intentions. I proposed to her the next day, 19th December, 1972.

Don't laugh, but I asked her if she'd like to be a minister's wife, and she replied that it all depended who the minister was. This photo was taken just after we got engaged.

Communication was very different back in 1973 when I was in India. I was unable to ring Joan, and relied on getting a letter from her and sending letters to her. I missed her tremendously, though I look happy enough in this photo taken in India. (I've got the archetypical one at the Taj Mahal somewhere, but can't put my hands on it, at the moment.) In the photo, I'm wearing an Indian shirt and a very uncomfortable coat made of yak hairs.

The jokes about our Australian accent are true: other people really do hear us quite differently from how we hear ourselves.So when I bowled up to an Indian man called Nicanor, hoping he had a letter from Joan for me, I asked "Any mail?" and he replied. "No. We only have kilometres in India!"

Then he told me a favourite Indian joke: an Australian doctor, working in India asks a hospital patient

Did you come here to today?

and the patient replies

No, I came here to live!

and runs out of the room.

It was an eye opener seeing the huge differences in the lifestyles of people in India and neighbouring countries. It was also odd, seeing how differently some of the missionaries' lives were from the people they were serving. A Canadian Lutheran family in a southern Indian town had maple syrup flown in, but I was grateful they had Western toilets. I couldn't come to terms with the holes in the ground in other parts of India that we were sent to, when nature called, nor the long periods of travelling time where there were no toilets available at all.

It was in India where I heard this parody on We Three Kings of Orient, Are. Back in 1973, Indians were as mad about the Beatles as the rest of the world had been in 1964.

We four Beatles of Liverpool are
John in a taxi
George in a car
Paul on a bicycle
licking an icicle
following Ringo Starr

Witty, isn't it!

When I arrived back in Australia, I was so pleased to see Joan again. I knew that I never wanted another period of five whole weeks away from her.

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PAGE TWENTY-EIGHT: how things have changed

1930s gramophone: note the crank!

A lot of things have changed over the sixty years I've been alive. When we were children, the milkman and the baker used to call daily. And the baker had a horse and cart! I've looked for a picture of the kind of cart, but haven't been able to find one. The baker would stand on a very short cart behind the horse, and would sometimes give us a ride to the corner of our little street.

Sometimes we would go out with a shovel and scrape up the horse manure for the garden.

When we went to the butcher's, Mr Fox would give the kids a free saveloy.

And hasn't sound reproduction changed! My Nanna's gramophone was a wind-up 78 revolutions per minute set-up. You didn't have to connect it to electricity: just give the handle a crank.

Nanna used to play old-time Scots dance music on her player, and enjoyed listening to Harry Lauder singing songs like Stop your tickling, Jock and I love a lassie. Both Nanna and Mum and Dad had recordings of Jimmy Shand's Band. I never knew they played Mairi's wedding which I only heard in the 80s, played by Van Morrison and The Chieftains on the terrific Irish Heartbeat CD.

Our old phonogram had a good sound and a nice big speaker. Dad used to play lots of Broadway musicals on it; sometimes setting the speed at 45 RPM, instead of 33 1/3 RPM, and wondering why the record had ended so quickly. He loved Brigadoon and Oklahoma! Mum didn't think he should play Oklahoma! on The Lord's Day, because she thought it was a bit risqué, with songs about a girl who Cain't Say No and strippers in Kansas City.

But I wanted a stereogram, so that we could hear the new records with different sounds emanating from the left and right channels.

Mum ordered one from The Store (if my memory serves me correctly), and I can remember muttering the line from I Am The Walrus

waiting for the van to come

while we waited!
It was 1968 and I had bought a copy of the The Beatles Double Album, which I was eager to play on the new system. But although the new player was supposed to be the latest thing, records tended to jump. There was a spot in the song Birthday that always skipped a beat or two, and later a spot in George Harrison's song Something, on Abbey Road.

And also, the cabinet of the new stereo may have looked nice, but it hid quite tiny speakers. There was a depth in the sound from the old mono speaker, which was missing from the tiny stereo speakers. Bummer!

When our cat scrabbled around inside the cabinet and disconnected one of the speaker cables, I found that it was actually quite interesting to listen to the left channel only: but we did get the cabling repaired so that we could have stereo again!

But from then on, Christopher and I used to sometimes deliberately listen to one channel only, and hear interesting parts isolated from the rest of the mix.



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PAGE TWENTY-THREE: great expectations

Although I had been enjoying The Beatles' music since I was in sixth class at Belmont Public School, I had never owned a Beatles album, and had just one or two of their EPs (extended play seven inch records, which usually contained four songs). Apart from those I had only heard their music on the radio, or at a friend's place.

When it was announced that they were releasing an exotic new record called Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, I asked my parents if I could have a copy for my fifteenth birthday. When I found that Mum now had the record in the house, I was mad with excitement. I couldn't wait to hear it. Radio stations mainly played singles, and very little of it had been heard on the Newcastle stations I listened to.

I found that it was every bit as interesting as the publicity had made out.  There were so many layers, you could listen to the whole album, concentrating on Paul McCartney's inventive bass guitar lines, or you could try to ignore the lead vocal and listen instead to the vocal harmonies accompanying the main part.

I think Paul Stocks took this picture of me

When I bought a copy of the sheet music, I  was shocked to discover that it only contained some of the songs, and only parts of some of the ones it did include. The notation had been done poorly and was not a good representation of the sounds I heard on the record.

So I had a crack at playing the songs on the piano, as I heard them. It wasn't hard to improve on the shoddy job done by the person who had done the piano/vocal arrangement.

It was a lot of fun working the songs out for myself. I learnt a lot about chords and chord progressions from listening, playing and also reading the chord symbols on popular sheet music.

But sometimes I would be stumped. I remember, a little later, trying to play Penny Lane. Most of it was easy: I loved the descending, walking bass line in the verse, but was frustrated by a mysterious chord change in the chorus. Whatever was the chord on the capitalised word?

Penny Lane is in my EARS
and in my eyes

It sounded like a chord change, but none seemed to work.
Try as I might, I could not find a suitable chord. So next time I was in Newcastle for a piano lesson, I went to Palings music store, bought the sheet music for 35 cents and discovered that the chord is the tonic chord, the same as the preceding one, but is in first inversion [the bass note is the original middle note of the chord].
THAT was a revelation to me, much the same as the odd bass notes in The Beach Boys' God Only Knows were to Paul McCartney.



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