Customer Reviews

Not for Sale: The Beatles' Musical Legacy as Archived on Unauthorized Recordings

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A few well-informed Beatles fans say this book reprints other people's research, fails to correct mistitled tracks, and makes up a few song titles.

That last one may seem a rather damning accusation, but Belmo has prankish tendencies, and credible people say the author had no sources for the following titles, and probably made them up from whole cloth: "Maisy Jones", "Baby Jane", "Portrait Of My Love", "Girl With The Red Umbrella", "Three Ships In The Harbor". EMI confirms these titles do not exist.

If you need a bootleg shopping list, there are quite a few online -- search on the term "Beatleg". If you need reliable information about the Beatles unreleased tracks, Mark Lewisohn's "Beatles: The Recording Sessions" is considered authoritative at least for the studio work, and is available used.

This is the BIBLE of Beatles bootleg recordings. Written by Scott "Belmo" Belmer (author of Belmo's Beatleg Newsletter), it is the book that every die-hard Beatles fan should get. It has track listings, reviews, and liner notes of over 1,000 Beatles bootlegs. If you only buy one Beatles bootleg book, make it this one!

Belmo's book is somewhat disappointing. While hyped as the ultimate bible to the underground recordings, it seems more to reprint exisiting research. It also does little more than catalog common bootlegs, rather than decribe in any detail the sound and material quality. For this book to have been sucessful, it needed more qualitative information. As such, it's a long list between covers.

Beatleg expert Belmo writes a book that catalogs a large chunk of the Beatle boots out there. By its very nature the book is now incomplete. But it does a good job of explaining the historical development of Beatles bootlegs on vinyl and cd, while listing the different releases based on type (the early years, radio and tv, live, studio outtakes, Get Back sessions, solo boots, etc) The best boots are given greater space with descriptive info on the tracks, lengths, soundquality, packaging, and other trivia. Unfortunately Belmo seems to forget to list all the info for each important album, so some lack more details than others. Maybe future editions will correct this and include the other major boots missing from this edition. One can also hope for a track index with cross-references based on sound quality as well as some more historical info on the tracks themselves.

Despite its catalog lay-out, the book has a narrative feel to it and the Belmo wit which makes for a friendly read, down to the funny touches on the last few pages.The best part of this book is in the track listings-a godsend when hunting down those legendary rare Fab tracks on the Internet that didn't make it to Anthology. And there is indeed some interesting stuff still out there- from the downright bizarre and ridiculous to the fascinating and sublime- all with that unmistakable Beatles imprint.

At a time where so much good and up-to-date information is available on the net on the Beatles' bootleg recordings, this book is really a waste of money.

It probably was a must have in 1997, but it would require a serious update in order to compete with several websites dedicated to the Beatles bootlegs.