Unreleased Beatles Music and Film (Softcover) [Paperback]

Richie Unterberger (Author), The Beatles (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2006

The Unreleased Beatles details the incredible breadth of music The Beatles recorded but did not release, as well as film footage of the group that hasn't been made commercially available. Beatles expert Richie Unterberger examines a huge array of material, including unreleased studio outtakes, BBC radio recordings from 1962-1965, live concert performances, home demo recordings, fan club Christmas recordings, and other informal demos done outside of EMI studios. The staggering wealth of unreleased gems encompasses The Beatles' entire career, from a recording the Quarrymen made on July 6, 1957 (aka "the day John met Paul"), right up to outtakes from the final sessions of Let It Be in 1970. Also includes a general overview of Beatles bootlegs, their songs recorded by other artists in the 1960s, never-recorded material, and more than 100 photos.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Richie Unterberger is the author of Unknown Legends of Rock 'n' Roll; Urban Spacemen; Turn! Turn! Turn!: The '60s Folk-Rock Revolution; and Eight Miles High (Backbeat Books). He has written numerous CD reissue liner notes, and he co-edited the All Music Guide to Rock.

Product Details

• Paperback: 390 pages
• Publisher: Backbeat Books (November 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879308923
• ISBN-13: 978-0879308926
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #565,241 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richie Unterberger has been writing about little-known and well-known rock and popular music of all kinds for more than 25 years. Of his eleven books, the most recent "Won't Get Fooled Again: The Who from Lifehouse to Quadrophenia,"" published by Jawbone Press in March 2011. It details the Who's amazing and peculiar journey in the years during the early 1970s in which they struggled to follow up "Tommy" with a yet bigger and better rock opera. Drawing on material from several dozen interviews and mountains of rare archival coverage and recordings, it's the definitive account of this fascinating period in the Who's career.

Also recently published is "White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day." Issued by Jawbone Press in 2009, this is the most comprehensive book ever written about this legendary and innovative group. The 368-page volume details the group's recording sessions, record releases, concerts, press reviews, and other major events shaping their career with both thorough detail and critical insight. Drawing on about 100 interviews and exhaustive research through documents and recordings rarely or never accessed, it unearths stories that have seldom been told, and eyewitness accounts that have seldom seen print, from figures ranging from band members to managers, producers, record executives, journalists, concert promoters, and fans. The July 2009 issue of MOJO magazine hails it as "an impressive menas to reflect on the conundrum of what could be the ultimate cult band...detailed and anecdote-packed." Uncut magazine chose it as #4 in its list of the ten best music books of 2009.

In 2006, Backbeat Books published his seventh book, "The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film," a mammoth 400-page, 300,000-word guide to the incredible wealth of music the Beatles recorded that they did not release, as well as musical footage of the group that hasn't been made commercially available. The book won a 2007 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research in the "Best Discography" division of the "Best Research in Recorded Rock Music" category.

His sixth book, "Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock" (Backbeat, 2003) , is the second book in a two-volume history of the 1960s folk-rock movement. "Eight Miles High" covers folk-rock from mid-1966 to the end of the 1960s, drawing on more than 100 first-hand interviews, as did its predecessor, "Turn! Turn! Turn!: The '60s Folk-Rock Revolution," which covers the history of folk-rock through mid-1966.

His book "Unknown Legends of Rock'n'Roll," published by Backbeat in 1998, profiled 60 underappreciated cult rock artists of all styles and eras. Its sequel, "Urban Spacemen & Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators and Eccentric Visionaries of '60s Rock," was published by Backbeat in the fall of 2000. Both of these books draw extensively upon first-hand interviews with the musicians profiled, as well as interviews with many of their close associates. These volumes cover important artists that have rarely been covered in depth in print, and have often rarely had the opportunity to tell their stories and put forth their perspectives.

He is also author of "The Rough Guide to Music USA," a guidebook to the evolution of regional popular music styles throughout America in the twentieth century; "The Rough Guide to Jimi Hendrix"; and the first two editions of the travel guidebook "The Rough Guide to Seattle." Since 1993, he has been a prolific contributor to the All Music Guide, the largest on-line database of music biographies and album reviews, for which he has written thousands of entries. He is the co-author of "The Rough Guide to Shopping with a Conscience," published by the Rough Guides in early 2007.

He regularly presents events featuring rare rock films in the San Francisco Bay area and elsewhere, at public libraries and other venues. These include the main public libraries of San Francisco, Seattle, Portland Oregon, and San Jose, as well as the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Organizations interested in having him present such events can contact him through his website, www.richieunterberger.com. In summer 2011, he taught a course on the Beatles for the College of Marin's community education program, and will be teaching it again for the September 6-October 11 fall session.

He has also contributed travel and music pieces to various publications, including MOJO, Record Collector, Pulse, rollingstone.com, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Rough Guide to Rock, The Rough Guide Book of Playlists, the East Bay Express, 100 Albums That Changed Music, the Oxford American, the Daily Telegraph, No Depression, Ugly Things, American Songwriter, and Perfect Sound Forever. He has written liner notes to several hundred CD reissues for the Collectors' Choice Music, Sundazed, Rhino, Shout Factory, Water, 4 Men With Beards, Sunbeam, Raven, Stax, Beatball, and Top Sail labels. He is among the journalists interviewed for recent film documentaries on the Byrds, Tim Buckley, Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, the Doors, Neil Young, and the genesis of New York underground rock in the 1960s and 1970s. He has traveled to more than thirty countries, and is a passionate advocate of independent travel and alternative culture in general. He lives in San Francisco.

There is more information about Richie Unterberger and his books on his website, www.richieunterberger.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dear Sir or Madam, Would You Please Read My Review..., January 5, 2007

By 

diskojoe (Salem, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Unreleased Beatles Music and Film (Softcover) (Paperback)

I purchashed this particular book not so much because it was about the Beatles but because I've read several of Mr. Unterberger's prior books and I have always found him to be informative and knowledgeable. This also applies to this book, which I enjoyed reading. I enjoyed reading Mr. Unterberger's story on how he obtained his first Beatles bootleg at the age of 8, since we're both the same age (one of my first memories was the Christmas of 1965 when my sister received Rubber Soul as a gift) and we belong to the youngest generation of people who can remember the Beatles when they were still together. He did a good job overall in describing the many unreleased sessions (studio, live and in concert)the Beatles did throught their career together. Overall, they show that what the Beatles achieved was through long hours of work (it's amazing how many BBC Radio sessions they did between 1962-1965; there's enough to material to fill 10 CDs)with the assistance of George Martin and documented the group's unique dynamics from their unsteady post-skiffle beginnings through their final weary post-psychedelic disintgration.The sections dealing with the unreleased videos and the songs that the Beatles "gave away" actually read a bit better to me than the main section. Mr. Unterberger does make a good case for many of the audio & video performances by the Beatles that are worthy of release (& rerelease; The Hollywood Bowl LP & the movies Help! & Let It Be have not been available for some time now). He also Overall, it's a nice addition to the Lewisohn books, with many pictures that I have never seen before.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For Serious Audiophiles, February 6, 2007

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R. DelParto "Rose2" (Virginia Beach, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Unreleased Beatles Music and Film (Softcover) (Paperback)

Richie Unterberger painstakingly compiled and documented the Beatles unreleased songs that have been in existence from 1957 to 1970. THE UNRELEASED BEATLES, MUSIC AND FILM may appeal to serious Beatle fans who enjoy reading about the most precise detail of the band's recordings in the studio, radio, concert stage as well as their television and film appearances and innovative promotional clips. The book reads and similarly weighs like an encyclopedia or dictionary of the band's unreleased material, but within these pages, die hard Beatles enthusiasts will sink their eyes into insightful information about the band, numerous lists of songs they performed, and see how the band developed musically.

As one reads every synopsis of each recording and performance, the band worked on a tight schedule. Apart from performing night after night in clubs and concert halls, the band performed on BBC radio and TV shows month after month as well as record their studio albums and make movies within the years 1962-1966; no wonder the band left the stage in 1966 and took refuge in the studio as well as try to live normal lives.

Unterberger went through thousands of hours listening and sifting through the Beatles' archives differentiating one track after the other of outtakes, alternate takes, and private and rehearsal tapes. But the most interesting aspect of the book is the tidbits about particular songs that Unterberger discusses that were as good to be released, but appeared incomplete, "That Means a Lot" and "Step Inside Love." The concluding chapter cover the band and artists who recorded and released "The Songs the Beatles Gave Away" and a list of songs that were considered throw aways,"For No One: Beatles Compositions That Were Never Recorded."

The UNRELEASED BEATLES is a humongous and tedious read but well worth the effort. The benefit of owning Unterberger's book is that most of the information about the unreleased recordings by The Beatles are in one place. And this book is an excellent accompaniment to The Beatles Anthology as well as Mark Lewisohn's THE COMPLETE BEATLES RECORDING SESSIONS: THE OFFICIAL STORY OF THE ABBEY ROAD YEARS 1962-1970.

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Successful Quest For a Beatle Treasure Chest, November 29, 2006

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BeatleBangs1964 (United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Unreleased Beatles Music and Film (Softcover) (Paperback)

This book is a bonus deluxe treat; it is a cornucopia of Beatles' music information. The Beatles' unrealed songs are covered in this book; from studio outtakes; rehearsals; live shows; Christmas fun and banter among the boys themselves are included in this treasure. The Beatle Literati are delighted with this book. It rates a hearty "yeah, yeah, yeah!"

Luckily, this author does an excellent job of providing a time line for the Beatles' otherwise "unknown" to the main population works. Each work is listed chronologically; each work is described in full.

Readers get to travel down the Long & Winding Road that the Beatles paved by listening to obscure BBC recordings from 1962-1965 and unreleased work from the Anthology collection. Rare pictures from films that had yet to see the light of day are included in this book.

Inveterate Beatle fans will want this book. It appeals to the Beatle scholar as well as those who are interested in the World's Greatest Band and want to acquire more information about the Beatles. Regardless of where on the Beatle spectrum you are, this book is for you.