The Beatles: Can AI ‘Fix’ Their Unreleased Material?
by Rip Rense
A screen grab from The Beatles: Get Back
Number one priority for applying artificial intelligence (AI) “demixing” to the Beatles’ catalogue? Easy:
Creating a completed Beatles version of George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass.”
Yes, thanks to MAL 9000, the program devised by Peter Jackson for The Beatles Get Back, it is entirely doable.
The Beatles made several passes at the song during the Get Back sessions, which include bass, drums, guitars, organ and glorious harmony vocals. One in particular, from Jan. 6, 1969, should form the basis of the finished version. What’s more, Harrison went into EMI on his 26th birthday, Feb. 25, 1969, and recorded two takes of a superb electric guitar-accompanied solo version (one was released on Anthology 3.)
[A slightly different version of this feature story appeared in the May-June 2024 issue of Beatlefan magazine.]
Using the solo studio take, and separating the mono “All Things Must Pass” rehearsal into individual tracks with AI—cherry-picking the best parts—there is a Beatles recording of this song to be made that would be as polished as anything on the Let it Be album. The band was thisclose to doing a proper studio take, yet the song was, in the instability of group’s last months, allowed to fall between the cracks, not to be revived until Harrison did it for his solo 1970 triple-album of the same name.
“All Things Must Pass” really is the biggest “one that got away” in The Beatles’ story. There is no other unfinished song in the group’s oeuvre that is a more viable, compelling candidate for rescue, and not merely because ingredients exist to create a finished version.
“ATMP” is simply one of Harrison’s signature, summary works, and had it been recorded by the Beatles with George Martin producing (think “Something”), would likely have been even more so. Ian MacDonald, author of the critical history of the Beatles, Revolution in the Head, described it as “the wisest song never recorded by the Beatles,” while Harrison biographer Simon Leng considers it “perhaps the greatest solo Beatle composition.”
It was, of course, meant to be part of the Get Back (later Let it Be) album, famously name-checked in the title list of new works recited by Lennon in a version of “Dig It.”
Listen: This should form the basis of a Beatles version: “All Things Must Pass” from Jan. 6, 1969
And this is just the tip of AI Beatles iceberg, thanks to MAL 9000 (named in honor of the Beatles’ famed right-hand man, Mal Evans, in a takeoff on “HAL 9000” from 2001: A Space Odyssey). It’s a given that producer Giles Martin will continue to make use of MAL with the forthcoming Rubber Soul boxed set, where single tracks with multiple instruments/voices will be “de-mixed” into discrete tracks, then remixed for greater depth and detail (as Martin did with Revolver and some early mono songs on the “red” and “blue” re-release). [The various releases of the Revolver‘s 2022 edition are available in the U.S. here and in the U.K. here.] But there is much other AI work to be done. Here is a general look at projects that could, and I believe should, be on the way in coming years.
*The Get Back Sessions: These famous/infamous sessions are both a morass and a treasure trove. In the 50 filmed hours (mono sound) and the total approximately 130 audio hours are fragments, jams, endless goofing off, half-hearted stabs at songs, laziness, sloppiness, casually performed oldies and, yes, disciplined shaping of new work. Four hundred songs, all told, whether finished or fragment (mostly the latter). The 60 filmed hours are all mono, and this is where MAL can, quite miraculously, spruce things up into fat, sassy, multi-track mixes of studio quality. One rule must apply: embryonic ideas for songs, beginning with the one-take, unfinished jam with almost zero lyrics, “Watching Rainbows,” should be excluded! (Recent articles online by alleged “authorities” absurdly talk about “Rainbows” as if it is a finished, lost gem.)
Related: Get Back, the album that wasn’t, and was
Priority should be given only to songs that sound the most complete, such as, for random example, the low-key Buddy Holly “suite” of “Maybe Baby,” “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” and “Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues”; the terrific rock version of “Two of Us”; the whistle-heavy performance of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” in the Let it Be film; the unfinished Lennon tune, “Suzy Parker”; the loosey-goosey oldies medley of “Rip it Up/Shake, Rattle and Roll/Blue Suede Shoes,” “Honey Hush” and many more.
There are countless proto-versions of Beatles fare, including “I Me Mine” with the later-discarded, great flamenco-style guitar riff; a slow “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window”; the enervated rehash of “Across the Universe”; run-throughs of some Lennon-McCartney oldies, such as “Wake Up in the Morning.” I would vote for the early, shuffle version of “Dig it,” where Paul hilariously mentions everyone from Betty Grable to Clark Kent, and original instrumentals including Paul’s piano quasi-adaptation of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio For Strings” and his own “Palace of the King of Birds” jam. Can Harrison’s quiet, gentle solo acoustic versions of songs by Bob Dylan, and his own work “(Let it Down”) be salvaged? Sifting through this material and choosing the “best” would be a gargantuan project, and merit at least a double-CD set. But it could make for a unique new album—the Beatles at their ease—and an indispensable part of the group’s catalog. (A finished Beatles version of “All Things Must Pass” might find a home here.)
*Live at the Star-Club: Peter Jackson is on the record as wanting to give this invaluable look at the early Beatles the MAL treatment. “I’d love to take the Star-Club tapes, best quality, and use our machine to basically split them apart, and also…take an echoey, amateury (sic) recording in a club and make it sound like it was in a studio,” Jackson told Beatles author Robert Rodriguez in 2022. Is he working on it now? Unknown. But he—or someone—should be. Performed in Hamburg at one of the band’s former showcase clubs on or near Dec. 31, 1962, and released in various legally contested configurations over the years, 33 songs were recorded by the club’s manager, Adrian Barber, using a Grundig reel-to-reel and a single microphone. Despite the dicey sound quality and various Beatles poo-pooing the performance as half-hearted, the concert is tight, well done, great fun and features Ringo just four months into his Beatles tenure. Said Jackson, “Can you somehow get this computer to transform the quality of the sound…from the room sound and make it sound like it was recorded at Abbey Road or something? And the (sound) guy said, ‘Yeah, it would take a little bit of doing, but in theory, it’s possible.’” If accomplished, this would instantly become the most historically important live Beatles recording (especially if the blistering Harrison-sung “Red Hot,” a 1955 hit by Billy “the Kid” Emerson, is included.) But…
*Other Live Concerts: Every mono live recording of the group on tour is now up for AI grabs. All can now be multi-tracked and, uh, de-screamed, from Hollywood Bowl to Tokyo to Munich. This is not to say that all such concerts should be done. Perhaps a highlights—best-of—package would be the way to go. Then there are more historically interesting possibilities: the Cavern Club rehearsals in ’62, shortly after Ringo joined (plus the filmed-for-TV “Some Other Guy” and “Kansas City”); the July ’62 Cavern Club complete performance (with Pete Best), reportedly owned by McCartney; the recently discovered hour-long 20-song set from Stowe (boys’) School in Buckhinghamshire, April 4, 1963 (screamless—with genuine fans yelling out requests!); the July 7, 1957, Quarrymen performance where 15-year-old McCartney watched 16-year-old Lennon (and later was introduced to him, thank goodness).
*Television: The better performances from the excellent Blackpool Night Out shows; the New Musical Express Pollwinners Concerts from 1964 and ’65’ Morecombe and Wise; Shindig, The Ed Sullivan Show, Ready Steady Go!, Lucky Stars, Royal Variety Show, Drop In (Sweden), the Washington Coliseum concert (perhaps the low-volume microphone problems can be fixed!)…yes, all can now be MAL’ed and turned into high-fidelity multi-track stereo. It would be tough to choose highlights only; the sensational Washington show alone begs for full release.
*Radio: All 275 live in-studio mono recordings of 88 different songs broadcast on the BBC (including 36 songs never recorded for albums) are now fodder for multi-track AI stereo. Will Apple and Universal re-release all the BBC material, remixed? It does not seem likely, but certainly those 36 songs never on the original albums would seem a natural project. Imagine hearing them close to, or indistinguishable from, studio presence, and it becomes tantamount to having three new early/mid-’60s Beatles albums. That’s a wow. Just hearing the tinny Lennon-McCartney rarity “I’ll Be On My Way” improved to near-studio ambience would justify the project, in my view. Historical value: restoring the BBC broadcasts of live performances in early 1962 with Pete Best. They are: March 7, the Playhouse Theatre, Hulme, Manchester, with “Dream Baby” (Roy Orbison), “Memphis” (Chuck Berry), “Please Mr. Postman” (Motown), “Ask Me Why” (Lennon-McCartney), the rarity “A Picture of You” (originally by Joe Brown); and June 15, the Playhouse Theater, with “Ask Me Why,” the standard, “Besame Mucho” and “A Picture of You.”
Related: Much more on The Beatles’ BBC sessions
The Escher Demos: Yes, these 27 songs written for what became the “white album” (19 made it), recorded in mono in 1968 at Harrison’s home in Escher, were finally released as part of the “white album” boxed set in 2018, thank goodness. Is it too fine a point to re-release them in MAL’ed multi-track stereo mixes? I think not. Doing so would imbue them with grand, full, detailed sound, effectively a live acoustic Beatles performance in your living room. Wouldn’t it be splendid for this to be released in maximum quality, rather than a batch of mono tracks buried in a boxed set as a curio? This is gold.
[Various editions of the 2018 boxed set are available in the U.S. here and in the U.K. here.]
Other Demos: There are countless Beatles demos from the early days to the late. Some have cropped up on Giles Martin-produced boxed sets, and some on Anthology (and, of course, bootlegs), and they vary greatly in sound quality. Even without MAL, a comprehensive survey of the demos—always of charm and historical significance—is long overdue. “Demixing” and remixing in state-of-the-art sonic enhancement would make such a collection an invaluable Beatles experience. Think: sketches for Van Gogh paintings. Perhaps there would be more revelations a la the Lennon demo for a plaintive ballad that morphed into “Yellow Submarine.” Maybe the legendary Paul song “Etcetera,” long in his possession, might make its debut, along with other discoveries. The many songs the band gave to other artists, from “Bad to Me” (Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas) to “I’m in Love” (the Fourmost) to “World Without Love” (Peter and Gordon) to “Goodbye” (Mary Hopkin) to “Sour Milk Sea” (Jackie Lomax) are essential. Even parts of that home jam from 1960 (with Stu Sutcliffe fumbling around on bass on a couple of numbers) might have a salvageable moment or two. And although they weren’t demos, strictly speaking, the Quarrymen’s 1958 make-your-own-record takes of “In Spite of All the Danger” and “That’ll Be the Day” could fit here. (Note: Peter Jackson is on the record as wanting to AI both.)
New Beatles songs: What? Wasn’t “Now and Then” the last new Beatles song? Well, it depends on how you define the term. In what Jackson likes to call “fan-boy stuff,” there are opportunities to create—yes, create—what can be described as new Beatles songs. No, this does not mean artificially imitating voices and instruments, perish the thought. Two examples come to mind: using AI to remove Harrison’s vocal from the demo for his terrific song, “Sour Milk Sea,” enhancing it, and replacing the Jackie Lomax vocal with it. The back-up musicians in the Lomax version, as is well known: Ringo, Paul, George, Eric Clapton, Nicky Hopkins. Would this be a Beatles song? Not strictly speaking, but it easily fits the bill in a “white album” sense, when there were guest musicians and not every Beatle on each track. Similarly, McCartney’s vocal on the demo for his wonderful “Goodbye” could replace Mary Hopkin’s in the official 1968 version, which features Paul on multi-instruments, and warm arrangement by Richard Hewson (who did “The Long and Winding Road” and “Across the Universe”). Again, a “white album”-ish undertaking.
Lennon’s ’70s Demos: Fans using basic AI programs have removed and enhanced Lennon’s voice from the scores of home cassette recordings he made in the ’70s. The net results (which can be heard on YouTube): every vocal can now be rendered in studio quality, or very close to it. What does this mean? Only that there are new Lennon albums to mined here. Sean Lennon should prioritize this as a project. With the most complete songs, it’s a matter of arranging and recording musical backing. A multi-instrumentalist, Sean could do this himself, or bring in musicians of his choice, including old friends of his father, such as Paul, Ringo, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Jim Keltner—and, yes, Julian. With the fragmentary or unfinished songs, creative thinking might find ways to link some of them, creating new songs, or even turning them into small suites. This must happen; Lennon deserves no less. His lost gem “Memories,” alone, proves this point (read my article about “Memories” here.) Otherwise, these recordings will forever be in a bootleg Twilight Zone (the newest example being a 12-CD box(!) called The Househusband Years).
Whether any of these projects is realized seems, sad to say, based largely on profit consideration, not a sense of properly preserving, curating and issuing the historic music left behind by the group. Apple/Universal seems set on the one-boxed-set-per-year format, pre-Christmas, rather than imaginatively serving Beatles history and fans. Ideally, there should be a plan to execute each one of these projects over the next five years, with possibly two releases per year, including Giles Martin’s ongoing remix projects. Why?
The answer, aside from the obvious endless fascination with the Beatles, and love of their work, is grounded in a desire to, in essence, keep the band alive, as opposed to rendering each new release as a museum piece. Once upon a time, Beatles music was the happiest, most uplifting stuff in the world, a new kind of medicine for melancholy, and I don’t think it’s maudlin to say that the world needs this medicine again. As much as it can get.
Listen: This solo in-studio performance of “All Things Must Pass” by Harrison should be used for the lead vocal on a new remix
5 Comments so far
Jump into a conversationWhy be limited to the Beatles? There are countless artists and groups with live and demo recordings of poor quality that could be enhanced using these techniques and create almost-like-new albums out of them. Of course, someone would have to justify the expense involved for each instance. But many of these have cult followings that could raise the necessary funds through GoFundMe or some other means.
Boy would I love to see that happen, especially with the early live material. Please do it!
The third reason for doing these A.I. remixes is copyright renewal and/or extension. The Beatles are well aware that their catalog is slowly moving toward public domain status – particularly in Britain where copyright on recordings is 50 years. A.I. crafting would extend ownership another 50.
Great list. Probably the most comprehensive list of Live, demo, concert songs that would benefit from MAL 9000 (great name).
You should have a poll so readers could vote. Personally, I’d like to hear the StarClub recordings first, followed by the BBC stuff.
It would be interesting to hear some of the items mentioned – especially the star club material…but what record company is going to stump up the money for such a project NOW??? I would presume the number of people willing to pay for such recordings would be intense collectors rather than the general public…so the capital costs would not be repaid…i don’t know…it is all a very nice idea for some but not for the majority…capitalism is based on money making projects…..not love, nostalgia, real artistic development etc
SADLY…we are all getting too old now…young people might like the beatles for the music they produced but the true analytics are too far and in between. there is no real profit to be made…that is my take on it…be interesting to hear responses to my diatribe.