Rare Beatles Songs: I Fancy Me Chances

A very simple song, interesting in how late, relatively speaking, it appears in the Beatles early catalog (1962) -- not entirely surprising, however, given that their single of choice at the time was "Love Me Do." Recalled by Cavern Club dwellers as possessing a basic premise ("when I'm at the dances, I fancy me chances with you"), the song exists in Beatles recorded history only at the tail end of their career, through a brief run-through during the Get Back sessions during a jam on "Maggie Mae," where, typically, John and Paul forget most of the words.

Paul McCartney & Wings: Let 'Em Out Vol. 2 - The Trevor Jones Tapes

Elstree Rehearsals September 1975

01 Little Woman Love + C Moon #1
02 Suicide
03 You Gave Me The Answer
04 Ol' Man River
05 Stealin'
06 Junior's Farm #1
07 Junior's Farm #2
08 Little Woman Love + C Moon #2
09 Let 'Em In
10 Live And Let Die
11 Soily

Paul McCartney & Wings: Let 'Em Out Vol. 1 - The Trevor Jones Tapes

01 Silly Love Songs (no strings or horns)
02 Beware My Love (complete instrumental acetate)
03 Beware My Love (incomplete)
04 Must Do Something About It (Paul vocal)
05 She's My Baby (take 1)
06 She's My Baby (version 2)
07 The Note You Never Wrote (no strings)
08 Time To Hide
09 Wino Junko
10 Let 'Em In (mono promo edit)
11 Let 'Em In (stereo promo edit)
12 Newt Rack (instrumental, monitor mix)
13 Take It Away (monitor mix)
14 What's That You're Doing (rough take, monitor mix)
15 Hi Hi Hi (mono acetate alt mix)
16 Another Day (mono acetate mix)
17 Junior's Farm (alt mix by Ernie Winfrey)
18 Sally G (alt mix by Ernie Winfrey)
19 Daytime Nighttime Suffering (early mix)

Beatles Covers: Fats Domino - Lovely Rita

Paul McCartney on the Inner Groove of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

"Then the this-little-bit-if-you-play-it-backwards stuff. As I say, nine times out of ten it's really nothing. Take the end of Sgt. Pepper, that backward thing, 'We'll fuck you like Supermen.' Some fans came around to my door giggling. I said, 'Hello, what do you want?' They said, 'Is it true, that bit at the end? Is it true? It says, "We'll fuck you like Supermen."' I said, 'No, you're kidding. I haven't heard it, but I'll play it.' It was just some piece of conversation that was recorded and turned backwards. But I went inside after I'd seen them and played it studiously, turned it backwards with my thumb against the motor, turned the motor off and did it backwards. And there it was, sure as anything, plain as anything. 'We'll fuck you like Supermen.' I thought, Jesus, what can you do?"

"We write songs. We know what we mean by them. But in a week someone else says something about it, says that it means that as well, and you can't deny it. Things take on millions of meanings. I don't understand it.

"A fantastic example is the inner track on the back of Sgt. Pepper that plays for hours if your automatic doesn't cut off. It's like a mantra in Yoga and the meaning changes and it all becomes dissociated from what it is saying.

"You get a pure buzz after a while because it's so boring it ceases to mean anything."

Paul McCartney on "Let Me Roll It"

"I was up in Scotland one day, on a nice day, I was sitting outside, plonking on a guitar and I got this idea for a song. We took it off to Lagos and put down a backing track, with Linda playing organ, me playing drums, Denny playing guitar. And then we overdubbed the big guitars you hear right the way through it, going through a vocal PA system to get the unusual guitar sound on this one, not through a guitar amp but through a vocal amp. It was a big powerful amp."

December 8, 1980: The Day John Lennon Died

by Keith Elliot Greenberg

In a breathtaking, minute-by-minute format, December 8, 1980: The Day John Lennon Died follows the events leading to the horrible moment when Mark David Chapman calmly fired his Charter Arms .38 Special into the rock icon, realizing his perverse fantasy of attaining perennial notoriety. New York Times bestselling author Keith Elliot Greenberg takes us back to New York City and the world John Lennon woke up to. The day begins with a Rolling Stone photo session that takes on an uncomfortable tone when photographer Annie Leibowitz tries to maneuver Yoko Ono out of the shot. Later Lennon gives the last interview of his life, declaring, "I consider that my work won't be finished until I'm dead and buried and I hope that's a long, long time." We follow the other Beatles, Lennon's family, the shooter, fans, and New York City officials through the day, and as the hours progress, the pace becomes more breathless. Once the fatal shots are fired, the clock continues to tick as Dr. Stephan Lynn walks from the emergency room after declaring the former Beatle dead, Howard Cosell announces the singer's passing on Monday Night Football, and Paul McCartney is lambasted for muttering "Drag, isn't it?" - his bereavement confused with indifference. The epilogue examines the aftermath of the killing: the considerable moment when 100,000 New Yorkers stood in silence in Central Park, the posthumous reunion of the Beatles in the studio - with George, Paul, and Ringo accompanying the recordings of their old friend - the unveiling of a bronze John Lennon statue in Fidel Castro's Cuba, and the durable legacy that persists today.

Keith Elliot Greenberg is a New York Times bestselling author and producer for America's Most Wanted. In addition to producing programs for VH-1, 48 Hours, MSNBC Investigates, the History Channel, and Court TV, among others, Greenberg has authored more than thirty non-fiction books and written for such outlets as Maxim, The Village Voice, The New York Observer, USA Today, Playboy.com, and US Weekly.

Rare Beatles Songs: Hold On, I'm Coming

You'd think that Lennon would have had enough of silly love songs by 1966, a time when he was writing groundbreaking material for the Beatles, but a look through his demos of the period and you'd see that it wasn't so. On a tape that also features acoustic demos of "She Said She Said" recorded at his home in Kenwood, John runs through "Hold On, I'm Coming," a love song in the form that fits in more closely with the material he had been writing in 1963-64. Needless to say, the song never made it beyond the demo stage, but it's interesting to note that Lennon did something similar four years later, abandoning generic love songs in favor of more personal compositions (in that case the plaintive "When a Boy Meets a Girl").