At this desk, the arrival of a tribute album is greeted with a great deal of skepticism. The whole concept of a tribute album is fraught with peril on all sides. If the featured act or acts hew too closely to the original arrangements, then what are they offering beyond cover versions? And if they reinterpret the works too liberally, they run the risk of subverting that which was special about the original music.

And if the artist being covered is one of the stature of the Beatles, well, then there’s the whole issue of sacrilege. Don’t mess up my Beatles, man.

So it was with those thoughts in mind that I received the latest album from Soulive, Rubber Soulive. My skepticism was ratcheted up a few notches furthur (heh) when I discovered that the trio has fans on the jam band circuit. Here’s the thing: I. Hate. Jam. Bands. Years ago I coined the term jamwankery, a self-explanatory word that sums up what for me is the primary motivation of players plying that trade. Okay, dudes: it may bring you joy, but I don’t want to see or hear you doing it.

But the promo blurb for Rubber Soulive had suggested to me the possibility that something different was afoot. And alas, it is. On Rubber Soulive the trio takes a sonic approach of classic soul groups like Booker T & the MGs and the Bar-Kays. Their sound is one that will be welcomed by anyone who enjoys The New Mastersounds and/or the City Champs.

Rather than being — like Booker T & the MGs’ McLemore Avenue — a soul reworking of a single Beatles album (as the title implies), Rubber Soulive picks and chooses from the Beatles catalog.

The instrumental trio presents “Drive My Car” as a duet of sorts. Neal Evans‘ gurgling B3 handles the verses, and Eric Krasno’s jazzy electric guitar takes the choruses and a tasty solo. The bass work is just the right amount of busy, yet it’s all done with organ pedals. Impressive. The organ takes a solo toward the end of the track.

George Harrison’s “Taxman” works well recast as a soul joint. The heavily Leslie’d organ takes the role of the response vocal. But the melody here is used primarily as a jumping-off point for some soloing. A fast and snaky guitar solo trades off with the organ, and Alan Evans‘ splashy drums propel things forward.

John Lennon’s ballad “In My Life” might not seem an obvious choice for this project. Here the band sounds the most like the Memphis Group, and the guitar sounds out single notes to recreate the vocal melody line. The band’s just-forceful-enough restating of the opening riff makes the song without destroying the vibe. A note-perfect organ recreation of George Martin’s double-speed piano solo is a delight.

Soulive takes a different approach on “Eleanor Rigby.” Here the mood of the song is drastically changed from the original. Stuttering syncopation gives the song a very off-kilter feel. While the soaring choruses work, the verses are jarring; perhaps listeners less familiar with the original (are there such people?) might be able to enjoy this, but for these ears it’s too radical of a change. Lovely jazz chording saves the song from being a total disaster, but it’s the first misstep on an otherwise solid album.

The trio launches right into the heaviness of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and sounds a bit like Derek & the Dominoes in the process. The arrangement here is less about soul and more about just plain rocking out in that curiously early 70s way. Listeners will want to whip out their air guitars for this tour de force.

Soulive plays it pretty straight on “Come Together” but they do bring the funk a bit here. There’s a pleasing balance of looseness tempered with the clear feeling that they know where they’re going with the song — no jams, thanks — and they get a surprisingly full sound out of the trio format. Lots of wah-wah guitar on this one.

Oit of eleven Beatles songs covered, Soulive chose three Harrison numbers. “Something” is played pretty closely to the original as well, but a gospel feel is brought to the fore. Again, the lead guitar follows the vocal line of the original, and the solo is taken virtually note-for-note. Here it’s the organ that takes off on an exploratory journey, just far enough from the basic melody line to make things interesting.

Most listeners won’t be able to identify the next track until the signature melody kick in. “Revolution” is radically rearranged as a fast jazz organ/piano centered number. The emphasis here is on licks rather than melody, though the melody is in there. Unlike “In My Life,” here the radical changes actually work. A brief but face-melting piano solo is the cherry on top.

“Help!” starts out sounding unlike the original, but when the trio locks in on the song, it’s a jazz guitar-led arrangement that’s as propulsive as the Beatles’ version. An exuberant organ solo pushes the melodic boundaries while slipping in just enough of the original melody line to keep things grounded. It’s a finger-poppin’ arrangement with a very “live” feel.

There’s not much one could do to “Day Tripper,” you’d think. That signature riff is such an integral part of the song, what can you do? In Soulive’s hands, a good bit. The riff is kept, but the band takes is half-time for a feel like Otis Redding’s stage band. And a Claptonesque (Cream-era) solo laid atop the riff works surprisingly well.

The album wraps up with George’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” The song seems tailor-made for this treatment. Here the trio is firing on all cylinders, throwing all of the tricks in their bag into the mix. It’s not at all overstuffed; in fact this may the most fully-realized reinterpretation on the album. The drums occupy a more prominent role that’s as musical as it is percussive. It ends the album on a soaring note.

Anyone who digs instro-jazz or the Beatles should give Rubber Soulive a spin. Jam band fans will probably dig it too. And I suppose that’s okay.

Follow “the_musoscribe” on Twitter and get notified
when new features, reviews and essays are published.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION:

The Rare and Unseen series from Formative Productions is a mixed bag. The Beatles edition has some interesting material but feels fleshed-out. The Rolling Stones volume is pretty good but not essential. But the latest edition covering John Lennon stands head and shoulders above those two.

First, the obligatory disclaimers: there’s no Beatles music here, save for a clip of “Some Other Guy” from Liverpool’s Cavern, but Lennon’s talking over that. And this is not an officially-sanctioned product. But those extremely minor points aside, John Lennon Rare and Unseen does what it sets out to do, and does it in a professional manner. Over the course of 75 minutes, the DVD weaves together some decidedly rare footage from a short list of sources into a relatively cohesive look at certain aspects of John Lennon. His on-the-record views on fame, money, the “bigger than Jesus” controversy, the war in Vietnam, the peace and youth movements and much more are explored. Lennon was always outspoken and candid, and the DVD captures those qualities through interviews with David Frost and others.

Beatles-era interview footage shows equally candid comments from McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starr as well; even as a lifelong hardcore Beatles fanatic with a large library of unreleased footage, I had seen quite little of this. Some well-known snippets – specifically ones surrounding the notorious 1966 Memphis and Manila visits — are shown here in longer form, providing useful and illuminating context.

The cheese quotient is refreshingly low. There are brief moments of ersatz Beatles music used as background, but they’re mercifully unobtrusive. A few talking heads appear to provide weighty pronouncements, and while some – Phil Collins, in particular – add little and may cause the viewer to wonder “Why is he even here?” – others have some genuinely interesting things to say. In general, however, these guests are at their most useful when they relay anecdotes rather than attempt to provide analysis. (Leave that to me, says I.) Collins telling us that he “never met Lennon” but probably “wouldn’t have liked him” is not especially useful information. Having been a childhood extra on the set of A Hard Day’s Night does not qualify one as a Beatles/Lennon authority, no matter how much fame one may have earned in other ways.

The two programs from which the bulk of the DVD is drawn are Man of the Decade dating from late 1969 and an episode of Weekend World from roughly the same period. The DVD is well-edited, and the archival clips are of reasonably good quality. The audio on some of the earlier clips is a bit dodgy, but nothing is so bad as to be distracting.

For anyone interested in what John Lennon had to say about, well, much of anything, John Lennon Rare and Unseen is a treasure trove of material that deserves to be seen.

Follow “the_musoscribe” on Twitter and get notified
when new features, reviews and essays are published.

 

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION:

Though I did my best not to, as the July 2010 Paul McCartney concert in Charlotte kicked off, I already had in my head a couple of ideas I thought I’d use in my post-show summary. But besides putting on a great show, McCartney managed to be something I hadn’t expected: just slightly unpredictable.

Sure, I had a pretty good idea of what songs to expect, and in what order. And I knew that we’d be treated to an evening’s full of by-the-book McCartneyisms: the well-rehearsed off-the-cuff anecdotes, the homespun snippet of some ditty of supposed relevance to the town he’s playing in, the everybody-say-woo bit, the connecting with a specific audience member (in this case a guy woman waving a “MCCARTNY” [sic] auto license tag), and repeated observations of what a great time we’re all having.

Buying a ticket to a Paul McCartney concert is not about witnessing spontaneity. But it is about a bunch of other things, all good. The man is in his late sixties now, and remains one of the planet’s richest performers. In 2010 Paul McCartney hasn’t got anything to prove to the audience. He could get up there and phone it in, and plenty of people would be satisfied, and would likely queue up for tickets to the next tour.

More than most performers, McCartney has always been one who truly wants to make his fans happy. You hear plenty of songwriters say things like “I write songs to please myself” and such, and thank goodness they do, because that’s what makes it real. And there’s ample evidence to suggest that the same is true of Macca. But onstage it’s a different matter altogether. He’s there to put on a show. He knows it, we know it.

Even to someone who has grown up with the Beatles, Wings and solo McCartney catalog (including tangential projects like The Fireman, the Liverpool Oratorio and Standing Stone, and even the Percy “Thrills” Thrillington album), a McCartney concert can still provide some mild surprises.

One surprise was how much Paul relinquished bass playing duties to Brian Ray. When McCartney did play bass, he used his trademark Hofner, but for a good half of the show, Ray played a Gibson SG bass while McCartney displayed (with some subtlety) what an accomplished musician he actually is. And that’s not an insignificant point: while his skills as a composer, singer and performer in general are well established, all-around-crack-musician isn’t always the first phrase that comes to mind when thinking of McCartney. Of course that’s wrong: this is a man who played all of the instruments on his first solo album, and did so before it was practical or relatively common (see: Todd Rundgren, Mike Oldfield, Stevie Wonder, etc.) But on this tour Paul plays lead guitar, acoustic guitar, mandolin, ukulele and piano.

The pacing of the show was flawless. With a catalog as vast as his, McCartney has material that covers a wide range of styles and emotions. Putting together a set list is a high-wire act, especially for someone so focused on crowd-pleasing. There are the demands of the casual fans: they want to hear the mega-hits, and they want them played Just Like the Record. For those people, McCartney served up ditties like “Let ‘Em In” and the mini-suite “Band on the Run.” Some punters are hardcore: they want to witness Paul reach deep into his songbook and pull out some deep album cuts. For them (well, us, really) McCartney and band pulled out “Mrs Vandebilt,” “Letting Go” and the Beatles’ “I’ve Got a Feeling.” And to keep things a bit contemporary, the band cranked out the two most accessible tracks from the Fireman project.

One of my original premises, one of the things I was expecting to comment on at some length, was the critical role that keyboardist Paul “Wix” Wickens occupies in the band. Wix has been part of McCartney’s touring lineup for twenty years: it’s perhaps worth pointing out that his time with McCartney has vastly outlasted such musical collaborations as those with John Lennon (spanning 1957-1969) or Denny Laine (1971-1980). Only Paul’s wife Linda, who succumbed to cancer, could claim a longer musical association with Paul.

And beginning with McCartney’s 1989-90 world tour (the first time I saw him onstage, as it happens), Wickens was indeed a central component of the sound that came from the stage. By the late-late 1980s, keyboard technology had finally advanced to the point where it was possible to recreate the complex and distinctive sounds of the Beatles’ Baroque and Mannerist period works (Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, Abbey Road) in an authentic fashion. So it was left — in those days — to Wix to play the horn charts from “Magical Mystery Tour,” the orchestra in “A Day in the Life,” and so on. Fans delighted to these carefully faithful live renditions of Beatles and Wings hits of yore.

Wickens — the band’s onstage musical director — remains in that role. But in 2010 his delivery is much more subtle. The current band (him and McCartney plus guitarists Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray, and drummer Abe Laboriel Jr. — a stable lineup going on nine years now) is focused less on providing audio carbon copies of classic songs. They’re careful not to mess with the arrangements too much –  don’t nobody better mess with our Beatles — but on the 2010 tour, the audience is as likely as not to hear what used to be a horn chart part played instead by Rusty Anderson on slide guitar. Not only does this work, but this approach gives the band a more rock-oriented edge. It also provides a less “plastic” feeling, and I say this as a keyboard player myself.

This go-round there were no tunes from Magical Mystery Tour, only two from Sgt. Pepper, and only one from Abbey Road (unless you count a George Harrison song). Also notably absent were any of the early Beatles rockers. But overall the set was well balanced, with perhaps a bit more Wings material (about ten songs) than casual fans might have expected.

The nearly three-hour setlist was carefully sequenced. The segues were smooth. Thoughtful pieces — like an amazing “Eleanor Rigby” featuring Paul on acoustic guitar, Wix on virtual (and note-perfect) string octet plus Anderson and Laboriel on vocal harmonies — led seamlessly into other styles. Particularly effective was the ukulele-led George Harrison tribute of “Something.” It led into a powerful like-the-Beatles version for its second half, effectively bridging a mini-set of mellower numbers back into rock and roll without jarring the audience.

Hardcore fans will always find something to carp about, and in this reviewer’s case it was the lack of getting to hear “Two of Us.” But instead we got to hear “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” Nice, but McCartney did that one on the Wings Over America tour, and he’d never done “Two of Us” until this tour. But at three hours, nobody could realistically claim that McCartney didn’t offer value for money.

Like Paul sings in “Venus and Mars / Rock Show,” the experience of seeing him onstage in 2010 is “like a relic from a different age.” But it’s a welcome and unforgettable experience. Few performers have earned the stature of Paul McCartney, and fewer still consistently deliver onstage. Over the course of thirty-seven numbers, his energy didn’t visibly flag once, and he never lost the audience, not for as much as a second. You could learn a lot about performing by studying a McCartney concert. But it’s also fun to just go and enjoy the evening. I did both.

Follow “the_musoscribe” on Twitter and get notified
when new features, reviews and essays are published.

To the Irish author Brendan Behan goes the attribution of a quote which reads in part, “There is no such thing as bad publicity…” In light of the possible status of this line as some sort of universal truth, I have serious misgivings about reviewing such a piece of irredeemable exploito-garbage as the new DVD Paul McCartney is Dead: the Last Testament of George Harrison.

If you’re a Beatles fan of any depth, you’re at least familiar with the broad-brush outlines of the premise. Because I’m walking a fine line here, trying to review product but not wishing to further a single one of the ludicrous assertions set forth within the film, I won’t even get into it other than to set the basic scene. In 1969 a Drake University student (a Des Moines IA institute of higher learning with the official motto “Veritas,” or, in English, “Truth”) penned an article in the school paper called “Is Paul McCartney Dead?” Times being what they were, and disc jockeys being desperate enough for ratings to perpetuate a manufactured story, the story caught fire and spread.

Subsequently, in between puffs on their joints, countless college students the world over scoured the Beatles LP covers and inner sleeves for the “clues” that the surviving Beatles left for them. People played their records backwards in hope of finding “backwards masked” messages from John, George and Ringo. While all this effort supposedly resulted in mounting evidence that Paul really was dead, the only real results were sales of (a) a lot of magazines on the subject and (b) replacement phonograph needles.

“Celebrated” attorney F. Lee Bailey even got in on the act, hosting a program that purported to examine and weigh the so-called evidence. (Here’s a shocker: The results were “inconclusive.”) And that was pretty much the end of the story. The next big Beatles-related hoax was centered around the 1976 album debut by a Canadian band called Klaatu. They were purported to be the Beatles in disguise. (They weren’t, but they did produce some worthwhile music. That’s another story.)

Fast forward to the 21st century, the era of fan fiction. Because that, in the end, is all Paul McCartney Really is Dead amounts to: some slapdash, shoddy fanfic that anyone with a working knowledge of the Beatles’ history could easily cobble together. The video was created by the production team at something calling itself called Highway 61 Entertainment. Run by a guy who fronts a Bob Dylan tribute band — I don’t wish to lend a shred of dignity to him by repeating his name — the production company’s facility exterior is shown briefly in the film, but what viewers see looks suspiciously like stock photo with a big logo Photoshopped across it. Which would make sense: why a big building for a team of roughly six to eight people, total? (Yes, I watched all the way through to the final credits-roll, and this product is the fruit of the labor of a minivan-full of people.)

The director of this film (who, natch, also wrote it) has a spotty track record already, with a barrel-scraping series of Dylan biopics, and some right-wing propaganda films that made him a darling of the Conservative Political Action Conference. CPAC, of course, are the folks who give a platform to such luminaries of rationality as Pat Buchanan (Nazi apologist), Newt Gingrich (serial adulterer), Sarah Palin (failed half-term governor and teabaggers’ stalking horse), Ron Paul (darling of the I’ve-got-mine-screw-you crowd), and Glenn Beck (dangerously insane TV/radio personality) to greater prominence. The cynicism necessary to espouse a worldview compatible with that sort of rogues’ gallery is, one supposes, a prerequisite for embarking on a project such as this. Said director and his crew have (pardon the expression) exhumed this long-dead fake controversy and added so many “new clues” that anyone who subjects themselves to the hour and a half viewing will end up with eyes sore from constant rolling.

Put quite bluntly, this film is a piece of shit. I could go on and cite specific examples where basic facts (upon which myriad laughable assertions are built) are misstated, fabricated or just plain wrong. But that sort of thoughtful treatment of the film, its creators and its subject would bestow undeserved credibility. This 95-minute sleazefest is beneath contempt. Not merely a crass, opportunistic cash-in, the DVD betrays undisguised contempt for all of the Beatles and people in their orbit. To call it disrespectful to the memories of John and George doesn’t begin to get to the heart of the matter. And it should go without saying that the voice on tape purported to be George Harrison…well, it ain’t.

Note: You may notice that I’ve obscured the director’s name in the DVD packaging image. He deserves such treatment. And I did notice something interesting: the “official” cover art from which I sourced the image has added a question mark (”?”) after George Harrison’s name. My copy has no such punctuation. Perhaps the lawyers weighed in.

Paul McCartney Really is Dead is to be avoided with extreme prejudice. I feel dirty even having viewed it. Totally without merit on any level, this DVD is in shockingly bad taste, is amateurishly produced, and represents cynicism of the lowest order.

Follow “the_musoscribe” on Twitter and get notified
when new features, reviews and essays are published.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION:

In honor of 09.09.09, the unofficial reboot of The Greatest Band The World Has Ever Known, here are NINE (of course) links to some Beatles-related features on this blog and its sister site www.musoscribe.com.

1.  A 2007 interview with Marshall Crenshaw in which MC reminisces about his days as a cast member of the Beatlemania show.
2.  A 2006 interview with Sean Lennon (John and Yoko’s son, currently touring as part of Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band) on the release of his solo album Friendly Fire.
3.  A 2007 interview with Yoko Ono discussuing her I’m Not a Witch album.
4.  A 2009 interview with Howard Kaylan (The Turtles, Flo and Eddie, Frank Zappa’s Mothers) discussing his film My Dinner With Jimi. A central scene in this humorous-yet-true-story movie centers on John Lennon.
5. One from my “Bootleg Bin” column in which the unofficial John Lennon CD Free As a Bird: The Dakota Beatle Demos is reviewed.
6. A review of the latest odds-and-sods DVD of Beatles ephemera, Rare and Unseen.
7. A review of the sorta-new DVD John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band - Live in Toronto ‘69.
8. A review of a 2008 Stax Records compilation titled Stax Does the Beatles.
9. A review of the new album You Are Here, by George Harrison’s son Dhani and Oli Hecks, calling themselves thenewno2.
10. BONUS! Well, no…that one’s not ready quite yet. It’s my interview with Barry Tashian, leader of The Remains, the group that toured with The Beatles in 1966.

Happy 09.09.09!

The Beatles 2CD retrospective Anthology 3 was released in 1996, some 17 years after the Beatles broke up. It’s been another 13 years now — a span of time longer than the group was together, in fact a span of time roughly equal to the period between the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show (early’ 64) and John Lennon’s tragic death (December ‘80). In other words, a long time; time enough for a lot to change. Time enough for the market, certainly, to change.

We now know that work began on the Anthology project (then under its working title The Long and Winding Road) as early as 1970. The Beatles and their associates made studious efforts to collect and compile the worthwhile audio and video relevant to the group’s history. Their result was successful, as evidenced by the six CDs of outtakes and ephemera that made up the Anthology audio series; the ten hours of video that make up the Anthology film series (not counting the unreleased-but-circulate-among-collectors “Director’s Cut” versions); and the impressive companion coffee table book.

Yet — yet — since Anthology represents the Beatles’ history from their own viewpoint, holes remain. Other pieces of the puzzle do exist, as does a market for them. When it comes to audio, quite a bit is still out there. Noted Beatles expert (and general rock music authority) Richie Unterberger published a book in 2006 called The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film, in which he surveyed the landscape of unreleased material. It’s a thick book, well-researched and as exhaustive as could be. And Unterberger knew enough to hedge his bets: he included references to items widely believed to exist, but as yet (or as of 2006) unverified. Even since that time, a couple of items have dribbled out into collectors’ circles (if not into legitimate release). These include audio of a Beatles concert in Montréal Canada; undoctored audio of their legendary Shea Stadium gig; a 1966 show from Memphis TN (the “cherry bomb incident” show) and — most recently — the full eleven-minute-plus version of “Revolution #1″ (that’s Take 20 RM 1 for those of you who track such things).

And there are still a number of us waiting for 1967’s “Carnival of Light”, even though it will probably sound like the “Think for Yourself” vocal overdub session tape crossed with John and Yoko’s Two Virgins. We want it anyway, along with the 23-minute “Helter Skelter” and Ringo’s “Anything.”

Points being, (a) stuff is still being discovered relating to a group that last set foot in a studio together over four decades ago and (b) people still give a damn.

Which brings us to the new DVD The Beatles: Rare and Unseen. This 90 minute DVD purports to include more of that cool stuff. Does it deliver? Well, very strictly speaking, yes. But the brief items included therein most definitely fall into the category of ephemera, and the material is presented in a manner that will doubtless frustrate hardcore Beatle fanatics (and then, for whom else would such a DVD be intended?).

First up is the earliest known footage of the Beatles onstage. Dating from Liverpool in 1962, the color footage is fascinating, and in pretty good quality. But — and this is important — there’s no audio. The clip is very short, and while it’s looped a number of times, it’s presented on the DVD with voiceover narration and commentary, and there’s an audio overlay of that ersatz Merseybeat music. You know the stuff: when you’re doing a piece on the Beatles and you want Beatles music but the budget simply doesn’t allow it, you get some generic “original compositions” that have just the right sonic elements, and you play that instead. It’s understandable, really, and it’s not that bad. But it would have been nicer if the disc’s compilers had included (perhaps as bonus material) the unedited, undubbed, un-voiceovered clip in its entirety. Had they done that, I guarantee some enterprising collector would have synched up some bootleg audio to the clip to create a more-or-less complete document. (Don’t believe me? Then track down and view the unofficial Pink Floyd DVD called 8MM. Case closed.)

Other clips included have the same appeal — while hardcore Beatleologists might know that these clips existed, they likely haven’t seen them before. But all are marred in some fundamental way, and none is presented in its raw, unaltered format. The home movie clips on the sets of Help! and Magical Mystery Tour are fragmentary, but it’s fascinating to see them nonetheless. There’s something about the way the Beatles’ demeanors are captured on these reels that does give the viewer a sense that they’re seeing a previously hidden side of these characters.

The interview clips of John Lennon from the 1970s are interesting — any interview with Lennon is interesting — but the full interview would have been much more so. The true highlight of the DVD is the footage of the Beatles onstage at the Paris Olympia. No, still no audio, but the brief clips show the group at a critical juncture: they had made it way-big in England, hadn’t yet traveled to America, and were onstage in Paris where they got a good-but-not-ecstatic reception. And here the commentary is more than interesting; it’s truly engaging and fascinating. On the bill with the Beatles for the Olympia run were two other acts: Sylvie Vartan and Trini Lopez. The Bulgaria-born Vartan (who was quite the hottie in those days, and scored a number of pop hits on the French charts) reminisces briefly about the shows. As ever, more would have been nice. But Lopez’s drummer — one Mickey Jones — has a lot to say. Jones — now an ubiquitous character actor whose countenance and frame will be familiar to most viewers — filmed the Beatles onstage for posterity, and spent a fair amount of time with the foursome, getting to know them pretty well. His recollections alone make the DVD worth viewing.

Other commentators are included. Some of them — even if they had no direct contact with the Beatles — have something to offer in the way of insight (former Cockney Rebel Steve Harley) and some (even if they do bear a tangential connection) do not (I’m looking at you, Phil Collins). And in at least one instance, the commentary is laughably misguided and factually incorrect. What’s ironic is that the error comes from someone billed as an Official Expert on pop culture.

In sum, The Beatles: Rare and Unseen has its flaws: it was certainly done on the cheap, and if all of the rare gems were strung end to end, you’d have a five-minute film. But those nuggets (and a small but significant portion of the commentary) make this title a must-see (once) for hardcore Beatles fans. Most others, including those with a passing interest in pop music, will still find the DVD interesting if not terribly memorable.