In 1964 and 1965, a little-known band called The Beatles played a small local venue here in LA, the Hollywood Bowl. Perhaps you have heard of this. You may even have heard some recordings from those concerts, because in 1977 they were released as a live album entitled The Beatles at The Hollywood Bowl. The record hit number two on the U.S. charts when it debuted, but it ultimately fell out of production and was never even published on CD.
Now, as Billboard reports, a newly remixed and remastered version of those Hollywood Bowl recordings will be coming out for today’s audiences.
When legendary producer George Martin was handed the tapes from the concerts to make the 1977 album, there was a bit of a problem. Or, specifically, about 17,000 problems: the non-stop screams of the packed house of Beatlemaniacs at their peak. The band couldn’t even hear themselves play, and the tapes were as much a document of that ambient noise as of the musical performance.
That was it—until Capitol Records gave Martin’s son Giles a call just recently to say that, deep in the building’s archive, they had found a different version of the tapes from those concerts. When the tapes were digitized, they were discovered to be an improvement over the version that had been used back in the 1970s and once modern studio technology entered the picture, allowing for much more precise sound separation, it made it possible to create a record where band and fans both come through clearly.
The reissue of The Beatles at The Hollywood Bowl will now also include four additional songs which were previously unreleased: “You Can’t Do that,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” and “Baby’s in Black.”
The release of the live record is in conjunction with the September 15 release of Ron Howard’s new documentary about the Fab Four, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, The Touring Years. The doc will include live film footage shot at the same Hollywood Bowl shows.
