Audio-Vérité
Audio-Vérité
The Beatles and the Memphis "Cherry Bomb Tapes"—the firecracker revolution.
The term "historical significance" tends to get bandied about in bootleg collecting circles almost as a warning to neophytes that some recordings ought not to be dismissed on the basis of execrable sound quality. But if near-perfect fidelity is your criteria, you just might miss out on a new take on history, or the solution to some long-standing musical mystery, or how new life can be pumped into an old musical saga.
The Beatles have dominated the bootleg market, despite what would seem some obvious limitations: their full-fledged professional career lasted only seven years, so there is far less to draw from than with artists like The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan; the recording and sound equipment of the time was hardly up to the challenge of overcoming fifty thousand screaming teenyboppers; and The Beatles viewed concerts as necessary grind work, typically giving no thought to the possibility of someone preserving their shows for posterity.
The best Beatles bootlegs are often collections of studio outtakes, like the wonderful package of alternate versions from the February 11, 1963 session that produced their first album, Please Please Me. For live cuts, The Beatles bootleg collector has long looked to the many BBC recordings the band waxed, turning up at the dear "Auntie Beeb" studios—as it was affectionately billed in British parlance—and cutting loose on personal favorites, fan requests, and forgotten nuggets they would never revisit again. On BBC radio, the group was a veritable human jukebox, and as tight a live band—even if it was a highly controlled enviroment—as you're likely to find
But just a few years ago, Beatles chat forums began to light up in regards to a live recording from Memphis in 1966—a most unstable environment±that has long had a special place in bootleg lore. The '66 tour was to be the band's last, an astounding decision at the same time, when being a touring band was absolutely vital—or so went the prevailing thought—to actually being able to call one's unit a band. Simply put, bands gigged. And if you didn't, well, you weren't no rock & roller.
The Beatles decision to retreat from the road and hole up in the studio—and become a band of a different sort, altering the future of music in ever-deeper ways—was tied in to John Lennon's remarks, to the UK's London, that his band was more popular than Jesus. The comments, in Beatle-mad England, were greeted as more or less plausible, if you based your argument on how many youths bought Beatles records versus how many attended Sunday services. In the States—in the Bible Belt particularly—the quote played less well, once it was reprinted in Datebook, and the Beatles quickly found themselves confronted with death threats and public record burnings, as hell-for-leather DJs did their best Cotton Mather impressions and all but called for a rock & roll inquisition.
There are several bootlegs from the tour, including a relatively spirited farewell from San Francisco's Candlestick Park on August 29. But it was the Memphis August 19 show that the punters had long dreamed of hearing, for it was there that some concertgoer decided to toss a cherry bomb at the stage during The Beatles' performance of "If I Needed Someone" from the day's second show. Mistaking the sound of the small explosion for a gunshot, each Beatle looked around to see if one of them had been shot down. As John Lennon would later state, it was then and there that the band knew they were done for good as a road act. What followed was a period of creation—a retreat from scenes like the one in Memphis—unmatched in rock music's history, in which stadia and teenyboppers gave way to studio wizardry and a new kind of populist art: the world of "Strawberry Fields Forever," "Penny Lane," and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The legend of what became known as the "Cherry Bomb Tapes" was formidable. The recording was made by two Mississippi school girls, who later tried to sell the tapes to EMI, but the company balked, presumably on the basis of that aforementioned execrable sound quality. And so, as tends to happen in such matters, the tapes leaked, making their way to the Internet, and the bootleg pressing plant. The best version was released on the Misterclaudel bootleg label, which has risen swiftly in the bootleg ranks to join storied labels like Swingin' Pig and Yellow Dog as purveyors of fine Beatles artifacts. Ears, naturally, were primed, as files were downloaded and swapped, and those wanting something more palpably physical—CD, booklet, artwork, photographs—ventured to their favorite independent "import" record store.
The audiophile would have been crushed, thinking he had happened upon some lo-fi bacchanal: girls scream until you start to imagine their larynxes shredding, The Beatles are tinny and distant—though there are dozens of worse recordings in the bootleg canon—and there doesn't seem to be much emphasis on actually being in tune. Which doesn't matter a jot, if one knows what to listen for: a karmic moment, when history, abruptly, in the space of a fraction of a second, changed.
The set is going along fairly well, and The Beatles play with more vigor than they mustered on most nights on the '66 tour, perhaps relieved that all the threats and hubbub had come to naught after all. And then it happens—a violent, louder-than-you'd expect detonation sound: the infamous, career-altering cherry bomb. You can hear gasps bleeding into the school girls' microphone, a sense of immediate panic and confusion. The Beatles don't miss a beat—rather, they double the pace immediately, and "If I Needed Someone" becomes less a run-through of a track from 1965's Rubber Soul, and more of a desperate, pounding track, something that could only come from a band that had been collectively terrified, with each member understanding, in that split second, that things were not to be the same again.
Accordingly, the "Cherry Bomb Tapes" have since taken up a singular position in the realm of Beatles bootlegs. They are not to be listened to on an iPod whilst strolling the city or riding on the subway, something one can happily do with most of the BBC recordings, and certainly the studio outtakes. They do not constitute a document that one would revisit many times a year, anymore so than one would opt for scuffed up, nitrate-consumed rushes of Orson Welles test shots over a pristine print of Citizen Kane. But the tapes do document The Beatles' ultimate harbinger moment: It was time, as Elvis had remarked in Memphis, back in 1955, to get real, real gone. And Pepperland, with its holes in the Royal Albert Hall, orphanage memories, and newspaper taxis, is about as gone as you can get.
