Lost Beatles demo discovered by Vancouver record shop owner
Jack Herschorn said he got the tape in London “in 1968 or 1969” from a “well-known record producer” who he declines to name.
A few years ago, Rob Frith of Neptoon Records bought a reel-to-reel tape labelled “Beatles demo.”
But he didn’t bother to actually listen to it. He just assumed someone had put a Beatles bootleg on the tape.
“I’ve had that Beatles thing sitting at the store for years,” said Frith, a record and poster store owner.
Last week, he was transferring some tapes and came across the Beatles tape.
“All of a sudden, it was like the Beatles are in the room playing,” he said.
“The quality was that good.”
As it turns out, it really was a Beatles demo — the session they recorded on Jan. 1, 1962, for Decca Records.
Decca rejected the band, which is arguably the biggest mistake in music history.
The tape features the Beatles’ original drummer Pete Best. Most of the songs are covers like Money, To Know Him is to Love Him and The Sheik of Araby.
But there are three original songs by John and Paul: Like Dreamers Do, Hello Little Girl, and Love of the Loved.
Not all 15 recordings in the Decca session have been officially released, although it’s been widely bootlegged. Five songs from the session were officially released on the Beatles Anthology I in 1995.
“It is a huge mystery to unravel but this is an amazing find,” Hennessey wrote, noting it was “not a bootleg copy, as this reel was prepared as a master (tape for a record) with leader tape between cuts.”
Jack Herschorn had obtained it in London “from someone inside Decca.”
Herschorn is now 80 and living in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico. He confirms that he got the tape in London “in 1968 or 1969” from a “well-known record producer” who he declines to name.
“He thought that maybe we could put it out as a bootleg album in Canada and the U.S.,” said Herschorn. “And he gave me a copy.”
It’s indeed a duplicate made off the original master tape, which is why the sound quality is so good.
At the time, Vancouver had a record pressing plant, International Record Corp., which made bootlegs and which was sued by Bob Dylan in 1969. But when Herschorn got back to Canada, he decided not to put the Beatles tape out.
“I wouldn’t want somebody doing that to me,” he said. “It was just a moral issue with me. I could have put it out, made a few bucks on it, but then I could get bad PR … get sued over. It wasn’t my style.”
“We had a closet, a good-sized closet where we kept master tapes,” he said. “And it was in there.”
The studio and property has been sold several times over the years: Whoever took the Beatles tape probably didn’t know what it was: they didn’t hype it to Frith.
Frith won’t be able to legally reproduce the music on the tape for copyright reasons.
But it has value as an artifact: a copy of the Decca sessions that once belonged to Brian Epstein sold for 62,500 pounds in 2019. And that tape had only half the recordings.
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