Off The Beatle Track

To recap, I’m highlighting some of the events that have kept The Beatles in the public consciousness since 1970. I ended Part 1 talking about Anthology. One month after the Anthology book was published in 2000, The Beatles released possibly the most successful of their post-breakup ventures.

2000: The release of The Beatles 1. This collection of 27(!) of their number one hits 1 is notable among hard-core fans for omitting Please Please Me and Strawberry Fields Forever.* The Beatles had released greatest-hits packages before (beginning with A Collection of Beatles Oldies in 1966, available in the U.K. but not in the U.S.), but 1 was the first new collection offered in the CD age, crucially at a time when new cars came equipped with CD players. Essentially a one-volume version of the “Red” and “Blue” albums (minus the non-single album tracks), 1 has sold more than 31 million copies worldwide and was the top-selling album of the 2000s in the U.S.

2006: The Beatles Love. I’ve never been to Las Vegas; in fact, I’ve never even seriously considered visiting Vegas. But if I had gone to Vegas, it would have been to see the Cirque du Soleil show Love, and not because I wanted to see acrobats and trapeze artists. George Martin and his son Giles** remixed and mashed up a bunch of Beatles tracks and demos into the Love soundtrack, and the results are fresh and innovative. Tracks include Blackbird/Yesterday, Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows, and the standout acoustic version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps with a new score by George Martin. The show closed in 2024, and and its producers claimed that more than 11.8 million people attended performances.

2017: The Sgt. Pepper’s special deluxe edition. Most of the items on this list have been targeted at casual fans; even by 2000, more serious fans likely owned several versions of the tracks on 1. But the fiftieth-anniversary deluxe box set of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a treat for the most devoted Beatles’ fans: it contained a stereo remix overseen by Giles Martin*** (including the non-album single Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane), early takes of most of the tracks, the original mono mix of the album, 5.1 surround sound mixes, and an exhaustive booklet. In the intervening years, similar sets have been issued for The Beatles (the White Album), Abbey Road, Let It Be, and Revolver, and we fans are clamoring for (and now expect) similar treatments for the remaining Beatle albums.

2021: Peter Jackson’s Get Back. The Beatles spent January 1969 in two studios (first a film studio, then their Apple recording studio) and a rooftop laying down the tracks issued on Let It Be in 1970. A camera crew filmed them writing (in some cases), learning, and recording the songs. The sessions began about 6 weeks after the release of the two-disc White Album. Why did The Beatles do this to themselves? I’ve watched director Peter Jackson’s excellent nearly 8-hour version of the footage shot by Michael Lindsay-Hogg twice all the way through, and I can’t really answer that question. But watching them (especially John and Paul) interact is enlightening, and witnessing Paul seemingly slip into a trance and start singing and playing (on his bass!) Get Back for the first time is among the highlights. Eight hours are probably too much for non-wackos, but enough clips leaked onto social media to make new fans.

2025: The Beatles Anthology available on streaming. I’m writing this about 10 days after a re-edited version of The Beatles Anthology started streaming on Disney+. It’s too early to say whether the new version will create as many new fans as the original 1995 version did, but The Beatles’ story belongs at least on a streaming platform, available (for a price) to be watched on-demand. For those without access to Disney+, 1982’s The Compleat Beatles is available (as of this writing) on YouTube for free.

*The explanation of why those tracks were deemed not 1-worthy rests on the charts used to compile the selections.

**Giles shares a birthday with John: October 9.

***His father George had died the previous year.