500 Lost Beatles Tapes Recovered in Raids
Police get back... "Get Back," an album planned by the Beatles in 1969.  The tapes disappeared that year and were assumed lost forever.  What can we expect?

A yearlong investigation into music piracy led to the January raids in England and the Netherlands.  Among the items recovered were 500 missing tapes from the January 1969 rehearsal and recording sessions by the Beatles.  An album called "Get Back" was due to be released in 1969, but the project was abandoned, and many of the songs became part of the Let It Be release.

The abandoned project was a back to basics effort after the challenge of 1968's groundbreaking "White Album." According to the BBS, the recovered tapes contain "dozens of entire songs, as well as snippets of tracks which they attempted and then abandoned during the rehearsals."

The Associated Press reports that initially the song "Get Back" was written to satirize the British people's negative attitudes toward immigration at that time, with the song originally referred to as the "Commonwealth Song" and "No Pakistanis."

The New York Times' Allan Koznin suggests that the tapes may be more of historical than artistic or commercial value.  What was recovered, he points out, were multi-track master tapes, which are in the EMI archives, but rather the monaural (single track) reference tapes that were constantly running.  Therefore, what has been found is not likely to be the source of a new Beatles CD, but the opportunity to see inside a Beatles session: "the rehearsals, discussions, arguments, clowning and loose jams on Buddly Holly and Chuck Bery classics as well as older Beatles tunes and oddities like the theme from 'The Third Man,' all in addition to the nose-to-the-grindstone work of making an album."

Koznin points out that the group's plans for a new album, movie and concert were derailed by the "increasingly fractious relations" within the group.  The tapes capture Lennon's attempts to involve Yoko One in the group's music, Harrison's temporary departure from the group, and McCartney's frustration with the others' lack of effort.

The tapes have been heavily bootlegged over the years and were familiar to collectors of such unauthorized releases.  At least two books document them in detail.

Link to the CBS article

Link to the BBC article

Read the New York Times assessment of tapes' content