Rare 1962 Beatles demo tape uncovered in Canadian record store
Jack Herschorn said he got the tape in London in 1968 or 1969 but hadn’t listened to it.
A rare and valuable Beatles audition tape that led to the Fab Four being turned by Decca Records has been discovered in a Canadian record store.
Jack Herschorn said he got the tape in London in 1968 or 1969 but hadn’t listened to it.
He says he was given by a “well known record producer” who he has so far refused to name.
Rob Frith of Neptoon Records then bought the reel-to-reel tape labelled “Beatles demo” a few years ago but hadn’t bothered to 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, one of Vancouver’s biggest record and poster collectors.
Last week, he was transferring some tapes at Canadian broadcaster Larry Hennessey’s recording studio and took along the Beatles tape.
Late in the evening, they put it on.
“All of a sudden, it was like the Beatles are in the room playing,” he said. “The quality was that good.”
It turned out the tape really was a Beatles demo from a recording session they made on January 1, 1962, for Decca Records.
The label rejected the band, which was probably a mistake on their part.
Instead, The Beatles signed to EMI a few months later and the group became a worldwide sensation known as Beatlemania.
The tape features the Beatles’ original drummer Pete Best, not Ringo Starr.
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 Lennon and Paul McCartney: 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.
Frith and Hennessey posted the discovery on Facebook.
“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.”
Tom Lavin of the Powder Blues replied to the post, noting that the Decca tape used to be at Can-Base Studios at 1234 West 6th in Vancouver, which later became famous as Mushroom Studios.
He said Can-Base’s owner, Jack Herschorn, had obtained it in London, England, “from someone inside Decca.”
Herschorn is now 80 and living in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico.
He confirmed that he got the tape in London “in 1968 or 1969” from a “well-known record producer” but wouldn’t say who.
“He thought that maybe we could put it out as a bootleg album in Canada and the U.S.,” Herschorn said. “And he gave me a copy.”
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.”
Instead, he took the tape and put it in a room at Can-Base.
“We had a closet, a good-sized closet where we kept master tapes,” he told the Vancouver Sun. “And it was in there.”
“I actually can’t remember who I bought it from,” Frith said. “I think it was an engineer that worked in Vancouver for years and years that was moving.”
Frith won’t be able to legally reproduce the music on the tape for copyright reasons.
But it could be worth a small fortune.
A copy of the Decca sessions that once belonged to Beatles manager Brian Epstein sold for £62,500 in 2019, which had only half the recordings.