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In the three decades between the break-up of the Beatles and the rise of the Internet as a means of sharing both information and music, collecting unreleased Beatles material (and trying to find that holiest of holy grails, an actual unreleased production-quality original Beatles song) was often a difficult and disappointing chore for devout Beatles fans. Information about what unheard Beatles recordings might still be gathering dust in a vault somewhere had to be gleaned from a myriad of books, music magazines, and fan publications, many of them inaccurate and contradictory. Obtaining such recordings was primarily accomplished by purchasing bootleg records and tapes through the mail or at swap meets, where caveat emptor was the rule since the buyer rarely had the chance to listen to what he was buying in advance. Plenty of Beatles fans who thought they'd finally gotten their hands on an album full of unreleased gems heartbreakingly discovered their latest acquisitions were mere costume jewelry: live tracks or radio performances passed off as studio recordings, tunes by other artists mislabeled as Beatles material, aimless studio jamming, and unidentifiable song fragments, reproduced with all the sonic fidelity of a fast food drive-through speaker buried under three inches of mud. Trying to separate the wheat from the chaff was a difficult chore for Beatles enthusiasts, as no official master list of everything the Fab Four had recorded existed to help guide collectors. Fans and writers compiled their own lists from a variety of sources (primarily borrowing from each other). Lists of unreleased Beatles material swelled but rarely grew smaller, as it was difficult to prove any particular title didn't exist. As it turned out, no treasure trove of lost Beatles recordings existed. EMI had preserved all but the very earliest of the Beatles' session tapes; in 1982 an Abbey Road Studios engineer named John Barrett methodically listened to and cataloged all of them, and in 1988 writer Mark Lewisohn presented the details to the world in his book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. The reality was that the Beatles had left behind only a handful of completed outtakes, nearly all of which were eventually released on the three-part Anthology series of CDs in 1995-96. So what happened to those dozens of lost songs with intriguing titles that kept popping up in Beatles discographies? Many of them were familiar Beatles tunes misidentified by their working titles, previously unreleased material (mostly from the Let It Be sessions) mislabeled by bootleggers unfamiliar with the real titles, or songs the Beatles had given away to other artists but never properly recorded themselves. And some of them were made up out of whole cloth. In my teens I was as unabashed a Beatles fan as ever there was, and I spent hours poring over books such as the 1975 Beatles discography All Together Now, studying the Bootlegs section and trying to imagine what recorded-but-never-released songs such as If You've Got Trouble and That Means a Lot might sound like. And entries like the following were even more intriguing: Pink Litmus Paper Shirt always sounded a little too bizarre to be a real Beatles song title to me, but I thought the same thing when I first gazed upon the back of the Let It Be album and found tracks with names such as I Dig a Pony, I Me Mine, and One After 909, so I couldn't dismiss it on that basis alone. Turns out I'd had good reason to be skeptical. Back in 1971, writer-humorist Martin Lewis, later an assistant for former Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, and a consultant on Beatles-related projects such as the Live at the BBC and Anthology CDs, had compiled a Beatles bootleg discography for Disc & Music Echo. Concerned that his list didn't have anything compelling and new to offer, Lewis inserted four song titles he'd simply made up: the John Lennon polemic Left Is Right (And Right Is Wrong), George Harrison's Pink Litmus Paper Shirt, a Paul McCartney vaudeville-style number (similar to the White Album's Honey Pie) with the improbable title Deckchair, and another John Lennon track, Colliding Circles. Lewis publicly confessed to his prank nearly thirty years later as part of his autobiographical one-man show (Great Exploitations!), which debuted in 1999: (George Harrison, not John Lennon, did record a rough demo of a song entitled Circles in 1968, but it was a completely different song that made no reference to colliding circles either in the title or the lyrics. Harrison eventually recorded Circles fourteen years later and released it on his 1982 solo album Gone Troppo.) Since everyone knows that anything appearing in print must be true, Lewis' outfakes were picked up by other compilers who continued to propagate them, despite the complete lack of any evidence for their existence. Even as the Beatles were issuing the little bit of unreleased material left in EMI's vaults on their Anthology series, reviewers were still holding out hope that these mythical tracks would turn up: As Lewis has noted, various writers even invented additional details about the supposed production and recording of his non-existent Beatles songs: Even though Lewis admitted the joke in performances of his one-man show in January 1999, and again in June 2001, some fans still didn't buy it and insisted that his hoax was itself a hoax: So Lewis found himself in the same boat as actor Eddie Murphy, whose repeated disavowal of the infamous elevator legend is often repudiated by people who insist that no matter what he says, they absolutely swear a friend or relative of theirs was indeed frightened after finding herself alone in an elevator with Murphy and his entourage and received a lovely gift from him afterwards. Such is the public's investment in some tales that they can't bring themselves to let go of the apocryphal ones to embrace the truth. Sightings: Neil Innes worked all four of Lewis' outfake titles into Unfinished Words, a track on Archaeology, the Rutles' 1996 spoof of the Beatles' Anthology albums:
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