The lost Beatles songs we'll probably never hear

January 28, 9:11 AMBeatles ExaminerSteve Marinucci

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The Beatles at the Cavern. (Copyright Apple Corps Ltd. & Capital Cities/ABC, Inc.)

Sam Leach, who was a promotor for some of the early Beatles gigs, has a great story on his website about a show he saw by the Beatles. The set included Paul McCartney singing the Little Richard song "Rip It Up," George Harrison doing "I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am" (later done by Herman's Hermits), Stu Sutcliffe singing "Wooden Heart" and Pete Best on "Matchbox."

When you see set lists like that, don't you wish someone had a tape recorder? (Of course, if they did, they'd probably be sued now if they tried to release it.)

And the list of songs that never made it to tape is quite long. An excellent resource for the names of those songs is Mark Lewisohn's meticulously researched "The Beatles Live," which includes a year-by-year listing of their live repertoire pieced together from newspaper and word of mouth accounts.

Here's just a small selection of songs listed in the book the Beatles played that would be my personal favorites to hear.

• 1957-9: Hank Williams'  "You Win Again," sung by John Lennon.
• 1960: "Clarabella," sung by McCartney (this was done on the BBC, but imagine a concert version)
• 1960: "Cathy's Clown," the Everly Brothers song. Lewisohn doesn't indicate who sang it, but I can easily imagine a John-Paul duet.
• 1961: "High School Confidential," the Jerry Lee Lewis song, sung by Paul
• 1961: Carole King's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?", sung by John.
• 1961: "Wild in the Country," the Elvis Presley song, sung by Pete Best.
• 1962: "Hey! Baby," sung by Paul.

Several of the unrecorded early songs were done later during the "Let It Be" sessions. But they would be missing the rawness of the early versions. That's one of the values of the Star Club tapes. Those tapes had a lot of songs we wouldn't have heard otherwise.

But there are oh so many more.