After spending the holidays at home, Brian, my college roommate, returned to our apartment in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Monday, January 6, 1964. He asked me if I had seen the “Paar Show” (NBC-TV’s “The Jack Paar Program”) on the previous Friday night. “No, why?” I inquired. “Well,” he said, “Paar showed this film of a band from England, and it was funnier than hell!  They had real long hair, like a girl’s, and they’d shake their heads, and the girls in the audience would scream. God, it was funny! That was all that was said that day, as far as I can remember, but sometime during the month, he bought the “Meet The Beatles” album and started to play it constantly on my stereo. It grew on me. I didn’t change my hairstyle quite yet, but Brian changed his immediately, combing his blond locks forward in the front and down on the sides.I thought he was nuts.

I played in a weekend rock band with my brother, Mike, so I borrowed Brian’s album one weekend and brought it home to play for Mike. I remember setting up my portable record player in our dining room and playing the album for him.  He didn’t think much of it, except he thought “I Saw Her Standing There” was “O.K.”.  But, by now, I was hooked and I soon got everything by or about the Beatles that I could find.  I remember our band taking a break from a basement practice session one Sunday evening to go upstairs and watch the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. I started to wear my hair like them (at first only at dance jobs), and dress like them.  I had my picture taken in Brian’s collar-less “Beatles’ jacket”, and I even practiced a British accent, calling a beer a “bot’le of ale”.

In later years, I found a source for bootleg albums and revelled in the fact that I had some Beatle things that few others had, such as a copy of their ill-fated audition tape for Decca records.  Brother Mike was finally won over and Paul McCartney soon became his idol, (they both played bass), replacing Elvis.  He even tried out a Hofner bass, like Paul’s, but thought it inferior to his Fender, so he gave it up.

My Beatle fascination stayed with me as I went into the army and was stationed in Germany.  It wavered a bit when they went into their “psychedelic” stage, but returned full-hearted to cherish their beautiful swan song album, “Abbey Road”, which I bought in a department store in Zurich, Switzerland.

Now we fast-forward to August 1995. I’m driving home from my Montana honeymoon with my new wife, Lois. We decide to spend a night in Fargo, North Dakota, instead of rushing home to central Minnesota. The next day we’re shopping around and I am looking under the “B’s” in a Music/Book store, as is my habit, hoping to find something that I don’t have.  I find it!  A book called Beatlesongs by William J. Dowlding.  It was full of the trivial kind of information about whom wrote what, whom played what on what recording, etc.  That stuff has always fascinated me.  I buy the book and ask Lois if she’ll drive home so I can read it.  I put a Beatles tape in the car’s player and settle back to read the book out loud to Lois, as if she could care.  As I read, I throw out more information to her that I’ve accumulated over the years, as she drives on.

Well it was the quickest three hours I’ve ever spent riding in a car.  At some point during the drive, however, I turned to Lois and said, “I wish I had a list of every Beatle recording ever made, in the order they were recorded, not in the order they were released”.  Lois drove on and listened.  I continued,  “I’d take it and put together my own tape so I could listen to the Beatles grow musically and hear the songs in the proper order.”  Lois drove on and listened.  “There must be a list in the back of one of my books.”  (Certainly in Mark Lewisohn’s wonderful book, The Beatles Recording Sessions, which Paul referred to as “the Bible”.)

When we arrived home, I started digging, but I could find no such list.  “Well”, I told Lois, “I’ll make my own.”  Little did I know the task that was before me.  The Beatles, literally, were music machines.  They never stopped performing, writing, or recording.  On days off from their hectic road schedule, Paul and John would sit in their hotel rooms writing new songs.  Being a musician myself, (who has recorded one single and two albums), I can really appreciate their dedication, love of their music, and work ethic.  In my research, I also started uncovering mention of recorded interviews, press conferences and filmings of, literally, “Every Little Thing” the Fab Four did.  I decided to include these things in my list also.

One thing that should become very apparent to the reader is that the Beatles worked very, very hard.  Look at any part of my Beatles’ recording list and you’ll know why these musical supermen were, and are still considered, the greatest band that ever rocked on God’s green earth.  As Paul said, in his 1988 interview with Lewisohn, “God bless their little cotton socks, those boys worked. They worked their little asses off!”  Paul sometimes exaggerated and got facts wrong in interviews, but not this time.

I’ve tried my damnedest to be as accurate as I could, checking and double-checking every fact.  The amount of mistakes out there in other books is staggering.  The Beatles’ own recollections are fuzzy and many books pulled information from previous books and therefore perpetuated the mistakes to the point that the facts are extremely hard to find.  I trusted one writer only, Mark Lewisohn.  He was the only person ever allowed to listen to all 400 plus hours of recordings and have access to the recording “logs”.  But even then, I found some minor errors in his books.  Allen J. Wiener’s Ultimate Recording Guide had them also.  Example:  (Entry for 1965) “Middle of June:  Brian Matthew taped several interviews with The Beatles during their U.S. tour.”  Fact:  The Beatles didn’t tour the U.S. until August of 1965.   I’m sure someone will dig out some errors in my list too.

As I was typing the names of the songs over and over, whenever they were recorded in any way, memories started coming back to me of a happy carefree time in my life.  I could “date” a Beatles song, quite accurately, by just remembering what I was doing when I first heard it.  My internal “playback machine” ran each song through my mind as I researched it.  The songs all came back to me like old friends.  Some of the friends I liked more than others just like people.

In one of the books I was using as a source, I came across a nice little story about the Beatles in the recording studio.  Their regular recording engineer was going to be gone from Abbey Road studios for a day or two when the Beatles were scheduled for recording.  So, he talked to his replacement about things to expect and do during the sessions.  He knew that the Beatles would be recording separately for some things and then together as a group.  He told his replacement to pay attention to the whole process and he would notice a strange phenomenon happen when all the Beatles were together.  For lack of a better word to describe it, he called it “magic”. “You can feel it, the magic, in the studio when they’re all together.” he said.  “Sure enough,” the replacement told his friends, “it had happened.”  When the Beatles recorded together, there was a “magic” in the studio that you could sense or feel. Ringo called it “telepathy”. “Without thinking,” he said, “we’d all be up or bring it down – together.”

There’s another kind of “magic” I’ve felt with the Beatles.  Being a fan is like belonging to a fraternity.  Total strangers will talk to me.  I must own over a dozen Beatle T-shirts and I wear them all the time.  They always elicit some kind of response from people.  “Hey, I like your shirt.” is the most common one.  I’ve had storeowners who sell Beatles’ T-shirts ask me where I got mine.  One time on a trip to DisneyWorld, I had no fewer than four responses one morning, a lot of looks from others, and two people engage me in conversation about the Beatles while standing in line for an attraction.  Both were very young, one in his teens, and the point was driven home to me that the Beatles have not only transcended time, but also generations.  My kids love them and I’m sure, in some way, they’ll turn their own kids on to them.

No, I don’t think the Beatles were gods or that everything they wrote or recorded was a masterpiece.  They were human.   In my opinion, there was some junk. But far less junk than any other group whose albums I bought.  I remember being so disappointed, having spent my hard earned cash on some group’s album, only to find that the only thing good on the entire album was the group’s single.  The rest was just “filler”.  The Beatles never did that.  They were a class act.  If it hadn’t been for Capital’s fooling around, you never would’ve found an older released song on an album.  Every time an album came out it had twelve new songs of quality.  And Capitol even cheated us U.S. teens.  There were supposed to be fourteen songs on each album, we found out much later.

Here are some facts about the Beatles that even their critics can’t deny.  Every single and every album that they recorded sold over a million copies.  Many of the songs broke or set records that will never be eclipsed.  John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote 105 songs “together” that the Beatles recorded.  They also wrote an additional 16 songs for other artists or groups.  The Beatles recorded 11 songs that George Harrison wrote and 2 that Ringo wrote.  That’s 134 songs.  Now throw in all the songs they recorded that were written by other songwriters.  That’s a recording career that needs to be documented.      

Ironically, I never did get my list made, (of only released records and albums), because it grew into this.  Only recently did I put together fifteen CDs of their music in the order recorded.  I feel like I’ve paid back John, Paul, George and Ringo in a small way for all the pleasure they’ve given me through the years.  It was fun digging into the Beatles’ past.  I now appreciate them and their work more than I ever did.

P.S.  I added a “Discography” to my list. It is not meant to be the definitive discography as I hope my list is.  I didn’t go into it with my heart as I did with my list.  There are so many re-issues and different releases around the world.  Also it was hard for me to list John and Yoko releases even though John was still officially a Beatle when he was making some of them. So I didn’t and couldn’t list everything done by a Beatle outside of “Beatledom”, to coin a word. Anyway, if you want a discography with everything conceivable, including record labels and catalog numbers, look for Wiener’s book.
    Terry R. Shaw 

The information on these pages is presented for educational and research purposes only. As it deals with a historical subject, specific items of information are necessarily derived from many other sources. I have attempted to give those sources the credit due them. However, the combination, layout and presentation of the information is original, copyrighted and may not be copied or reproduced in any form or medium without the express permission of the author. Anyone who feels that any item in these pages may have inadvertently breached their own copyright should advise the author at this e-mail address: tshaw75@charter.net so that appropriate remedial action can be taken.