Behind a Fabricated Beatles History

For stories about the Beatles, the line “It was 50 Years Ago Today” is destined to serve as a repeated hook for the better part of this decade.

Most immediately, it was, in fact, also the title of an international Beatles conference staged at Penn State Altoona to coincide with the anniversary of the group’s arrival in the U.S. and first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

At that conference, Beatles scholar Mark Lewisohn presented a talk drawn from the research for his book Tune In, taking the story through 1962.

Appropriately, at another session of that same conference, I described a very different take on key events in Beatles history from 1962 as an example of “Inadvertent and Deliberate Deceptions.”

This one was most definitely a deliberate deception, offered as liner notes to an album.

Follow this link to read the behind-the-scenes details in a new Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik essay: The Untold Story of the “Untold Story” of the Beatles first recordings.