Free as a Bird

Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew has got a record on the turntable that still gives a few of us the chills, even after all these years of spinning deep cuts and old friends for the listening audience over at THE ZOO. The song is "Free as a Bird," credited to The Beatles, and it opens the door on Anthology 1 the way a porch light comes on after a long ride. It is not a 1960s take that got left in a can. It is a home demo John Lennon cut around 1977 in the Dakota in New York, piano and voice locked together on a cheap cassette, the little microphone sitting on top of the piano. He never finished it. The second half is mostly wordless humming and the title line coming back around, the way a guy writes when he is talking to himself and not to a studio clock.

Yoko Ono handed Paul McCartney a cassette the day after John was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January 1994. On it were four unfinished songs: "Free as a Bird," "Real Love," "Grow Old With Me," and the piece that would wait decades and come out later as "Now and Then." Paul has said he fell in love with "Free as a Bird" the minute he heard it, and he warned Ringo to have a hanky ready. The three of them, with producer Jeff Lynne, went into Paul's place in Sussex in February 1994 and started building a record around a voice that was no longer in the room. George Martin, who produced the Anthology films and the sets, stepped aside from the single itself. His hearing was not what it had been, and he later said the lads were fine producers on their own. After he heard the finished track he wished he had taken the chair. Lynne has called the cleanup one of the hardest jobs he ever had. The piano was glued to the vocal. You could not pull a fader and lose one without losing the other. He spent about a week at his own studio in Hollywood, with engineer Marc Mann, pulling hiss and crackle out of the air between phrases so John's voice would sit in time with a click. Paul doubled that vocal underneath, a ghost of a harmony, so the old cassette would not sound like it was coming from the next room.

The demo only left them one scrap of a verse: "Whatever happened to the life that we once knew?" Paul and George sat together and wrote the rest, with Lynne parked between them. The new lines ask whether they can really live without each other, and where the touch went. Ringo has said they started with a cassette that was not in great shape, and that modern science, meaning Lynne, got it into time before anybody could overdub. George played slide on his old psychedelic Strat, the one jacked up for bottleneck, and Paul still talks about that part as the icing. It is a simple line, almost a Muddy Waters figure, and simple is the exposed kind of playing. Paul used a Wal five-string bass on the track, not the old Höfner violin bass. Lynne kept his own hands mostly off, aside from a harmony and a few little bits at the end, because he wanted the record to be them.

Paul wrote the session down on a plane afterward, the only studio week he ever put on paper, so the facts would not slip. He has said the most exciting thing was that John was no longer on the planet and yet there he was in the studio with them. The press called the three of them the Threetles. Paul brushed off the fallen-hero talk and said John would have told them to knock it off and make a record. When they compiled the ending they put in a backwards phrase, "turned out nice again," a nod to the old ukulele man George Formby, who shows up in the closing of Joe Pytka's bird's-eye video. Later, playing the tape back, they heard something none of them had planted. The backwards wash seemed to say "made by John Lennon." Paul swore it to the others, and they told him they had just heard it too. The single came out in December 1995, reached number 2 in Britain and number 6 in the States, and picked up a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. It also gave the band a Top 40 hit in a fourth decade. Some of the royalties went to a Romanian AIDS charity tied to Elton John and the Beatles' wives. Lynne has said, of everything he has produced, this is the one he is proudest of. He worked the vocal in late at night so he would not have to do it in front of Paul and George, and the next day Paul hugged him and told him he had done it.

None of that reunion makes sense unless you go back to how the band started, which was never a boardroom plan. John Lennon put together the Quarrymen in Liverpool in 1956, a skiffle outfit named for Quarry Bank High School, built on washboard, tea-chest bass, and whatever rock and roll he could sneak past a jazz club owner. On July 6, 1957, at the Woolton village fete, a younger kid named Paul McCartney was in the crowd. He met John afterward, played a little Eddie Cochran and a little Little Richard, and tuned John's guitar, which impressed the older boy more than the speeches. Paul was in the group within weeks. He brought along George Harrison, who auditioned on the top deck of a bus and made the cut in 1958 even though he was still in school. Stuart Sutcliffe, John's art-school friend, came in on bass, and the name settled on The Beatles after a run of Beetles and Silver Beatles, a twist on Buddy Holly's Crickets with a beat dropped in on purpose. They learned the hard way in the clubs of Hamburg, long sets, cheap rooms, and the discipline of playing until the place closed. Back in Liverpool the Cavern became the room, down in a cellar that had started as a jazz spot and had once sent John a note telling him to cut out the rock and roll. Brian Epstein, who ran the North End Music Stores record shop, saw them there in 1961 after Bill Harry of Mersey Beat pointed him downstairs, cleaned up the stage look, and shopped them around London until George Martin at Parlophone took the chance. Pete Best was replaced by Ringo Starr in 1962. "Love Me Do" arrived that October. The rest of the sixties is the part everybody already knows, right up to the 1970 split. "Free as a Bird" is the later chapter, three old bandmates finishing a song their friend left on a cassette, and it sits on Anthology 1 like a letter that finally got an answer.

If you want the band's own shelf, the official home is The Beatles, and the Free as a Bird page there walks through the Anthology 1 single, the Dakota demo, and the 1995 release. Their official Facebook page is The Beatles on Facebook, where they have posted the restored film and the line about being free as a bird. The official Instagram is @thebeatles, and the official account on X is @thebeatles. For a room run by Apple Corps and the label, the Beatles Official Fan Group is the active Facebook gathering. Song-by-song session notes, including the Anthology dates for this track, live on the fan site The Beatles Bible. Spin it loud, Zoo Freaks. The man on the cassette never got to hear the slide guitar, and the record still sounds like they left the studio door open for him.