Cover Story: Buried Treasure: The Story of the Beatles' Lost Tapes

Harrison rejoined on Wednesday, January 15th. At a meeting in their Apple Records office at 3 Savile Row, the Beatles agreed to scrap the Tunisia gig and record in the new Apple studio under construction downstairs. Filming would go on; the Twickenham footage shot by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg would become part of a feature documentary of the Beatles at work.

But the damage was done. Seven years after recording their first hit, "Love Me Do," the Beatles were breaking up. A year later, on April 10th, 1970, McCartney made it official, issuing a press release announcing the start of his solo career.

Exactly thirty-four years after Harrison's outburst, on January 10th, police in the Netherlands recovered more than 500 reels of tape in a raid on a warehouse near Amsterdam. They arrested three people on suspicion of theft and handling stolen goods. British detectives also nabbed two people in London as part of the investigation. The tapes were original sound recordings made at Twickenham and Apple by technicians assisting Lindsay-Hogg as he shot his Beatles movie — released in 1970 and retitled Let It Be after a more appropriate McCartney song of reflection and surrender.

Those reels are genuine rock & roll treasure. They contain hours of officially unissued music and chatter by the greatest band in history. They are also a rare open window into the Beatles' inner life during one of their last, traumatic months together. With Let It Be, the Beatles — the first in so many things as composers and recording artists — made the first rock & roll film about a band falling apart. Those tapes tell the full story — January 1969, at its best and blackest.

The arrests in Holland and London climaxed a year-round intercontinental hunt for the tapes, which have been missing since the early 1970s. A source close to the Beatles says the tapes were essential to work now being done to prepare the Let It Be film for release this fall on DVD. Previously, to hear this material, you had to go underground. For the last three decades, the tapes have been available to obsessive Beatles fans only on bootleg albums. The recordings first surfaced in 1974 on two double LPs called Sweet Apple Trax, later blooming into multiple-CD sets such as The Get Back Journals and The Twickenham Sessions. The fidelity can be maddening. These were reference tapes, made by Lindsay-Hogg's crew on monaural Nagra machines with room mikes that often rendered the music murky and distant. The songs in the movie and on the Let It Be album — and the nine outtakes included on 1996's Anthology 3 collection — came from the multitrack studio masters held by EMI Records.

But Lindsay-Hogg — an American who directed promotional clips in 1966 for "Paperback Writer" and "Rain" — caught the Beatles in the raw, often painfully so. One moment, they are joking between takes. The next, they snipe at each other with barely veiled contempt. "You're so full of shit, man," Harrison actually says to McCartney in the film, oblivious to the camera.

Musically, on the Nagra reels, the Beatles veer from numbing monotony to open joy. They rehearse new gems such as Lennon's R&B prayer "Don't Let Me Down" and McCartney's Everly Brothers homage "Two of Us" to near death. They also rip through R&B and early rock & roll covers — Joe Turner's "Honey Hush," Arthur Alexander's "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues," Little Richard's "Miss Ann" — like the great bar band they were, in 1961 and '62, at the Star Club in Hamburg.

The Beatles took that spirit upstairs, to the Apple rooftop on January 30th, 1969, for the hastily arranged lunchtime concert that ended the movie and their career as a live band. The set was five songs with retakes and Billy Preston on piano. But in hot, dirty versions of "I've Got a Feeling" and "One After 909" — the latter written, mostly by Lennon, in 1957 after he and McCartney first met at a Liverpool church picnic — McCartney's Get Back dream briefly came true.