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

"We either go home, or we do it," McCartney said. "It's discipline we need." He tried to unite the Beatles with his Get Back scheme and was paid back in resentment.

Ironically, the lack of order meant the Beatles were free to play anything. And they did. Between January 2nd and the last take on the last day of recording at Apple — a fullgroup reading of "Let It Be" on January 31st — the Beatles played, or at least started, more than 300 different songs, not including untitled jams and instrumentals.

Many "covers" were just a few seconds of fucking around: a single jokey chorus or intro lick. But the range was encyclopedic, from Cole Porter's "True Love" and Jimmy Webb's "MacArthur Park" to "To Kingdom Come," a Harrison favorite from the Band's 1968 debut, Music From Big Pink. The first thing McCartney played on the morning of January 3rd, while waiting for Harrison and Lennon to show up for work, was a solo piano stab at "Adagio for Strings," a 1938 piece by the American composer Samuel Barber.

The Beatles were not above mocking themselves to break the tension or boredom. The Nagra reels are littered with quick comic flashbacks to old Beatles hits: McCartney's brief turn on piano at Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever" on January 27th; the two of them, on the 23rd, hacking through the first verse of "Please Please Me."

The tapes also double as demos for the real last album the Beatles made, in the spring and summer of 1969, and issued that fall, Abbey Road. Twelve of that LP's seventeen songs — among them "Octopus's Garden," "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" and "Carry That Weight" — first surfaced at Twickenham and Apple. In The Beatles Anthology, the group's 2000 autobiography, Ringo Starr marveled at the peculiar order of the Beatles' demise: "It goes to show how quirky the world is — that the next to last album comes out as the last album, and the last album came out before it."

The Beatles bore down on a handful of the Abbey Road songs more hopefully than others: They devoted a good part of January 7th at Twickenham to arranging "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," McCartney's music-hall-style confection about a homicidal freak. A meaty Apple jam on Lennon's "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" featured Billy Preston on gospel-flavored piano, trading vocal lines with Lennon, while Starr hit a New Orleans second-line drum march — a rhythm that changed to a Latin-metal swing in the Abbey Road recording.

Because the Beatles insisted on recording live without overdubs — they later reneged on that condition — much of what ended up on the Let It Be album went through prolonged renovation. An electric attempt at "Two of Us" on January 6th precipitated Harrison's steely response to McCartney's heavy steering: "I'll play what you want me to play. I won't play at all if you don't want me to. Whatever it is that will please you, I'll do it." An embryonic "Get Back" satirized British racism, in particular the anti-immigration harangues of the English politician Enoch Powell. "Don't dig no Pakistanis taking all the people's jobs," McCartney sang. "Get back to where you once belonged."

"Let It Be" got no raves from the other Beatles when McCartney played its bare bones for them at Twickenham on January 8th. He had started writing the song, inspired by Aretha Franklin, at the end of the sessions for The Beatles. McCartney was still missing a third verse by January 26th; on the 31st, the Beatles finally got the take that mattered. Even that was not perfect. In April 1969, Harrison overdubbed a new guitar break; a second, with more distortion, was appended to the master in January 1970. Both solos appeared on record: the latter on the Let It Be LP; the first, and more thoughtful, on the March 1970 single.

Another McCartney newborn, "The Back Seat of My Car," got a better reaction from the rest of the Beatles, who likened it favorably to the Beach Boys. But McCartney did not record the song until he was no longer a Beatle, on his 1971 album Ram. In addition to previewing more than half of Abbey Road, the Nagra tapes also contain seeds of the Beatles' solo futures. There are pieces of Lennon's "Child of Nature" (a.k.a. "Jealous Guy") and "Give Me [sic] Some Truth," both destined for his 1971 LP Imagine. McCartney's "Teddy Boy," a bit of kiddie-folk fluff, made it to a test pressing for a proposed Get Back LP, compiled by Johns in May 1969. When the song was dropped from Let It Be, McCartney exhumed it along with "Hot as Sun" — a quirky instrumental he wrote in the late 1950s and pulled out at the January 24th session — for his 1970 solo debut, McCartney.