Not everything an artist is worthy of being put out on a record. As much as people like to talk about their favourite artists like they’re musical gods, not everyone is perfect, and chances are a lot of those jam sessions could be focused on people mucking around in the studio while everyone else gets their amps together. Everything released on the main studio albums are the ones artists wanted their fans to hear, but many of The Beatles’ discarded tracks were worthy of being anyone else’s hit.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney never stopped writing for a second when they first made it big, and there were usually far too many songs in the can for them to include on one album of material. That meant giving their tunes away half the time, and whether it was for some other pop singer or to give artists on Apple some exposure, many of these were written to order without really thinking about it.
That commission style of songwriting is one thing, but towards the end of their career, a handful of their future solo smashes could have been fantastic Beatles songs on their own. Looking through everything from sessions for The White Album onward, many of the Fab Four’s eventual solo smashes had the potential to be gigantic had they put them under the Beatles banner for a little bit.
While fate was on the group’s side by giving them a near-flawless track record, it’s a wonder what their material would sound like had they gone for these tunes first. Many artists discard songs for a reason, but in the case of The Beatles, it might just be because there were too many classics to go around.
Five discarded Beatles songs:
5. ‘Bad to Me’ – Lennon/McCartney
A significant reason why The Beatles gave their greatest early tunes away was because of Brian Epstein. One doesn’t manage artists just on their own, so the Beatles’ manager would usually see if there was anything else ‘The Nerk Twins’ had in the pipeline for other artists. And as it turns out, this gem Lennon came up with for Billy Kramer and the Dakotas has all the hallmarks of something that could have fit on A Hard Day’s Night.
In essence, this is like an unintended sequel to ‘If I Fell’, complete with the lovelorn lyric where everything lives happily ever after with Lennon secure in his relationship again. While he may have been spitting out classics much faster than the group could record them, it may have been a good idea to keep this one in his back pocket so they didn’t have to rely as much on cover songs when creating Beatles for Sale.
4. ‘That Means a Lot’ – Lennon/McCartney
While The Beatles had a standard track record for being a great album band, their first handful of singles did have more than a few duds present on the B-sides. Before anyone gets to the level of writing brilliant B-sides like ‘Rain’ or ‘Yes It Is’, they normally have to go through making tunes like ‘I’ll Get You’ that feel more than a little bit lifeless by comparison. But if McCartney hadn’t sounded so tired on the demo recording, ‘That Means A Lot’ does seem to fill in the gap between Help and Rubber Soul quite nicely.
Despite only getting released on the Anthology series years after the fact, ‘That Means a Lot’ is the kind of mindless pop song that seems to be nothing but puppy love stuff. But by dissecting what it means to be in love like this, it’s easy to hear them growing into the mature songwriters they would become, especially with the strange chords happening in the middle eight. Rubber Soul was just around the corner, and if they were to have swapped something like ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ out for this, it would have been a worthy album track on the same level as ‘Wait’ one album later.
3. ‘Junk’ – Paul McCartney
For someone who was a major perfectionist behind the scenes, it’s baffling to hear McCartney’s solo debut sound so slipshot. While far from a bad album, hearing him make a project that’s the equivalent of a demo recording felt closer to a Lennon move than anything the sophisticated Beatle had ever done. Although that indie-rock style of production worked pretty well for what it was, ‘Junk’ is a tune that sounds like it could have benefited from getting beefed out during the Get Back sessions.
Since most of the album was recorded around the same time that the group were recording their final projects, this little fragment is begging for Lennon’s touch. The melody itself is quite pretty and even sounds a little bit jazzy in spaces, but outside of the half a chorus, all that it needs is maybe some of Lennon’s trademark wit to help finish it off. We might have been in for an ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ situation where two songs are stacked on top of each other, but Lennon and McCartney’s greatest strength was filling in each other’s musical sentences.
2. ‘Child of Nature’ – John Lennon
By the time the group returned from transcendental meditation in India, it was clear that everyone had a different experience. Harrison was the one most spiritually inclined to visit, but after coming back to the studio, each of them looked at it either bitterly or only took pieces out of the experience. Nature was on everyone’s mind, though, and while ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ eventually got fleshed out, Lennon’s solo smash ‘Jealous Guy’ could have worked just as well as ‘Child of Nature’.
Even in their sessions in Twickenham Film Studios, Lennon is heard playing the melody of what ‘Jealous Guy’ would become with different lyrics, which could have played into the theme of Get Back of returning to that child-like sense of wonder. Once he dusted it off for Imagine, though, it seemed almost necessary for him to confront how he treated people as a younger man. ‘Jealous Guy’ is one of the best examples of recycling in music, but if Lennon had recorded this with The Beatles and decided to write another tune, we could have got two classic Lennon tracks for the price of one.
1. ‘All Things Must Pass’ – George Harrison
The rest of the Beatles failing to see what they had on their hands with George Harrison still boggles the mind. Here was one of the greatest songwriting talents standing right next to them, and yet they were more concerned about how their songs were shaping up than whatever weird project he worked on. Outside of Harrison’s dabblings in Indian music, though, ‘All Things Must Pass’ should never have been glossed over.
After all, the only complaint that comes with his solo debut is that it’s way too long as a triple album, so getting masterpieces like this into The Beatles would have been a worthy substitute. Especially when you look at what the group were working with, the fact that they figured a song like ‘For You Blue’ or the scrap of ‘I Me Mine’ suited the project better is one of the biggest fumbles they ever made. They had certainly wised up by the time they made Abbey Road, but if Get Back had been their final outing, this could have been the cherry on top that closed the final chapter of their career.
