When Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr reunited The Beatles for their 1995 Anthology 1 in the early ’90s, they revisited a song John Lennon had written but never released. Set as a bonus track on the anthology, the three Beatles started working on “Free As a Bird,” originally written and recorded by Lennon in 1977 but never completed.
A simple piano demo, “Free As A Bird” was recorded by Lennon at his home in the Dakota Building in New York City. Though he never completed it in the studio, it was one of the songs he recorded to cassette during his “Househusband” period between 1975 and 1980.
As Anthology 1 was in the works, the former Beatles used Lennon’s previously recorded vocals from the demo. To complete the song, the three added their vocals to more verses, along with instrumentation. Lennon’s vocals were then weaved throughout the track, something co-producer Jeff Lynne achieved by using analog technology and tricks. To complete the song “entailed doing whatever manipulations [Geoff] Emerick [engineer] and [Jeff] Lynne could achieve to help bring out Lennon’s voice above the piano which was playing along with him,” recounted engineer Marc Mann in 1996, “as well as adding whatever effect onto his voice to give it that ‘Strawberry Fields’-Lennon sound.”
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Using technology to manipulate Lennon’s vocals and the song, along with any form of virtual reality, was something Prince considered “demonic” and furthered his desire for artistic freedom.
“That’s the most demonic thing imaginable,” said Prince in 1998 of using technology to manipulate songs. “Everything is as it is, and it should be. If I was meant to jam with Duke Ellington, we would have lived in the same age. That whole virtual reality thing. It really is demonic. And I am not a demon.”
Prince added, “What they did with that Beatles song [‘Free As a Bird’], “manipulating John Lennon’s voice to have him singing from across the grave, that’ll never happen to me. To prevent that kind of thing from happening is another reason why I want artistic control.”
The band’s longtime producer George Martin, who died in 2016, also decried the then-new Beatles song, along with “Real Love,” released on Anthology 2, in 1996. “I kind of told them I wasn’t too happy with putting them together with the dead John,” said Martin in a 2013 interview. “I’ve got nothing wrong with dead John but the idea of having dead John with live Paul and Ringo and George to form a group, it didn’t appeal to me too much. In the same way that I think it’s okay to find an old record of Nat King Cole’s and bring it back to life and issue it, but to have him singing with his daughter is another thing.”
Martin said he may have worked on the tracks if he were asked by the remaining Beatles, but still praised Lynne’s production on the Anthology songs. “I thought what they did was terrific,” said Martin. “It was very very good indeed. I don’t think I would have done it like that if I had produced it.
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Released 25 years after the Beatles’ breakup and 15 years after Lennon’s death, “Free As a Bird” was just one of the songs Lennon recorded but never released that Yoko Ono shared with the band.
Initially, Harrison and Neil Aspinall, who headed the band’s Apple Corps, approached Ono and suggested working on Lennon’s unfinished recordings.
After Lennon’s posthumous induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the Beatles in 1994, Ono shared the tapes with McCartney, including the songs: “Grow Old With Me,” the last song Lennon recorded which was released on his 1984 posthumous album Milk and Honey; “Real Love”; “Free as a Bird”; and “Now And Then,” which was later released in 2023.
“I’d never heard them before, but she [Ono] explained that they’re quite well known to Lennon fans as bootlegs,” said McCartney of the recordings. “I said to Yoko, ‘Don’t impose too many conditions on us. It’s really difficult to do this, spiritually. We don’t know. We may hate each other after two hours in the studio and just walk out, so don’t put any conditions. It’s tough enough. If it doesn’t work out, you can veto it.’”
He added, “When I told George and Ringo, I’d agreed to that they were going, ‘What? What if we love it?’ It didn’t come to that, luckily.”
Upon its release, “Free As a Bird” went to No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart, No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, and won a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal in 1997.
“We took the easy route, which was to do some incidental music, because what else can we do?” said Starr. “There were four Beatles, and there are only three of us left. We were going to do some incidental music and just get there and play the instruments and see what happened. Then we thought, well, why don’t we do some new music?”
Starr continued, “And then we always hit the wall, and OK, Paul had a song, or George had a song, or I had a song, well that’s the three of us, why don’t the three of us go in and do this. And we kept hitting that wall because this is the Beatles; it’s not Paul, George, and Ringo.”
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
