Latest Beatles release just scrapes surface

[NEW YORK] In the summer of 1971, one of the first Beatles bootlegs turned up, packaged in a white sleeve with "The Beatles - Yellow Matter Custard - Previously Unreleased Studio Material" rubber-stamped across it.

It offered an odd line-up of tracks (performances of Ray Charles' I Got a Woman; Buddy Holly's Crying, Waiting, Hoping; Carl Perkins' Sure to Fall (in Love With You); Arthur Alexander's Shot of Rhythm and Blues - 14 in all, in decent, if slightly tinny, quality.

Beatles scholarship was in its infancy then, and collectors had no idea what these tracks were. When a fan played the disc for John Lennon in 1972, he said it was the Beatles' failed Decca audition from a decade earlier. He was wrong. By the late 1970s, the recordings' provenance was established: The Beatles recorded these songs in 1963 for a 15-week BBC radio series, Pop Go the Beatles.