Number 5 - Photograph

Beatle involvement:  

George and Ringo

Listenability: 5 out of 5

A strong collaboration between George Harrison and Ringo, this song features a catchy melody and harmonies to match. This is the only song in which the George and Ringo officially share song writing credits. George plays guitar and sings backing vocals on the song. The song appears on Ringo’s 1973 self-titled album. It was also released as a single and went to number 1 in the US.

What they said about it:

Ringo: 

"Photograph" is beautiful. That's one of the best songs I've ever written. I was writing it with George Harrison, so that also helped. In those days, and still to this day, I only play three chords. I'd write these songs, and then I'd give them to George and he would put in 10 more chords, and they'd think I was the genius.

Question: Which three chords?

I can only play guitar in E, and I can only play piano in C. Everything I've ever written, if I play it on guitar I make it in E and if I play it on piano, I do it in C. "Photograph" was actually written because George made me play C. It's so hard, you have to get that little finger over.  

Taken from Ringo’s official website. 08/23/2007 - Ringo Q&A with the AP By SOLVEJ SCHOU, Associated Press Writer

  “You know I loved George, George loved me, and I’d like to do two numbers for you tonight. One, George and I wrote together. It’s called Photograph and the meanings changed now of course.” 

2002 Concert for George

Number 4 - All Those Years Ago

Beatles involved: 

Paul, George, Ringo

Listenability: 4 out of 5

According to Keith Badman author of ‘The Beatle Diaries’, Ringo and George recorded the basic drum and guitar parts for the song at Friar Park in November 1980 for Ringo’s upcoming album. After John Lennon’s murder Harrison took the song back with Ringo’s agreement. He kept Ringo’s drum track and rewrote the lyrics as a tribute to John. 

Later Paul and Linda McCartney, Denny Laine and George Martin visited Friar park. According to Paul this visit was so George Harrison could add guitar to Paul's song 'Wanderlust'. Paul, Linda and Denny added backing vocals to Harrison's track. It is unclear what role George Martin played on the night. The single was released in America on 11 May 1980. It reached number 13 in the UK and number 2 in America. George Harrison never did play guitar for Paul's song 'Wanderlust'.

What they said about it:

George:

Question: Did you start writing "All Those Years Ago" before John was killed? Yeah, I did.
Question: The lyric—where you jump from Lennon being "weird" to God and the reason we exist—always puzzled me. It is a strange choice of words. The way I saw it was, I’m talking all about God and he’s the only reason we exist–now that’s something I believe to be true.
Question: Were you saying you were weirder than John? No, no, no. What I was saying is there’s all these weird people who don’t actually believe in God and who go around murdering everybody, and yet, in the broad sweep, it’s like they were the ones pointing fingers at Lennon, saying he’s a weirdo. Sometimes my lyrics get a bit abstract in place—I get so many thoughts coming from different angles, I’m not sure if they come across right. But I think that’s what I was trying to say.
Taken from a two part interview in CREEM - December 1987 and January 1988 

It’s about a friend of all of us… John Lennon. 

Live in concert in Hiroshima 6 Dec 1991 

Paul:

Question: You played with George recently, didn't you?

Not really, no. I just sang some stuff on All Those Years Ago. 

Music Express, Canada. Issue #56, April/May 1982 edition

  

Question: Is it true that you contributed to George Harrison's tribute song to John Lennon, 'All Those Years Ago'? There was a lot about this in the press at the time but I can't actually hear you on the recording.

Yes - me, Linda and Denny Laine are in the backing harmonies. We were making the album Tug Of War at the time and we wanted George Harrison to add a guitar overdub onto 'Wanderlust', so George Martin, me, Linda and Denny arranged to go up to George's house. When we got there, though, he said "First I've got this track that I'd like you to sing harmonies on" so we agreed to do that and then do the guitar overdub afterwards. We did our bit, but then, what with one thing and another, he never got around to doing the guitar overdub. 

The Paul McCartney Interview by Mark Lewisohn Club Sandwich #72 Winter 1994. This particular question was submitted to Club Sandwich by Cecilia Franks, Lincoln, England 

Ringo Starr:

The story is that the track originally was written for me and so we did the backing track. And then we did four tracks and we only used two. And George kept that one and changed the words to put his vocals on. Then Paul came to visit and did some backing vocals I believe. I haven’t heard the record myself. And that’s how it is, but we didn’t go out, do a tribute record. And I haven’t heard it so, I don’t really consider it a tribute record. It’s a record that the three of us are all on.

Taken from: Good Morning America May 7, 1981

Denny Laine:

The last time I was at George's, Paul and Linda were also there. Paul has a way of coming in and taking over and making everything a bit edgy. Everyone was uptight. When he and Linda left, the atmosphere suddenly changed and became more relaxed. Everybody seemed to physically go 'phew' and start enjoying themselves. Paul thinks he's easygoing but there is a mistrust about him. He doesn't trust people and it shows.  

Taken from: Geoffrey Giuliano “Blackbird. The Life and Times of Paul McCartney"

It was at George’s house, Friar Park. I knew George really well. I really knew George better than all of them, because he was my neighbor. When he was with Pattie Boyd, I used to go to his house a lot. But when he got this other house, he had a studio upstairs. When everybody went, I was hanging out with him upstairs listening to all the music and having a laugh. So, I mean, I knew George well. I knew Ringo really well. I never thought of it as working with the three Beatles, funny enough. It never crossed my mind. But it was just easy. I mean, I was never in awe of anybody. I was in a band and they were in a band. That was the way I looked at it. I did really respect how good they were as a band. I mean The Beatles were a great rock band. Before they even got famous they were great. They just had a great little groove, because they worked Hamburg five gigs a night and they were a good little rock band. You know, I just knew them so well as people.  

The Gibson Interview: Denny Laine (Part 3) Michael Wright 07.22.2010

Number 3 - I'm The Greatest

Beatles Involved: John, George and Ringo

Listenability: 3.5 out of 5

Written by John Lennon for Ringo Starr, it was recorded on 13 March 1973 by John, George, Ringo, Billy Preston (who appeared on the Let It Be Album) and Klaus Voorman (a friend of all The Beatles from their Hamburg days). According to author Keith Badman, the session lasted approximately 18 minutes. Apart from the Anthology reunions this is the only time three former Beatles played live together in a recording studio. Unfortunately the song never really takes off as it lacks a chorus. The end result is O.K but it's not the greatest!

Two versions of this song have been officially released, the first with Ringo on lead vocals on his 1973 Ringo album. The second features John on lead vocals on the 1998 John Lennon Anthology. On the second version John is performing the vocals as a guide for Ringo rather than for official release. Billy Preston's organ playing is missing from the John Lennon version. Producer Richard Perry and session musician Nicky Hopkins were also present at the session.

What They Said About It....

John:

Question: You [The Beatles] haven't worked together in three or four years? 

Well let me say, I've worked with Ringo and George on Ringo's album. I worked with George on an album of mine [Imagine]. I worked with Ringo about two months ago [in August John worked with Ringo on the songs Goodnight Vienna and Only You] and I might be working with George on Friday night folks! [This didn't happen. The following Friday, 27th December 1974, John signed signed the official documents to dissolve The Beatles partnership. John was the last ex-beatle to sign these documents.] 

Today - NBC TV December 1974 

Question: "Didn't all four Beatles work on a song you wrote for Ringo in 1973?"

'I'm the Greatest.' It was the Muhammad Ali line, of course. It was perfect for Ringo to sing. If I said, 'I'm the greatest,' they'd all take it so seriously. No one would get upset with Ringo singing it.

Question: "Did you enjoy playing with George and Ringo again?"

Yeah, except when George and Billy Preston started saying, 'Let's form a group. Let's form a group.' I was embarrassed when George kept asking me. He was just enjoying the session and the spirit was very good, but I was with Yoko, you know. We took time out from what we were doing. The very fact that they would imagine I would form a male group without Yoko! It was still in their minds... 

Taken From: 1980 Playboy Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono

Ringo:

And John happened to be in town, so did George. They wrote me a song, um, and then I didn’t want to leave Paul out so I phoned him and I flew back to England to do Paul. But it just came about like that. 

Taken from raw footage from 1976 Australian television interview

               It was John, George and I. It was the closest we ever got to a reunion. And it was fine.
           Taken from interview by Elliot Mintz, broadcast on American radio on 29 August 1977.

It just happened. John was there and George was there. So I go to John and said, 'I’m doing an album. Do you got any songs?’ He said, ‘I got one I’ll finish for you.’ He was in the Beverly Hills with his piano. So he finished a song for me. George was there and I said, ‘George, give us a song.’ You know, they’re the writers. And he says, ‘Yeah, I got a song.’ So I say ‘Well come and play.’ And he and John said okay. So we have the one track with John, George and Ringo on it. Then I thought, well, we’ll get Paul. I’d talked to him as well. I called Paul and I said, ‘You can’t be left out of this. I’ve got John and George is back. I’ve got the other two on it. Have you got any tracks?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, I’ve got a track.’ And I was going to England, so I said, ‘Come on Richard, we’re going to England.’ We went to England and we went into the Apple studio there with Paul to do his track. So that’s how that album got together. 

Question: So with that album, all four of The Beatles were on it, with three on one track. We were like big girls again. We were all looking at each other smiling. We hadn’t played together in four years. I’d played on John’s album, George’s album. This was my first one of those. We were just smiling while we were playing. It was nice.

Bill Minkin interview 1977

Paul:

I know the three of them did play together once, maybe on Pussy Cats [an album of Harry Nilsson's]. They jammed together, and I remember, I think it was John who said to me, "Man, it was great, we're a great band. Because that was the great thing about the Beatles; we really were a great band. 

Taken from: Rolling Stone - 20th Anniversary Edition, 1987. N.B. Paul get's the details incorrect. The song John, George and Ringo got together for was for a track off Ringo's 'Ringo' album. It was not a jam, but rather a series of takes for the one song. 

Billy Preston:

I remember one night when we were in between takes, and there was John, George and Ringo along with some other musicians. We were all saying, 'This is great! We should go out and get another band together, have other musicians.' And then John Lennon said, 'Yeah, that would be great, but it would be like starting over.' I remember him saying that and then, years later, he comes out with the title 'Starting Over' on his own album. 

Taken from 'Ticket to Ride' by Scott Muni, Denny Somach, Kathleen Somach p. 147 -148 

Richard Perry:

Just like that. No planning. The three ex-beatles recorded one of John's songs. Everyone in the room was just gleaming... it's such a universal gleam with The Beatles. 

The Beatles Diary. Keith Badman

This was the most exciting and fun session I've ever had!" 

Taken from the 1990 'Ringo' album CD release notes by Staffan Olander.  

Nicky Hopkins:

All it was, was all the people turned up, which has happened many times before in England. For example, Ringo worked on George's upcoming album and Harrison helped out on my forthcoming solo LP. 

The Beatles Diary. Keith Badman

Number 2 - Real Love

Beatles involved:  

John (posthumous), Paul, George, Ringo

Listenability: 4.5 out of 5

In early 1995 the remaining Beatles added backing vocals and music to a low quality cassette recording of this John Lennon song. The song is more upbeat than Free As A Bird and both the piano sound and John's voice are clearer. John sings lead throughout the song and it does sound a bit like a John Lennon solo track, albeit with George Harrison’s trademark slide guitar and some Beatle style backing vocals.

What They Said About It:

Paul:

Real Love was different from Free As A Bird in that it had all the words and the music and so it was a bit more like being side men to John - but that was very joyful and good fun and I think we did a good job.   

Press release for The Beatles' single Real Love 5 February 1996

 I don't quite like it as much as Free As A Bird because I think Free As A Bird is more powerful. But it's catchier. There was one real nice moment when were doing Real Love and I was trying to learn the piano bit, and Ringo sat down on the drums, jamming along. It was like none of us had ever been away.  

Q December 1995

Ringo:

Real Love is more of a poppy song. It was more difficult, actually, to turn it into a real Beatles track.  

 Q December 1995

I think John will love it when he hears it.

George:

I hope somebody does this to all my crap demos when I'm dead, make them into hit songs. 

 Huntley, Elliot J (2004) Mystical One: George Harrison: After the Break-up of the Beatles

Other Bits And Pieces

Biographer John T. Marck stated that Real Love was originally written as part of an unfinished stage play that Lennon was working on in 1977 titled "The Ballad of John and Yoko." A handwritten page of notes shown below indicates that John Lennon was also considering the song for his come back album in 1980 that would eventually become 'Double Fantasy'.

Number 1 - Free As A Bird

Beatles involved:  

John (posthumous), Paul, George, Ringo

Listenability: 4.5 out of 5

Not quite a full Beatle reunion as the four living Beatles never did fully reunite after announcing their break-up in March 1970. The listenability of the track also suffers as John’s voice is not clear and the piano has an effect add to it to help it blend in with John’s own piano playing. George Harrison, however plays some remarkable slide guitar, Ringo’s drums are loud and crisp, and when Paul and George harmonise on the track (with some help from Jeff Lynne) they end up sounding like a 1990’s reunion of The Beatles.

What They Said About It....

Ringo Starr:

It’s great, and I’m not just saying that because I’m on it. It’s an amazing Beatle track. And for me being away from it for so long. I listened to it and I thought “It sounds just like them.” I’d taken myself away from it for so long, that it was like listening to it as an outsider. It’s brilliant. I think you could say that they could have made this in 1967.   

Q December 1995

George Harrison:

John never finished the middle, and also if you hear the original version – which has apparently been out on the radio for years – you know that John plays very different chord changes in it as well. Historically, what we’d say would be , Well hang on, I’m not sure about that chord there – why don’t we try this chord here? So we took the liberty of doing that: of beefing the song up a bit with some different chord changes and different arrangements, and we finished the lyrics and we actually produced the song and put John into it....When you say it sounds like The Beatles, people may expect it to sound like ’65 or ’68. It’s very similar in some respects to Abbey Road because it has the voicing, tha backing voices like Because. But the whole technical thing that has taken place between 1969 and 1995 is such that, you know, it sounds more like now.  

Q December 1995

Paul McCartney:

It came to the backing harmonies and George said to me 'Jeff is such a big Beatles fan, he'd love to get on this record, he'd just die! Even if he goes 'hey!' he can then say he was on it'. And I was a little bit reluctant. I'm a bit sort of precious, a bit private about who's in the Beatles and we didn't do too badly on that philosophy. Even when Billy Preston came in I was in two minds. The others were so definite that I went with their thinking, as I always did, because I knew they had right-on opinions. Well Ringo says 'You know why ELO broke up? They ran out of Beatles riffs.' One off Jeff's great prides is that he met John once - obviously a huge fan of John's - and John said 'I really like all that ELO stuff man.' That was the highspot of Jeff's life! He was vindicated. John said it was alright! So we got Jeff on Free As A Bird.

Jeff Lynne:

It was very difficult, and one of the hardest jobs I've ever had to do, because of the nature of the source material; it was very primitive sounding, to say the least. I spent about a week at my own studio cleaning up both tracks on my computer, with a friend of mine, Marc Mann, who is a great engineer, musician and computer expert... Putting fresh music to it was the easy part! Free As A Bird, however, wasn't a quarter as noisy as Real Love, and only a bit of EQ was needed to cure most problems. 

Sound on Sound, December 1995 

George Martin:

Question: When Paul, George and Ringo recorded the two new Beatles songs, Free As A Bird and Real Love, did they ask you to be involved?I kind of told them I wasn’t too happy with putting them together with the dead John. 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. So I don’t know, I’m not fussy about it but it didn’t appeal to me very much. I think I might have done it if they asked me, but they didn’t. 

Question: Did you enjoy Jeff Lynne’s production of Free As A Bird and Real Love?I thought what they did was terrific; it was very very good indeed. I don’t think I would have done it like that if I had produced it. 

Question: What would you have done differently?Well, you see the way they did it you must remember the material they had to deal with was very difficult. It was a cassette that John had placed on top of his piano, played and sang. The piano was louder than the voice, and the voice wasn’t very clear and the rhythm was all over the place. So they tried to separate the voice and the piano, not very successfully.
Then they tried to put it into a rigid time beat so they could overdub easily other instruments. So they stretched it and compressed it until it got to a regular waltz and then they were done. The result was, in order to conceal the bad bits, they had to plaster it fairly heavily, so what you ended up with was quite a thick homogeneous sound that hardly stops. There’s not much dynamic in it.The way I would have tackled it if I had the opportunity would have been the reverse of that. I would have looked at the song as a song and got The Beatles together and say ‘what can we do with this song?’ bearing in mind we have got John around as well somewhere. I would have actually have started to record a song and I would have dropped John into it. I wouldn't have made John the basis of it. So where possible I would have used instruments probably and we would then try and get his voice more separate and use him for the occasional voice so it would become a true partnership of voices. Whether that would be practical or not I don't know, this is just theoretically the way I would tackle it. Taken from: Rock Cellar Magazine. April 2013.

Does it hurt that you are not a producer of ‘Free As A Bird’ their new single?

...Well having heard it I wish I had been. But when I heard that they were going to do it I said to myself well it can’t be as good because I’m not producing it, you know. But then when I heard it I realised it was better than I produced. So, yeah it’s a very good record. No I’m not sorry about it, I’m quite happy. 

Dutch TV Interview with Neil Aspinall, George Martin, and Derek Taylor

Julian Lennon:

I heard the song for the first time when I was last in New York visiting Sean and Yoko. It's a great song. I love it. Although I must say I find it hard to hear Dad's vocals.

Sean Lennon (as retold by Paul McCartney):

It's going to be a bit spooky hearing a dead guy on lead vocal. But give it a try. 

Q December 1995

Other Bits and Pieces

This short video below shows Paul, George and Ringo arriving in Friar Park (George's home) in style. It was originally broadcast prior to the premier of Free As A Bird video and has been officially unavailable ever since.