Paul McCartney wasn’t just the Walrus. He was a pioneer of the mixtape.
The cute Beatle in the winter of 1965 created a custom album for his bandmates, using the studio of music publisher Dick James to transfer tapes onto a disc.
“With Paul playing DJ and the occasional guest spot, he’d call the album ‘Unforgettable.’ Only four copies were ever pressed [as Christmas presents], with many – including McCartney – believing they were lost in the mists of time,” says a description on YouTube.
HuffPost recounted: “Unfortunately, the quality of these discs was such that they wore out as you played them for a couple of weeks,” McCartney told Mark Lewisohn in 1995, per the book, “The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film.”
“There’s probably a tape somewhere, though.”
Now it’s posted on the Simon Wells YouTube channel.
“It was like a magazine program,” he was quoted as saying. “Full of weird interviews, experimental music, tape loops, some tracks I knew the others hadn’t heard. It was just a compilation of odd things.”
Nat King Cole, the Beach Boys and Elvis are part of the primitive mixtape.
“I had two Brenell tape recorders set up at home, on which I made experimental recordings and tape loops, like the ones in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’” McCartney said. “And once I put together something crazy, something left-field, just for the other Beatles, a fun thing which they could play late in the evening. It was just something for the mates, basically.”
Other coverage:
Paul McCartney’s Long-Lost Christmas Album Surfaces Online — https://t.co/nW2EZXvwpp pic.twitter.com/97WujPa1e8
— Mental Floss (@mental_floss) December 5, 2017
Listen to Paul McCartney’s Extremely Rare 1965 Christmas Recordhttps://t.co/VXIGBu7EtL
Shared from my Google feed
— Dee Stewart (@SpcAuthor) December 5, 2017
It only took 52 years https://t.co/pG8Un4Lurd
— Esquire (@esquire) December 5, 2017
