Fellow blogger Nancy at The Elephant’s Trunk posted today’s featured track by the Beatles – Free As A Bird – a reworked version released in 1995 from a home demo John Lennon recorded in 1977. I was so impressed with it, just as I was with another demo I shared here not too long ago – Strawberry Fields Forever (Demo Sequence Anthology 2 Version). I honestly would buy an entire album of just Beatles demos, even though Free As A Bird is a posthumous reworking. What draws me in are the rough edges and the feeling of hearing something still in motion. They carry a certain intimacy in their looseness and experimentation – like George Harrison’s touching slide guitar solo here for his old friend, or the poignant moment in the outro when the words “Made for John Lennon” are heard.
The following was abridged from the Wikipedia article below:
25 years after the Beatles break-up and 15 years after Lennon’s murder, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr released a studio version of ‘Free as a Bird‘ in 1995 incorporating the Lennon demo. It was released (see image left) as part of the promotion for The Beatles Anthology video documentary and the Anthology 1 compilation album. The B side was Christmas Time (Is Here Again). The song peaked at No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart and No. 6 on the US Billboard.
Background
Ono says that it was Harrison and former Beatles road manager Neil Aspinall who initially asked her about the concept of adding vocals and instrumentation to Lennon’s demo tapes. Ono stated “People have said it was all agreed when Paul came over to New York to induct John into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but it was all settled before then. I just used that occasion to hand over the tapes personally to Paul.”
Free as a Bird was one of four Lennon songs (along with Grow Old With Me, Real Love and Now and Then) for which McCartney, Harrison and Starr contributed additional instrumentation, vocals and arrangements. Jeff Lynne, who had worked with Harrison on Harrison’s album Cloud Nine and as part of the Traveling Wilburys, co-produced. During an interview for the Anthology project, McCartney revealed that he was surprised to learn that Lennon’s demos of “Grow Old With Me” and “Real Love” had already been released and were well known by Lennon fans.
So, McCartney went to Ono’s home after the induction ceremony at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to listen to, and receive, the Lennon demo tapes; he recalls the meeting with Ono:
She was there with Sean … and she played us a couple of tracks. There were two newies on mono cassettes which he did at home … [s]o I checked it out with Sean, because I didn’t want him to have a problem with it. He said, “Well, it’ll be weird hearing a dead guy on lead vocal. But give it a try.” I said to them both, “If it doesn’t work out, you can veto it.” 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. 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.”
Ono recognised that she was now in a position of bringing the band back together after previously being criticised for splitting them up.
[Chorus]
Free as a bird
It’s the next best thing to be
Free as a bird
[Post-Chorus]
Home, home and dry
Like a homing bird, I’ll fly
As a bird on wings
[Verse 1: Paul McCartney]
Whatever happened to
The life that we once knew?
Can we really live without each other?
Where did we lose the touch
That seemed to mean so much?
It always made me feel so—
[Chorus]
[Post-Chorus]
[Verse 2: George Harrison]
Whatever happened to
The life that we once knew?
Always made me feel so free
[Guitar Solo – George Harrison]
[Chorus]
[Outro]
Free
Made for John Lennon
References:
1. Free as a Bird – Wikipedia
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
Observation Blogger 
Good write, Matt. Thanks for the nod. Appreciate it.
No, rather thanks to you! Cheers.
By the time “Free As a Bird” came out, I already had been a Beatles for 15-plus years, so listening to a newly released Beatles song was certainly exciting. Is it one of my top 10 or 20 Beatles songs? Nope, but that was not the point. It’s pretty remarkable how John, George and Ringo transformed a home-recorded demo tape by John into the resulting song. One wonders what the outcome would have been, had they had the same advanced technology they used for “Now and Then.” That said, the fact that “Free As a Bird” isn’t perfect from a sonic perspective does give a certain charm!
I had thought this was an original Beatles demo until researching it. I can imagine how thrilled you would have been as a Beatles fan about a new transformed version release of Lennon’s demo by the surviving Beatles.