There was no press release, no rediscovered genius, just a dusty tape on a forgotten shelf in the back of a Vancouver record store — misfiled, mislabeled, mostly ignored. It read: Beatles ’60s demos. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to be blank, or maybe someone’s homemade mixtape, and not even the store owner had listened to it.
But one day, someone pressed play. And there it was — not a revelation, exactly, but something close, a piece of rock history trapped on magnetic tape: the Beatles’ audition for Decca Records, January 1, 1962. Fifteen songs, a mix of originals and rhythm-and-blues standards, a pre-Beatles Beatles. They were four boys from Liverpool trying to find their footing, trying to get signed.
They didn’t, Decca passed. It was too rough, not enough polish, they said. “Guitar groups are on the way out”, the label famously said. That rejection would go down as one of the great music-industry miscalculations. The tape had taken a strange path: London to Vancouver, passed around and stored in boxes, ending up at Can-Base Studios, where it sat for years — anonymous, unremarkable. Local musicians even used it without knowing what it was. Eventually it landed at Neptoon Records, bought by owner Rob Frith, who promptly forgot about it until a local DJ mentioned it and curiosity — or luck — took over.
Frith listened, and suddenly, the tape wasn’t just old plastic, it was a time capsule. “Unlike most bootlegs, this one sounded good”, said Frith. “Better than expected. Between tracks, there was white leader tape – an odd, professional touch”. And then there was that sound: Lennon’s phrasing, McCartney’s urgency, the accent, the chemistry — faint but unmistakable.
The Beatles — not quite yet The Beatles — were caught in the moment just before becoming myth. “A month ago” Frith said, “if someone had offered me twenty bucks for that tape, I’d have taken it”. Now, he’s not so sure. Maybe it will go to McCartney. Maybe there will be a public playing of the tape, a charity fundraiser, a second life, or maybe it will just stay as it is: one more footnote in a story we already thought we knew.
