BEATLES RECORDING TURNS UP MADE FOR DECCA RECORDS IN 1962

ByBeatles Magazine

Mar 20, 2025 #The Beatles

A few years ago, Rob Frith of Neptoon Records bought a reel-to-reel tape labelled “Beatles demo.”
But he didn’t bother to actually listen to it. He just assumed someone had put a Beatles bootleg on the tape.
“I’ve had that Beatles thing sitting at the store for years,” said Frith, one of Vancouver’s biggest record and poster collectors.
Last week, he was transferring some tapes at broadcaster Larry Hennessey’s recording studio and brought along the Beatles tape.
Late in the evening, they put it on.

“All of a sudden, it was like the Beatles are in the room playing,” he said, a sense of astonishment still in his voice. “The quality was that good.”

Turns out, it really was a Beatles demo — a legendary session they recorded on Jan. 1, 1962, for Decca Records.
Decca rejected the band, which is arguably the biggest mistake in music history.
Instead, EMI signed the Beatles a few months later and they became a worldwide sensation.
The tape features the Beatles’ original drummer Pete Best, not Ringo Starr. Most of the songs are covers like Money, To Know Him is to Love Him and The Sheik of Araby. But there are three original songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney: Like Dreamers Do, Hello Little Girl, and Love of the Loved.

Not all 15 recordings in the Decca session have been officially released, although it’s been widely bootlegged. Five songs from the session were officially released on the Beatles Anthology I in 1995.

Frith and Hennessey posted the discovery on Facebook. “It is a huge mystery to unravel but this is an amazing find,” Hennessey wrote, noting it was “not a bootleg copy, as this reel was prepared as a master (tape for a record) with leader tape between cuts.”
Tom Lavin of the Powder Blues replied to the post, noting that the Decca tape used to be at Can-Base Studios at 1234 West 6th in Vancouver, which later became famous as Mushroom Studios. He said Can-Base’s owner, Jack Herschorn, had obtained it in London, England, “from someone inside Decca.”

Herschorn is now 80 and living in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico. He confirms that he got the tape in London “in 1968 or 1969” from a “well-known record producer” who he declines to name.

“He thought that maybe we could put it out as a bootleg album in Canada and the U.S.,” said Herschorn. “And he gave me a copy.”

It’s indeed a duplicate made off the original master tape, which is why the sound quality is so good.

At the time, Vancouver had a record pressing plant, International Record Corp., which made bootlegs and which was sued by Bob Dylan in 1969. But when Herschorn got back to Canada, he decided not to put the Beatles tape out.

“I wouldn’t want somebody doing that to me,” he said. “It was just a moral issue with me. I could have put it out, made a few bucks on it, but then I could get bad PR … get sued over. It wasn’t my style.”
So he took the tape and put it in a room at Can-Base.

“We had a closet, a good-sized closet where we kept master tapes,” he said. “And it was in there.”

The studio and property has been sold several times over the years: it’s on sale right now for $4 million. Whoever took the Beatles tape probably didn’t know what it was: they didn’t hype it to Frith.

“I actually can’t remember who I bought it from,” Frith said. “I think it was an engineer that worked in Vancouver for years and years that was moving.”

Frith won’t be able to legally reproduce the music on the tape for copyright reasons. But it has value as an artifact: a copy of the Decca sessions that once belonged to Beatles manager Brian Epstein sold for 62,500 pounds (about CDN$117,000) in 2019. And that tape had only half the recordings.

Jack Herschorn said he got the tape in London “in 1968 or 1969” from a “well-known record producer” who he declines to name.

Herschorn grew up in Los Angeles and moved back there in the 1970s but was a key element of the Vancouver music scene in his day. He managed the Collectors, which became Chilliwack, and was partners with singer Tom Northcott in the pioneering local label, New Syndrome Records.

He left the Beatles tape at Can-Base and became a successful chiropractor at Venice Beach, Calif. But his big claim to fame was running The Sacred Space near Santa Barbara, a retail outlet selling goods from Tibet, Bali, Java, Thailand, Nepal, India, Indonesia and China. It has been described as more of a “spiritual retreat or a day spa.” Customers included Oprah Winfrey and Beyonce.

Herschorn is still friends with many people from his days in the Vancouver music business. Last week Howard Leese, the former guitar player in Heart, visited him in Mexico.

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