A cassette of a half-finished John Lennon song sat on the table, and three Beatles had to decide whether to complete it. The band was already deep into assembling Anthology 3, the collection of outtakes and alternate recordings from their final years together, due on Apple Records on October 28, 1996.
The plan had worked twice before. For the first two volumes of the Anthology series, the surviving Beatles had turned Lennon's rough home demos into new singles: 'Free as a Bird' and 'Real Love'. For the third set, the target was 'Now and Then', another unfinished demo Lennon had left behind.
Harrison halts the Lennon demo
George Harrison stopped the project. He was unhappy with the quality of the recording, and Paul McCartney later told Q Magazine that Harrison had dismissed the demo with a crude insult. The group, McCartney explained, was a democracy, and the decision was made not to do the song.
That left a hole in the album's closing moments. Instead of a new Beatles single, the compilers turned to 'A Beginning', an orchestral instrumental by producer George Martin. Originally written as an introduction to 'Don't Cry' for the White Album sessions, the piece now became the opening track of Anthology 3.
Rare recordings from the final years
The album itself was the third of four volumes in the Anthology project, tied to the television special of the same name. It gathered rare and alternate recordings from the final two years of the Beatles' career, spanning the first sessions for the White Album through the last recordings for Let It Be and Abbey Road.
Listeners could hear the group in fragments: a solo demo of 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' by Harrison, a raw second take of 'Hey Jude', and 'The Long and Winding Road' without Phil Spector's later overdubs. The material was drawn from 1968, 1969 and the start of 1970, the years when the band was coming apart. The first disc opened with George Martin's 'A Beginning', recorded at Abbey Road Studios on July 22, 1968. It also gathered home demos made at Kinfauns, George Harrison's house in Esher, on May 28 and 29, 1968, including 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun', 'Glass Onion', 'Junk', 'Piggies' and 'Mean Mr. Mustard'.
Chart success and later reissue
The commercial result was remarkable. Anthology 3 became the third consecutive double album by the group to reach number one in the American chart, a feat that matched a record Donna Summer had set in the 1970s. The band's archive still had that kind of pull, thirty years after they stopped recording together. The set also carried a cappella version of 'Because', with the vocal arrangement by George Martin. The Anthology albums were later remastered and released on iTunes on June 14, 2011, both as separate albums and in the Anthology Collection box set. The set also earned a triple platinum certification from the RIAA, a sign of how eagerly fans still bought the band's archive material. That commercial success underlined the group's enduring place in American record shops.
The cover, painted by Klaus Voormann, turned the band's history into a wall of peeling posters and album covers. In Harrison's hair, a small updated photograph of Voormann himself appears, taken from the cover of Revolver. The collage made the past feel layered and close, full of images you had to lean in to see.
The rejected song did not disappear. 'Now and Then' was finished and released only in 2023, nearly three decades after it had been set aside. By then the decision made for Anthology 3 looked less like an ending than a postponement, one last Beatles song waiting for the technology and the will to bring it back.
'Now and Then' was finished and released only in 2023, nearly three decades after it had been set aside.