Those Were Indeed The Days
If like me you grew up a Beatlemaniac, the release this month of Come and Get It: The Best of Apple Records, a compilation of recordings by the other artists signed to the Beatles’ indie label Apple is a revelation. We finally get to hear music we’ve been reading about for decades—Jackie Lomax’s “Sour Milk Sea” (1968), written and produced by George Harrison, for example, or the original studio version of Billy Preston’s “That’s The Way God Planned It” (1969), a song we know from the scintillating live performance at The Concert for Bangladesh.
Some of the material is very familiar (Badfinger’s hits, for example, or James’ Taylor’s debut single, “Carolina on My Mind”), but much of it is new to my ears: Trash, Brute Force, Lon & Derrek van Eaton, Doris Troy, etc. And it all starts off with Mary Hopkins’ beloved Klezmer-meets-The-Band smash hit from 1968, “Those Were the Days.”
