A couple of half-finished sketches got saved for Abbey Road (“Polythene Pam,” “Mean Mr. Songs that got worried to death on the album are played with a fresh one-take campfire feel, just acoustic guitars and handclaps. The Esher demos are a real treasure trove they mined it for years. They recline on leather cushions – George and Patti don’t have anything so square as chairs. On the tape, you can hear them relax in an informal setting – they sit around the living room, banging guitars or tambourines or shakers, breathing in the joss stick. John showed up with 15 tunes, more than Paul (7) or George (5). So they met at George’s hippie bungalow in the Surrey countryside, decorated in the grooviest Indian style. When the Beatles regrouped in England, they decided to get together and tape home demos on their own turf before stepping into Abbey Road – an innovation they’d never tried before and would never revisit. (The previous album with the mostest and bestest John songs was A Hard Day’s Night, four years earlier.) We wrote tons of songs in India.” John, the most distractible Beatle, had the hot streak of his life during his three months in Rishikesh, which is why the White Album is their most John-intensive record. As John Lennon said years later, “We sat in the mountains eating lousy vegetarian food and writing all these songs.

They also had no drug connections, which might help explain why they came up with their sturdiest tunes in years. They wrote these songs on retreat with the Maharishi in Rishikesh, India, a place where they had no electric instruments.

When the boys gathered at George’s pad in the last days of May – nobody’s sure of the exact date – they had excellent reason to feel cocky about their new material. Fifty years later, the Esher demos remain one of the Beatles’ strangest artifacts.

The beatles kinfauns demos download