Telling Their Own Story ‘Beatles Anthology’ Promises To Be Most Complete Project Done So Far On The Legendary Band From Liverpool

“They used us as an excuse to go mad, the world did, and then blamed it on us,” George Harrison observes a couple of hours into “The Beatles Anthology,” the television documentary to which Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr have been contributing reminiscences for the last four years.

Back together for the project - with John Lennon represented by excerpts from radio and television interviews he gave before he was murdered in 1980 - their idea was to tell the Beatles’ story in their own words.

The Beatles, after all, have been the most thoroughly dissected and analyzed musicians of the 20th century. They eclipse even Elvis Presley as the subject of books, documentaries and critical studies, not only because their work represents a creative peak in the history of popular music but also because they influenced the attitudes of a generation.

Now fixtures in our culture, they seemed to have leaped fully formed into the limelight. But their climb from obscurity in Liverpool to global fame was a matter of single-minded slogging. And as they approach their mid-50s, the time seemed right to put their memories on tape before they grew too murky or too encrusted in myth.

One thing that comes through in the documentary is the group’s ambivalence about Beatlemania. Yet if there is one place where that spirit lives, it is on Abbey Road, in the elegantly appointed Knightsbridge headquarters of Apple, the company the Beatles founded in 1967 to oversee the band’s business affairs.

Concert posters line a foyer wall that leads into the office, with its twostory wall of gold and platinum records and its reception area dominated by Richard Avedon’s 1968 psychedelic portraits. Right now, Apple’s staff of about five is putting into motion a plan meant to rekindle the world’s fascination with the Fab Four.

Apple’s six-hour documentary, which will be broadcast by ABC next Sunday at 9 p.m. and on Nov. 22 and 23, will be followed by home-video releases and a series of compact disks of previously unreleased music.

The Beatles have added to the allure of the occasion by contributing two “new” songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” which were created when the surviving Beatles added vocal harmonies, instruments and new lyrics to two of Lennon’s working tapes, supplied by his widow, Yoko Ono.

All this may net Apple $130 million next year, according to Forbes magazine, which recently listed the Beatles as the world’s best-paid rock band this year, a quarter century after their breakup.

But money aside, the attraction of the project for the Beatles is that after years of reading, hearing and seeing others tell their story, it allows them to tell it as they remember it. And their memories, as it turned out, proved as fallible as anyone else’s.

“Our memories were terrible,” McCartney said recently in New York. “We found that after all those years, none of us could remember the stories the same. And this is supposed to be the definitive, authorized thing.”

“But it’s no wonder we don’t remember it all,” he added, “In the ‘Anthology’ you can see the chaos we were going through. I think this is as definitive as it can be. In truth, there’s no such thing as definitive, from us or anyone else. That’s life. Life is not definitive.”

Actually, the facts of the Beatles’ story are well established, thanks largely to the exhaustive research of Mark Lewisohn, who uncovered the group’s paper trail, interviewed hundreds of people who worked with them between the time Lennon formed the Quarry Men in 1957 and the Beatles’ breakup in 1970, and listened to all the tapes in the Beatles’ library.

These efforts yielded “The Beatles Recording Sessions” and “The Complete Beatles Chronicle,” books that offered detailed accounts of the group’s working life.

There are times in the series when the Beatles get the documented facts wrong yet offer a perspective that goes beyond them. Still, this is hardly their first telling of this tale. They told it in thousands of interviews, and they cooperated with Hunter Davies on an authorized biography, “The Beatles,” in 1967 and 1968.

For a year, Davies interviewed the Beatles and their friends and relatives and sat in on composing and recording sessions. But his book was published two years before the breakup. And the Beatles had bowdlerized the manuscript, tearing out indiscreet stories of life on tour.

Were they more frank this time?

“We were pretty frank,” McCartney said, “but not brutally frank. I was particularly frank about the breakup. It was hard to talk about, and I realized that George and Ringo still didn’t know the facts from my side. But there were one or two subjects where we thought, ‘Do we really need that?”’

The title of the series was a subject for debate. The project had actually been on the drawing board since 1969, when it was proposed by Neil Aspinall, the head of Apple and a member of the Beatles’ inner circle since 1961, when he was hired as their road manager.

Aspinall assembled a 105-minute documentary called “The Long and Winding Road,” after a McCartney song. But his work mainly sat on a shelf while the Beatles sued one another and their record company, EMI.

When the suits were settled, in 1989, however, the project was revived, and in 1992 the production got under way. Soon thereafter, Harrison objected that the title was too closely associated with McCartney. He disliked the original ending for the same reason.

“There was an ending,” McCartney said, “that George didn’t like because he thought it was too McCartney. And it was. It had me ending the whole thing with ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Let It Be.’ The director was crying into his handkerchief, it was so emotional. But George said, ‘No, no, no, no - excuse me, we can’t have this Beatles thing suddenly become a McCartney bandwagon.’ So I had to bow to that, because he was right.”

Yet Harrison did not insist on expansive coverage of his own contribution.

“We were very aware of George’s songwriting,” said Bob Smeaton, the writer and series director, “and we had included a big section with John talking about George’s early songs, and Paul saying that Frank Sinatra had called George’s ‘Something’ his favorite Lennon-McCartney track. But George came in one day and watched it, and he turned around and said, ‘Why are you paying lip service to me?’ We thought he’d be really happy, but he said, ‘No, don’t build up my role.”’

If keeping things in perspective was a goal, so was jettisoning myths. As the documentary makes clear, many of those myths began with the Beatles themselves, particularly with Lennon, who sometimes embellished his war stories.

The other Beatles now deflate them freely. Lennon’s assertion that the Beatles had smoked marijuana at Buckingham Palace is dismissed by the others, who say they had a cigarette in the men’s room. And his claim that the group’s awkward 1965 meeting with Presley became a jam session is also roundly denied, with McCartney impishly suggesting that perhaps Lennon and Presley “jammed in secret, when we were out of the room.”

But they maintain the myths they cherish most. McCartney insists that the Beatles refused to visit the United States until they had a No. 1 hit. When they arrived in February 1964, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was indeed No. 1, but the contracts for the group’s American appearances had been signed weeks before that record was released.

Harrison obliquely contradicts McCartney when he remembers the telegram congratulating them on reaching the top of the American charts. “We were booked to go there,” he said, “so it was handy having a No. 1.”

Across town, at the Abbey Road Studios, where the Beatles recorded virtually all their music, George Martin, their producer from the start, and Geoff Emerick, an engineer at many of their sessions, have been assembling a series of compact disks that traces the group’s story but offers an alternative view of their career.

All this year, Martin has been wading through the roughly 400 hours of session tapes in EMI’s vaults, as well as concert, radio and television recordings and items from the Beatles’ own collections.

By including alternative takes of familiar songs, as well as what Martin calls “eavesdropping bits of the Beatles making mistakes and fooling around,” the disks let listeners hear the Beatles turning their rough drafts into polished recordings.

Even failed experiments are included. When a 1963 performance of “One After 909” falls apart after McCartney tries to embellish his bass line, Lennon is heard asking: “What are you doing? Are you out of your mind?”

“When we listen to some of the outtakes now,” Starr said, “we think, ‘Oh, that wasn’t bad. Did we do that? And why did we change it?’ Usually the reason we changed things is because we were a singles band. We thought, singles, singles, singles, and if it was in another groove, we dismissed it. Now we’ve grown up, and we’re not dismissing everything.”

So what’s in this for the Beatles? The money’s not bad, but they could make even more if they accepted the $100 million reportedly offered for a tour, a prospect McCartney called “unseemly.”

Letting their version of the Beatles story compete in a Beatles-hungry marketplace was certainly an attraction, and the CDs compete directly with a thriving business in bootleg recordings. The spotlight that “Anthology” will throw on the Beatles might even help jump-start their solo careers.

But Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ publicity officer on and off since 1964 and the author of several books that touch on his experiences with the group, offers a more poetic view: “What I want for this ‘Anthology’ is for people to be reminded that it did happen, that it was as big as we thought and that it was amply justified because here is the music. This was the 20th century’s greatest romance.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: 1. What was the name of the basement club in Liverpool where the Beatles got their start as performers? 2. Which Beatle relative provided the inspiration for both “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and “Hey Jude?” 3. Which Beatle coined the titles to “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Eight Days a Week?” 4. Who was the first Beatle to quit the band, only to be lured back a week later after the resignation was kept quiet? 5. What song was composed by Paul McCartney when he was 16, but was not recorded by the Beatles until 1966?

Answers 1. The Cavern. 2. John’s son, Julian Lennon. 3. Ringo Starr. 4. Ringo Starr 5. “When I’m Sixty-Four.”