The 'Yellow Submarine' Record That Wasn't

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the soundtrack album for the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine in the United States - four days earlier than its British release.  And the reason you haven't heard much about this anniversary is because, as I once said before on this blog, it's less a Beatles record than it is a movie soundtrack in the truest sense of the term.  It contains the title song and "All You Need Is Love," plus four previously unreleased Beatles songs, on side one with George Martin's film score music on side two.   

I've already reviewed both the original 1969 soundtrack record and the 1999 Yellow Submarine Songtrack album, so I'm not here to do that.  But it's worth remembering that when the soundtrack album first came out, there was criticism toward the Beatles - but not only for the reason you might think.  Yes, the fans were forced to pay a full-album price for an LP with only four previously unreleased songs, but others also criticized the group for the fact that it had taken so long for the album to come out.  After all, the movie had had its world premiere in London six months earlier, and the "new" songs were in fact older than the movie.  One of them - George Harrison's "Only a Northern Song," his self-referencing comment on how he could write any old thing for Northern Songs and get it published just for filling his quota - was a Sgt. Pepper outtake.  And, as noted in my original review, the new material the Beatles contributed was sub-par due to their detachment from the Yellow Submarine movie during its production. 

There were three basic reasons why the Yellow Submarine soundtrack album didn't make it into record stores until January 1969.  The first reason was that the Beatles were primarily focused on getting the White Album out, and they wanted to wait until after that double album had been out for awhile to put out any new material from the Yellow Submarine movie.  A second reason was that George Martin wanted to re-record his film score music for the second side, which he did with his orchestra about ten days after sessions for the White Album wrapped up in October 1968.  (Martin later explained that it was "more convenient to do so, and no more costly since the original orchestra would have had to be paid twice anyway if we had used the soundtrack for the record.")  The third reason was likely the American market.  The Yellow Submarine movie, though released in Britain in July 1968, wouldn't come out in America until that November, and EMI, the group's record company and the distributor of their Apple label, likely wanted to tie the soundtrack album's release to the movie's U.S. opening as closely as possible.  The Yellow Submarine soundtrack album's U.S. release date, in fact, was two months to the day after the movie's American premiere; that the record came out in the U.S. four days before it did in the U.K. speaks volumes about how important the American market had become for the Beatles.  In the end, though, the soundtrack record was still considered something of a ripoff - because no one really wanted to hear film-score pieces such as "March of the Meanies" and "Pepperland Laid Waste."  John Lennon let it be known that he thought it had been a mistake on the part of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who negotiated the movie deal shortly before his death in 1967, to allow Martin to put his film music on the record.  "He recorded all this terrible sh-- that went out with our LP, you know," Lennon said later.  "If you check it out, it's a whole sort of joke. George Martin is on one side of our album. Oh, we didn't notice that."

Which brings me to the Yellow Submarine record that wasn't.

The Beatles briefly considered issuing the four new songs from the movie on an extended player a couple of months after the Yellow Submarine LP was released.  They thought it was only fair that the fans should able to get the movie's new songs without having to buy "Yellow Submarine" and "All You Need Is Love" twice along with film score music they didn't really want. EMI had floated the idea of releasing such an EP before the soundtrack album's release - after all, the Magical Mystery Tour songs had been released in EP form in Britain - but George Martin's work was contractually obligated to appear on the soundtrack record, and, besides, Capitol Records in the U.S. couldn't be bothered with issuing an extended player in the States, where EPs were never big sellers.  While an EP was considered a sophisticated single in Britain, it was seen as a poor man's album in America.  (The original idea was to issue an LP featuring all of the Beatles songs in the film as the Yellow Submarine Songtrack album does, not just six of them, but EMI thought that asking the fans to pay for a dozen-odd duplications made even less sense, so it is quite ironic that the Yellow Submarine Songtrack album was so well-received in 1999.)

With the criticism of the soundtrack LP still stinging even after they'd moved on to other things, the Beatles revisited the Yellow Submarine EP idea and had one Edward Gadsby-Toni, an employee at EMI Studios at Abbey Road, compile a master tape for a mono EP to run at LP speed with all of the four new songs from the movie plus the bonus addition of "Across the Universe," which had been finished in February 1968 but was being saved for a various-artists charity album for the World Wildlife Fund being compiled by British comedian and environmental activist Spike Milligan.  The master tape was banded up in March 1969, while John Lennon and Paul McCartney were off getting married to Yoko and Linda, respectively, and a sleeve (above) was even prepared for it.

The EP, of course, wasn't issued, and for good reasons.  After all, the Yellow Submarine soundtrack album had been on release for two months by March 1969, and it's safe to say that most Beatles fans already had it and wouldn't have felt the need to buy the same four songs all over again.  Moreover, the bonus inclusion of "Across the Universe" would have compelled them to go ahead and buy the EP anyway just to get one new song; also, releasing "Across the Universe" at that point wouldn't have been fair to Milligan, whose World Wildlife Fund charity compilation record was nine months away from release.  Also, it was an EP, which, as noted, was the very sort of record format that Americans wanted nothing to do with.  And, it was in mono, a sound that had fallen out of favor by 1969.

But the best reason the Beatles didn't release the Yellow Submarine EP was this:  Sometimes the best response to criticism is no response at all.  The foursome simply put the matter behind them and let the issue die; paying full price for an LP with only four new songs, in fact, wasn't much of an issue.  And the Yellow Submarine soundtrack has gotten a favorable reappraisal of sorts.  Pop critic David Gassman found George's "Only a Northern Song" and "It's All Too Much," Paul's "All Together Now" and John's "Hey Bulldog" quite interesting, writing, "No matter how you get them, though, the otherwise unavailable songs on this album ought to be part of any thinking Beatles fan's collection."  Alex Young of Consequence of Sound agrees to some extent, writing that "as a whole, Yellow Submarine is a delightful album, even if it's still a less-than-acceptable inclusion in the Beatles canon."  Even at their most slight, the Beatles could never disappoint us.  If they worried about whether this soundtrack album would have a negative impact on their reputation for offering value for money, they needn't have.

Incidentally, these mono masters were included on a special disc as part of a 2009 box set of all of the Beatles' monophonic masters.