Find­ing the Best of the Bands on the Bea­t­les Label

Ringo thought it would make a great birth­day present for his wife, and Sina­tra agreed. Apple’s sec­ond sin­gle, though, was unfor­tu­nately a world­wide smash: “Those Were the Days.”

Ingenue folksinger Mary Hop­kin was a Paul McCart­ney dis­cov­ery, and if Bea­t­les fans were shocked that he’d pro­duced such a sen­ti­men­tal piece of schlock, they hadn’t been pay­ing atten­tion. But sen­ti­men­tal­ity was in the air, as was obvi­ous from another early sin­gle with which McCart­ney had noth­ing to do, by a Welsh band called The Iveys.

The Iveys’ “Maybe Tomor­row” was a flop every­where except Hol­land, but Apple believed in the band, changed its name to Badfin­ger and had a huge hit a year later with “Come and Get It,” writ­ten and pro­duced for the band by McCartney.

Apple Records released 31 albums and 52 sin­gles from younger acts it hoped would flour­ish. Many are sam­pled on Come And Get It: The Best of Apple Records, a col­lec­tion of the label’s remas­tered and re-released tracks.

Some of the sin­gles Apple put out defy logic: Why would The Bea­t­les release a sounda­like cover ver­sion of “Golden Slum­bers” and “Carry That Weight” from the Abbey Road album by a Scot­tish band called White Trash — hastily changed to Trash after protests from radio and retail­ers? At least John Lennon was dis­play­ing a sense of humor when he had the com­pany release a cover of “Give Peace a Chance.”

The engag­ingly weird rewrite was also from an odd source: The Hot Choco­late Band, which later became Hot Choco­late and had smash after smash, includ­ing the mem­o­rable “You Sexy Thing.” Another odd release was “Sat­ur­day Night Spe­cial,” by vet­eran Cajun accor­dion­ist Lionel Cormier’s band The Sun­down Play­boys, who’d been going at it since 1945.

The story was that Cormier’s teenage son heard that Apple was look­ing for acts and mailed the band a copy of the sin­gle, and that either George Har­ri­son or Ringo Starr decided to release it. It was their label, and they were hav­ing fun with it, so why not?

Well, one rea­son was that nobody was really look­ing after the money, and that the record­ing stu­dio they were build­ing was eat­ing up a lot of it. They were also hir­ing expen­sive help: Phil Spec­tor was hired to scout Amer­i­can tal­ent out of Apple’s New York office, as well as to ruin what became the Let It Be album. There was an upside to this, though: the track “Try Some Buy Some,” prob­a­bly the best Apple sin­gle that never saw a full album.

At once grandiose and gor­geous, the George Har­ri­son song gets great pro­duc­tion from Spec­tor, not least because the vocal­ist is his wife Veron­ica, of The Ronettes.

Apple Records out­lived The Bea­t­les as a group, but the label’s best-known releases were albums. Apple set the pat­tern for inde­pen­dent and artist-owned labels, and as a few of the sin­gles on Come and Get It show, it was more than just an indulgence.