Goodbye - McCartney’s demo enhanced

In 2000, John Weber and John Camatelfoo (both guys hail from a Beatles fan forum) took me up on a project to augment unreleased Beatles demos.  They decided to enhance Paul Mccartney’s 1968 demo ‘Goodbye’.  This was a song that Paul gave away to Mary Hopkins.

I loved the results - though as John Weber acknowledged, the drums could have been better.  And with the resources and time, real horns would have been nice.  It’s still exceptional work.  John Camatelfoo’s Beatlesque harmonies are legendary. And he doesn’t fail to disappoint on this track.  In all my years, I’ve never heard better sounding fab four type backing harmonies.  It’s as if John and George are backing Paul on this track.

And thanks Robert (allabest) for putting together this excellent video.

John Weber says: “Will’s thread, “Multitracker’s Anonymous”, was about a project where rmb’ers take some rare and unreleased Beatles songs and demos, and fill in the missing gaps, and add their own bits to them. Well, I took on Paul’s 1968 demo, “Goodbye”, which the Beatles never released. It didn’t even find it’s way on to the “Anthology” album, which I find really odd, as it is a *beautiful song*. Paul’s voice on the demo is sung *perfectly*.

It is for this reason why I decided to add overdubs to this gem. It’s just Paul singing with his acoustic guitar- nothing else. On it’s own, it’s still an awesome “unplugged” tune. But after repeated listenings,
you can see where the song begs for a drumbeat, and some other instruments to make it a bit more adventurous. So that’s what I did. I added some instruments that I felt would have been what The Beatles
would have used around that time. It was 1968, and the White Album favored a horn section (even on intimate acoustic tunes like “Mother Nature’s Son”). I took this theory when I added parts to Paul’s acoustic
“Goodbye”

I am a perfectionist in every aspect of my life, but with this particular song, I cranked it out in a few hours, simply because I felt I didn’t have to be perfect- after all, we are in the baby stages of a very good thing that Will is proposing. It took me longer to upload the song than it did to *record* the damn thing.  =)

I concentrated much more on the instrumentation than the percussion.  It’s pretty hard to make year 2000 technology sound like 1968 technology.  Even the Free as a Bird and Real Love tunes sound like they were tampered with, and they used some of the best producers in the business. I guess I could have made the drums sound less brighter, and the only way to duplicate a horn section would be to hire a *real* horn section.  Since this was strictly a little fun project, I didn’t pull out all the stops, and used what I had available to me.

I am not a drummer, and played the whole percussion section with my fingers on a cheap Casio keyboard where each key represents a different drum sound. Example- the bass drum is actually an “E” note on my keyboard.

It is what it is. I only spent a few hours on it, and if I would have spent more time, it would have sounded like an over-produced disaster.   It was a labor of love. Paul’s demo deserves more recognition.

Camatelfoo’s harmonies were the icing on the cake.”

John Camatelfoo adds: “John Weber sent me a file of this song with the drums, piano and horns added and asked me to sneak in some vocal stuff…so I did. This was in the pre-ipod days of dial-up, and I think we spent more time waiting for the track to download/upload than we spent on any musical contribution”