Two reel-to-reel audio tapes featuring a soundboard recording of a Toronto Beatles concert may soon be up for sale. Piers Hemmingsen owns two high-quality audio tapes of one of the Fab Four's Toronto concerts.
Billboard reports the owner, Piers Hemmingsen, a Toronto-based Beatles historian and author of The Beatles in Canada, is looking to sell the recordings, which were made at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens on Aug. 17, 1965.
“I have never offered it for sale before,” Hemmingsen shares. “This is the best recording of any Beatles concert in Canada, if not North America, other than what was professionally recorded for The Beatles themselves.”
The reels include The Beatles’ full half-hour set, including 12 songs: “Twist and Shout,” “She’s A Woman,” “I Feel Fine,” “Dizzy
Miss Lizzie,” “Ticket To Ride,” “Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby,”
“Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Baby’s In Black,” “I Wanna Be Your Man,” “A Hard
Day’s Night,” “Help!” and “I’m Down.”
Hemmingsen says he has a copy of the concert on cassette, strictly for listening purposes, and while he’d like to keep it, he’s willing to sell it, as well. He didn’t say how much he wants for the recording, but Dan Muscatelli-Hampson, of U.K.-based music memorabilia and vinyl specialists Omega Auctions Ltd., estimated to Billboard it could be worth between $60,000 and $80,000.
So far Hemmingsen hasn’t put the reels on the market and says he’d prefer to sell it to Apple Corps, so Beatles fans may one day hear it.
“You can’t sit on a thing like this,” he says. “You want to share it with the world. On the other hand, there’s a commercial value to it and the only people that can release it are Apple.”
Hemmingsen plans to use the money toward printing his next two Beatles books, The Beatles in Canada: The Evolution 1964-1970, due out in September, and a follow-up, The Beatles In Canada: The Origins of Beatlemania!
He says, “But I think that if you were to put it into auction, you might be thinking around I would probably say something like 40 to 60 thousand pounds,” he adds. “So that’s maybe $60,000 to $80,000, but that’s a provisional auction estimate; I would not be surprised to see it selling upwards of $100,000.”
Muscatelli-Hampson says Hemmingsen “will always be better served putting it into auction, opening up that by a pool rather than just go for the first offer that he gets from Apple. [But] some people like to close that loop and get it back to the people who might be able to do something with it.”
Hemmingsen’s preference would be for Apple Corps to purchase the tapes and release the concert for all to hear. He hopes it will be made available to Beatles fans before the 60th anniversary of the Toronto concert next year.
“You can’t sit on a thing like this,” Hemmingsen says. “You want to share it with the world. On the other hand, there’s a commercial value to it and the only people that can release it are Apple. Somebody could buy the tape from me and enjoy it for themselves, but they could never release it. I have that in writing from Apple. I mean, there’s nothing I can do with it.”
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