Pitchfork: Beatles Tape Thieves Sentenced

Sometimes you can't just let it be. When it comes to the Beatles, quite a few of us wish record company executives would just give up the lawsuits and get back to the task of remastering (and digitizing) those classic LPs. Recently, though, one of those lawsuits has actually produced material that might at least aid in the addition of bonus tracks to those elusive reissues.

In 2003, over 500 tapes from the 1969 "Get Back" sessions that produced Let It Be were discovered in a warehouse in the Netherlands after a man named Nigel Oliver attempted to sell the tapes (along with George Harrison's 1960 passport) for £250,000 to undercover police officers in Amsterdam. According to the London Times, on Friday, a London court ruled that Oliver, who is schizophrenic and was found unfit to plead at a previous hearing, should be placed under psychiatric supervision for two years. The BBC reports that another man, Colin Dillon, was also sentenced.

It is unknown who originally stole the tapes, which include 80+ hours of footage of the band playing over 200 songs, including covers of "Maggie May", "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Great Balls of Fire", as well as songs by Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. The sessions' original sound engineers identified the tapes as legitimate, having recognized their own voices among the arguments, banter and jokes of the band.

Hey, maybe we'll get a spoken word album-- a la Elvis or Robert Pollard-- out of this whole mess. We hear Ringo had a killer stand-up routine back in the day.