FREE AS A BEATLE

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WELL, WHAT DID YOU EXPECT to find in the Abbey Road vaults--Al Capone? The hype preceding last week's debut of Free as a Bird, the Beatles' first new single since The Long and Winding Road in 1970, was so intense that anything short of the world premiere of Beethoven's 10th would have been anticlimactic. The clock on the Sunday edition of abc's Beatles Anthology didn't help: Two minutes to Free as a Bird ... one minute ... 15 seconds ... as if it were a countdown to a very special Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve. Coming at the end of two hours of good music and great vibes, this souped-up, no-muffler megaproduction of John Lennon's wispy little air made the surviving Beatles sound--and their longtime fans feel--very old indeed.

In the original 1977 demo tape, widely available on bootleg cassette, Lennon prefaces the tune by announcing, in the terse gutturals of a Brooklyn gangster, "Free. As a boid.'' That larkish spirit, absent in the new version, abounds on the two-CD album The Beatles Anthology (Apple/Capitol)--60 tracks of the group's compositions, cover recordings, outtakes, TV skits and reminiscences.

As the Sunday ABC show expertly evoked the Beatles' burgeoning popularity from 1958 to 1964, so this album produces all the evidence anyone will ever need of their growth during those years as musicians, singers and composers. Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison began the way a million other children of early rock 'n' roll did: by singing rough copies of their idols' numbers into clumsy tape recorders in their parents' rec rooms. Six years and two crucial recruits (Ringo Starr and producer George Martin) later, voila--meet the Beatles.

The big news on this album is the emergence of seven early, previously unreleased songs by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison in various collaborative permutations. But before anyone starts the countdown clock, be warned that there are no unpanned nuggets here. The five vocals and two instrumentals hold mainly archaeological interest, offering vague signposts to the musical trails the lads would later blaze. The first, In Spite of All the Danger, is a Paul-and-George ballad with John singing lead, the others singing doo-wop with a perversely rockabilly twist, and an anonymous pal banging out triplets on a piano. They imitate the Everly Brothers' tight harmonies on Hello Little Girl, Maurice Williams on Like Dreamers Do.

The most entertaining cuts show the Beatles' early gift for parody. You'll Be Mine, a Lennon-McCartney jape from 1960, suggests a Five Satins love song as it might have been tortured by a fourth-rate crooner in a Blackpool pub. John offers a basso-preposteroso spoken verse: "My darlin'...I looked into your eyes, and I could see a National Health eyeball..." The band brought the same proto-camp tone to covers of Three Cool Cats and Sheik of Araby, on a failed audition tape for Decca Records on New Year's Day, 1962. Raw and cheeky, the Beatles sound at best like a dance-hall novelty act. You wouldn't have signed them either.