The Beatle who vanished

He played with the most famous rock group in the world for 13 days…and then Jimmie Nicol walked out of his London flat and disappeared without a trace. In his new book, The Beatle Who Vanished, coming soon, Jim Berkenstadt uncovers the twisting trail of intrigue that has followed Jimmie Nicol since his disappearance in the late Sixties.

Originally a collector of The Beatles’ bootleg recordings, Berkenstadt collaborated with Scott Belmer in publishing Black Market Beatles: The Story Behind the Lost Recordings
, a guide to the underground market. Talking to Citypages, Berkenstadt said “Somebody had been to Apple Corps to meet with Neil Aspinall. They saw a copy of our book on his desk. A chapter in the book highlights the most significant black-market Beatle releases. The Beatles Anthology box set, released later, aligned closely with our recommended recordings. I think they had a reference there. When they hired me in the late 1990s, it proved to be true.”

The Beatles’ Apple Corps company hired Mr Rock’n’Roll detective Jim Berkenstadt to dig up audio, video and other artifacts for projects including LOVE, the Las Vegas Cirque de Soleil show, and the box set George Harrison: The Dark Horse Years 1976-1992. Among other things he was able to supply George and Giles Martin with 10 or 15 hours of spoken-word Beatles audio to be peppered into the audio mix for the Cirque du Soleil Love show in Vegas.

The website for his new book can be found here. Be sure to pay his blog a visit too, you won’t regret it!