The best of the Beatles — and the songs they never played live.

The Beatles were a touring band for four years. They played their last ticketed concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on 29 August 1966, and after that they never toured again — one rooftop in Savile Row in January 1969, five songs, and that was the end of it. Almost everything most people picture when they picture the Beatles was written and recorded after they had already stopped playing live.

They stopped for good reasons. The screaming had grown louder than the amplifiers, so they could not hear themselves on stage. More importantly, the records had outgrown what four men could reproduce standing in a row: orchestras, backwards tape, harmonium and sitar, a forty-piece crescendo, layer on layer of overdubs built in a room with no audience in it. The band went into the studio and never came out.

So the strange fact at the center of the Beatles’ catalog is this: Sgt. Pepper was never performed. Neither was The White Album. Neither was Abbey Road. “A Day in the Life,” “Hey Jude,” “Something,” “Come Together,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” — not one paying audience ever saw the Beatles play any of them. The greatest run of records in popular music has no live history at all.

Newspaper Taxi was built for that gap. It is not a Cavern-era recreation with wigs and collarless suits, and it is not four people approximating a quartet. It is a band assembled specifically to perform the material the Beatles themselves never took to a stage — which means enough musicians to cover the parts, arrangements worked out from the records rather than from other people’s live versions, and the discipline to play the studio years straight instead of simplifying them into something easier.

That is a harder brief than it sounds. “Strawberry Fields Forever” is two different takes in two different keys and tempos spliced together. “A Day in the Life” needs an orchestra to fall apart on cue. “Because” is nine vocal tracks. Getting these songs onto a stage is an act of arrangement as much as performance, and it is the whole reason the band exists.

The early years are in the show too, of course — the singles that made them, played the way they were played when they still had to be played. But the arc runs forward from there through the studio records and out into the solo catalogs, which is where the story actually ends.

Newspaper Taxi anchors the New Orleans Beatles Festival every July, the second-oldest Beatles festival in America, and tours the rest of the year. It carries the thing that makes the Festival work: musicians who play this catalog year-round rather than once a summer, on stages where New Orleans players of Deacon John’s caliber sit in with them. No wigs, no accents — just the songs, at the level they deserve.

Booking

The touring Beatles production in this series, with a full Rolling Stones tribute available on the same booking — one band, both catalogs, one travel bill.