Forgotten Beatles reunion? Forget it

No, the Beatles didn’t secretly reunite in Los Angeles in 1976, but that didn’t stop a story to that effect from setting the pop world abuzz earlier this week.

Radio stations, newspapers, websites and other outlets jumped on a Tuesday report in the New York Daily News about an auction website offering to sell a tape supposedly recorded by the Fab Four six years after their acrimonious breakup.

But even though the story has been discredited by representatives of Paul McCartney; John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono; and the studio where the secret recording session was supposed to have taken place, odds are the rumor won’t die.

It’ll just hibernate, then resurface in a few months or years with a few of the details altered.

Why? Because fans want it to be true and probably always will.

“Even though the Beatles can no longer reunite, the mere thought that they might have reunited at some point before John’s passing, and that people could listen to it, gets people very excited,” says Jim Berkenstadt, author of the 1995 book “Black Market Beatles: The Story Behind Their Lost Recordings.”

“An entire generation grew up and loved the Beatles,” he notes. “They’re part of the fabric of our lives. There’s always a desire to try and rekindle our youth, and that’s one way our generation has tried to do that.”

Berkenstadt recalls the same tape, with a strikingly similar back story, popping up two or three years ago in an EBay auction. It didn’t sell. He researched what each of the former Beatles was doing at that time, he said, “and concluded that [a reunion] was a physical impossibility.”

Shortly after putting the tape on his auction house website, Moments in Time (www .momentsintime.com), curator Gary Zimet told The Times, “My gut feeling is that it’s perfectly fine” and added that he expected it to fetch at least a half-million dollars. But he hasn’t put it up for auction. Zimet says he’ll take offers from private bidders before doing so.

They’ll be vying for a tape that is blank, but the box and label from the very real Davlen Sound Studios look tantalizing to Beatles fans.

Although the name “The Beatles” is not on it, the performers are listed as “John, Paul, George, Rich,” the initials of the session’s producer are GM (alluding to longtime Beatles producer George Martin) and the engineer is listed as GE (corresponding to another Beatles stalwart, Geoff Emerick).

The website’s listing further states: “Len Kovner, former co-owner of Davlen Studios, can independently confirm all of the above, as can the engineers who were then present.”

Just one glitch: Kovner says it’s all a fairy tale.

“No sessions of this type ever took place at Davlen Sound Studios

Ono, through spokesman and longtime family friend Elliot Mintz, said Wednesday that at the time of this supposed hush-hush reunion, she and Lennon were holed up in their New York City apartment, caring for their 1-year-old son, Sean.

And on Friday, McCartney spokesman Geoff Baker said simply, “This story is not true.”

Beatles historian Martin Lewis, who produced the DVD edition of “A Hard Day’s Night” and is associate producer of the new DVD “The Ed Sullivan Shows Featuring the Beatles,” says, “This whole ‘secret reunion session’ story is one of the crudest attempts at a scam I’ve ever seen.

“The biggest thing about this is that if they had done it, word would have leaked out,” Lewis added, noting that in 1976 reunion hopes were high and rumors were rampant. “It would have been impossible for it to remain a secret.”

So why would anyone give this story the time of day?

“To a lot of us younger fans, they were virtual parent figures,” Lewis says. “And when they broke up, it was as though your own mum and dad were getting a divorce. And it was a very bitter divorce, with John and Paul sniping at each other for years. So every prospective reunion rekindled an emotional yearning within fans. We were like the kids in that Disney film ‘The Parent Trap’: ‘If we could only get Mum and Dad back together again, wouldn’t it be wonderful?’ ”