Lost and found: tunes Beatles fans overlooked

Over a loping reggae backbeat and an achingly gorgeous melody, British rocker Graham Parker squeezes emotional sparks out of a lyric venting a man’s inability to articulate what he feels for the one he loves.

When I want to speak to you

It sometimes takes a week or two

To think of things I want to say to you

But words just stay on the tip of my tongue

It’s a long way from the muscular rock ‘n’ soul the firebrand singer-songwriter may be best known for, yet fully in tune with the intensely confessional aspect of his music as he’s evolved during the last 2 1/2 decades from Angry Young Man to Reflective Middle-Aged Artist.

The thing is, the song Parker offered Thursday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano wasn’t his own. Nor was it written by a fellow love-scarred songwriting veteran or some hot-tempered upstart, but by a couple of bright lads from Liverpool as they sat atop the pop world a dozen years before Parker cut his first album.

“Tip of My Tongue” is one of 17 songs that Parker, B-52’s singer Kate Pierson and Buffalo Tom singer-guitarist Bill Janovitz excavated for their revelatory new album, “From a Window -- Lost Songs of Lennon & McCartney.”

The idea of labeling anything John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote “lost” seems, some 40 years down the road, almost ludicrous. (Unreleased Buffalo Tom alternate takes, maybe.)

Yet the claim, if not completely accurate, is credible as far as the general public is concerned, in that none of the 17 was ever released by the Beatles.

Instead, they were handed over to acts (most also clients of Beatles manager Brian Epstein) that were fortunate enough to bathe in the Lennon-McCartney glow at a time when they could do no wrong.

That roster includes several performers (Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas, Cilla Black, Peter & Gordon, P.J. Proby) who dented the charts in the ‘60s, if only briefly, as well as some (the Strangers, Tommy Quickly) who escaped the notice of most pop music listeners who were around at the time, at least on this side of the Atlantic.

“Some joker the other night said, ‘Why don’t you do the not-lost songs of Lennon and McCartney instead? You’d probably bring in a few more people,’ ” Janovitz quipped to the one-third-capacity crowd. Answering his own question, he quickly added, “Well, we’re artists.... “

The brief tour, which also stops tonight at the Knitting Factory Hollywood, does carry the aura of a labor of love rather than a hollow bid to milk the Beatles’ memory.

Parker gave a case-in-point demonstration by prefacing his version of “Tip of My Tongue” with a snippet of Quickly’s recording, a kitschy treatment that makes the song seem a simple-minded throwaway.

His take, however, unearths a previously trapped poignancy. Pierson, her signature vocal yelp intact, adds dashes of B-52’s bounce and quirkiness to “Step Inside Love” and “I’m in Love.” Janovitz, meanwhile, applies his Parker-esque rasp to exceptional effect on the prescient egalitarianism of “Woman” and the stabbing vulnerability of “World Without Love.”

Awaiting the arrival of their dinners in a backstage lounge following a sound check Thursday, the three musicians from disparate backgrounds were in sync in their admiration for the quantity and quality of the pair’s songwriting.

“I don’t consider any of these second-rate Lennon-McCartney songs,” Pierson said. “I haven’t tired of singing any of them; they just seem to get better.”

The project was the brainchild of Jim Sampas, the thinking person’s producer who put together the 2000 album “Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska.’ ” “From a Window,” says tour manager Phil Hopkins, is “not a tribute project, but a restoration project.”

“It’s a tough sell at retail,” he added, and indeed, Nielsen SoundScan reports that “From a Window” has sold 2,000 copies since its release in March.

“Record stores don’t know what to do with something like this. ‘Should we file it under Beatles? No -- where do we put it?’ ”

Hopkins is vice president of RPH Productions, a music and video company that financed the album and tour and plans to issue a concert DVD to be taped at tonight’s performance.

A music fanatic who sings the praises of the rock-fan-adoring movie “High Fidelity” and uses his own mix of CDs to preface the Parker, Pierson & Janovitz shows, Hopkins considered it a no-brainer when Sampas suggested the “lost songs” concept.

“Yes, it’s difficult and some people just don’t get it,” he says. “But we pay the bills with the home video business; this is the kind of thing that keeps it fun.”

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‘Lost Songs of Lennon & McCartney’

Where: Knitting Factory, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

When: Tonight, 7:30 p.m.

Price: $20

Info: (323) 463-0204