Meet the Beatles You Thought You Knew -- Tonight!

Everybody knows about the Beatles, right? Four guys, Liverpool, took the world by storm in the 1960s. Eight years, 13 albums, three movies, billion-dollar song earnings, countless books, documentaries as well as spin-off and tribute bands from the Plastic Ono Band to Wings to, well, Sonoma County's own .

Even though they broke up in 1970, it's almost impossible to have missed the impact of John, Paul, George and Ringo. Still, admit it, you've been wondering what the program is all about, the one coming to the Tuesday, Feb. 7 at 7:30 p.m.

I called composer/producer Scott Freiman this week to find out what he plans to tell us that we don't already know.

"I'm a second-generation Beatle fan," he said when I reached him by phone. He was in Philadelphia, where he was preparing for a presentation. "By the time I got into them they had already broken up. My first introduction to them was the famous red and blue Greatest Hits albums that came out in '73.

"I was a classically trained pianist," continued the 49-year old musician, "and I really didn't have a lot of exposure to music beyond classical. But when I found the Beatles everything changed."

With his degrees in computer science and music composition, Freiman's own original music has been performed at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, and his television work includes contributing music to the BBC/Discovery Channel Emmy®-award winning series Life, and mixing all the music for the series. He also owns his own recording studio and does online video training in professional audio software.

His interest in the Beatles thus blends his professional and technical skills with his appreciation as a fan. "Because I'm a composer/producer I'm always curious about what makes that [particular] sound, and why did they choose this chord instead of that chord, and so forth.

"Once I got into the whole world of composing and production and understood more about how music was created, I could then go back and take another look at some of the stuff that the Beatles were doing, and figure about how it worked."

In fact he defines deconstruction as "taking apart something to see what makes it tick," and he brings his technical skills to bear on his lectures, which he started just a couple years ago after encouragement from friends and colleagues who appreciated his "little talks" about the Beatles.

Now he has several such multi-media presentations, and is kicking off his first West Coast tour with several bookings from L.A. to Nevada City in the next couple weeks. As well as "Deconstructing Sgt. Pepper" his other lectures include "A Trip Through Strawberry Fields," "Looking Through a Glass Onion" about the White Album, and "Tomorrow Never Knows." A schedule and list of his presentations can be found on his website, beatleslectures.com.

"What's interesting is when you study classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven," he said, "you have 'sketches,' and you can study the sketches to find out what kind of decisions were made as they were composing. But in the popular music world you don't have those sketches, the Beatles didn't read or write music. So what you have is an audio trail, you have recordings.

"Whenever you get access to those recordings you can hear early versions of the songs, you can hear where they've changed lyrics, you can hear how the songs came to life."

As a result, his shows use lots of rare audio, some from bootlegs and studio outtakes he's picked up at Beatles conventions and elsewhere, and some he's "reverse engineered" in his own studios by using computer technology. "I'll  isolate certain tracks so you can hear the bass or you can hear the guitar or the keyboard. I'll talk about some of the effects they used and demonstrate that with audio examples."

Along the way, Freiman's considerable researches in printed history as well as recorded material has found that "there are an awful lot of mistakes which get perpetuated along the line. It's always fun to uncover those and say to people, 'You always thought X was happening, but let me show you what's really happening."

For instance, surely that's lead guitarist George Harrison playing the Indian-influenced solo on his own composition "Taxman,"  right? Wrong.

"Paul is playing guitar on 'Taxman'," Freiman told me.

"Harrison was having a little trouble coming up with a good guitar solo. So George Martin suggested that Harrison let Paul have a try, and Paul came out with this wailing guitar solo. Harrison liked it because it was Indian flavored -- and it was his song, and it was going to lead off the album, so he said 'Sure, Paul, take it.' "

Although "Taxman" is on the Revolver album, not Sgt. Pepper, similar insights are sure to shed new light on the recording process and the talent of the four musicians and their producer, George Martin.

During my brief talk with him, Freiman said again and again how much fun these shows are for him as well as the audience. "The people who are coming are all ages, from five and six year olds up to people in their 80s. I've got total Beatle fanatics who know everything about the Beatles, and even some people who kind of missed the whole Beatle thing are kind of curious what it's all about."

The show at the Raven will last about two hours with an intermission, and there will be time for questions at the end of the program.

"Many people who come to my shows don't know what it's like to work in a studio, and even if they do they may not know what it was like in the 1960s. So I can give them a little glimpse into that world, and show them what it was like to be working in Studio Two at Abbey Road, and how they came up with this music that 50 years later we're still listening to."

Tickets are available online or at the door for only $15. Or, if you're 64, just $6.40. If you don't know why that is, you owe it to yourself to go.