The Fab Faux play at the Michigan Theater on Saturday.

Joe Sharp | For AnnArbor.com

On the other hand, the Fab Four never played their later records, like “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” live.

That’s where the Fab Faux comes in, as it did Saturday at the Michigan Theater, to recreate on stage the music the Beatles never performed live.

Was it an improvement? Certainly not. In fact, it’s kind of hard to see the point in the entire enterprise.

But we’ll get to that.

Bassist and bandleader Will Lee and the Fab Faux bring a trainspotting sense of devotion to re-creating —and we do mean re-creating—the Beatles’ later works that the original band never performed live after giving up touring in 1966.

That means, on Saturday, every cowbell clank, every tom-tom fill, every guitar lick was just exactly where you expected to hear it. And since these are songs you’ve heard countless times, you would have missed these details had they not been there.

“This is our classical music,” Lee said at one point. “Everything has to be just so.”

And it was. The thing is, that worked both for and against the band as in its painstaking quest to get everything right.

When it worked, it was inspired. Take for instance how the band played the last few bars of “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” before launching directly into “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”—just exactly like it appears on “The Beatles” LP. Or the plaintive “Oh and … “ that leads into the chorus on “This Boy,” which was one of a small handful of mid-era tunes the band covered during its first set. Or the feedback-drenched chord that opens “I Feel Fine.”

The list goes on.

Other highlights from the somewhat randomized first set were semi-obscure gems like “Not a Second Time” and “Baby, You’re a Rich Man,” the B-side to 1967’s “All You Need is Love.”

But in its attention to detail, the band occasionally lost the forest for the trees, as it did on “Across the Universe” and “Old Brown Shoe,” on which the band was so focused on the details, they lost the spirit of the songs.

After a lengthy intermission, which allowed the hammy Lee time for a costume change, the band returned to perform “Sgt. Pepper” in its entirety.

Of course the band devotedly found every nuance in every song, recreating the bombast of the title track, the lilting feel of “When I’m Sixty-Four” and even George Harrison’s sitar parts on “Within You, Without You.”

The thing is, the whole affair eventually felt a little like a laboratory experiment rather than a concert. Sound-modeling amps had to be constantly programmed to mimic specific parts. Guitar changes were frequent, even in mid-song.

All of which raises the question: If you aren’t going to improve upon the original, then what’s the point in doing these songs live? After all, part of the reason the Beatles stopped performing live was because they didn’t want to try to re-create them on stage.

To their credit, the Fab Faux isn’t a costume act like Beatlemania or 1964 or countless other “tribute” bands. But in a strange way, that worked against the band on Saturday.

When you’re listening to an essentially cloned version of, say, “A Day in the Life,” it’s a little jarring to see John Lennon’s part being sung by drummer Rich Pagano. And you definitely expect the left-hander to be playing the bass, a la Paul McCartney, rather than rhythm guitar and singing a George Harrison part.

In the end, of course, if the Fab Faux wasn’t so good at mimicking the original band’s sound, none of it would matter. In that sense, on Saturday, they were almost victim to their own abilities.