- The Beatles – The Capitol Albums Vol. 1 (2004)

The Beatles – The Capitol Albums Vol. 1 (2004)

The short gray days of winter in the Midwest were recently made brighter by the arrival of this colorful CD box set that contains the first four Beatles’ albums in their original US versions. Here’s a little background for the non-obsessed fan….

Up until the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, the Beatles’ albums released in the US by Capitol Records bore little resemblance to the albums released in England by EMI. The reasons for this include: (1) a British emphasis upon the e.p., a 7-inch record that help four tracks and played at 33 & 1/3rd, a format that never caught on in the US market. (2) British labels would NOT put hit singles on an LP, believing it was rude to ask people to buy the same songs twice (a trait definitely not shared by US record labels). (3) It was common for the average UK LP release to contain 14 or 15 songs, the US version usually held a maximum of 11 or 12.

As a result, Capitol regularly removed tracks from the British albums, added hit singles and e.p. cuts, and produced records that just don’t exist outside the US. However, the lion’s share of the millions of LPs The Beatles sold in their rise to the top of the charts were sold in the US and there is a large population of fifty-something year old Beatle fans whose music collections grew from the seeds of those early Capitol LPs which have never had a legitimate CD release until now.

While Robert Freeman’s classic black and white photo of the four Beatles, the left sides of their faces in shadow, is the same for the US Meet The Beatles as it is for the UK With The Beatles the differences are quite interesting. With The Beatles is the perfect title for the 14 track UK album. It is a good overview of what you would hear had you been lucky enough to catch this band in its pre-Beatlemania tour of clubs and small halls. But Meet The Beatles is a perfect title for the US debut. By dropping the five cover versions and adding three more original compositions, the Capitol album became the perfect introduction to the growing songwriting skills of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

It’s difficult to overestimate the importance of Capitol’s The Beatles’ Second Album when it arrived on the shelves in 1964. In its brief post-Elvis (in the Army), post-Jerry Lee Lewis (in seclusion with his 13 year old bride), post-Chuck Berry (in prison) doldrums pop music was dominated by facile crooners like Fabian, Dion, Frankie Avalon and Paul Anka. The music of the great early rock and roll performers like Little Richard and Fats Domino was reaching a mostly white teenage audience in the filtered down form of cover versions done by Pat Boone (this really is what music will sound like in Hell). What The Beatles’ Second Album did was to rip away the white sheets and reveal (and revel in) the original sources of songs like “Roll Over Beethoven” “You Really Got a Hold On Me” “Devil In Her Heart” “Please Mr. Postman” “Long Tall Sally” and “Money.” In an America where “race mixing” was still against the law in more than a couple states this pop record was as revolutionary as anything the Clash did fifteen years later. It also contained their massive hit of the time, “She Loves” you, the only song I know that begins with its chorus, exploding from small transistor radios across the US.

The third album in The Capitol Albums Vol. 1 is the collection Something New, which is the most cut up and tossed together of this batch of four. Capitol didn’t have the license to release the soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night (United Artists wound up with that album) but it did have the rights to all the Beatles’ music in the film except the title song which it combines with five new single and e.p. tracks (“Things We Said Today” “Any Time At All” “When I Get Home” “Slow Down” “Matchbox”) and the odd German language version of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” resulting in a record that, while it’s a bit scattered, is also very, very good.

Beatles ’65 (though also released in 1964) lifts eight of the fourteen tracks off the British Beatles For Sale, adds “I’ll Be Back” and the powerful single “She’s a Woman / I Feel Fine” while dropping all the cover versions but two Carl Perkins songs (for Ringo & George to sing) resulting in a really strong LP with its own unique identity.

The real good news here for Beatles fans is the sound. The Beatles catalog was mastered for compact disc in 1987 and has never been redone despite the significant improvements in CD sound since that time. There is a bit of controversy over the echo that Capitol added on some vocals, but expert sources seem to agree that only 9 tracks are affected across the four albums and the vast improvement in overall sound more than makes up for it. As a major bonus, each album is on each disc twice, first in stereo, then in mono (which makes up for the relative brevity of the Capitol LPs and takes advantage of the CD length). This represents the first CD stereo release of all the early material.

My only criticism has to do with the packaging of the version I own (I’ve heard of a second, smaller version), a rather thin cardboard slipcase, with fairly awful art work, holds a dual pocket container that holds, on one side, the four discs in mini-LP sleeves reproducing the original LP art and, on the other, a booklet with interesting notes and photos on the other. It is a major challenge to remove anything from this without everything falling on the floor. So be careful, still, that aside, the days seem longer and brighter already.

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The Beatles – The Capitol Albums Vol. 1 (2004)

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