The Beatles: The Capitol Albums Vol. 2
By: Stan Denski
The speed with which material poured from The Beatles in 1964-1966 seems like science fiction in the era of the “new record every 6 years” schedule kept by most modern performers. That the vast majority of this material was of A+ quality AND exhibited a constant growth and maturation is also still hard to wrap one’s brain around. Two things always come to mind when I listen to The Beatles in 2006. First, the simple fact that, after the whole thing had collapsed and all that remained were rooms full of lawyers, not a single one of the four young men had yet turned thirty years old. Second, that the period that represents the height of their creative powers (1965-1968) may well have been the last time that the most popular thing was also the best thing. But I digress…. The second release in this Capitol series of reissues of the Beatles' American LPs contains the albums Capitol released in 1965: The Early Beatles, Beatles VI, Help!, and Rubber Soul. Though Capitol was owned by EMI, the Beatles’ UK label, they initially turned down The Beatles and refused to release their early material in the US market. This explains why so much of the early material is found on small regional labels like Vee-Jay, Swan and Tolie. Some of that material had been collected for the 1964 LP, The Beatles’ Second Album, most of what was left is on The Early Beatles. Five of the album’s twelve tracks are Lennon-McCartney originals, the rest are covers of some relatively obscure R&B and soul songs of the era. Even if the record doesn’t gel nearly as well as Beatles VI, it’s hard to fault an album with tracks like “Love Me Do” “Twist and Shout” “Please Please Me” “Anna” “Chains” and “Ask Me Why.” The US soundtrack to the first Beatles’ film, A Hard Days Night, had been released on United Artists in the US (with some material on the Capitol LP Something New). By the time of their second film, Help!, their US label was entirely on board and the US version of Help! was designed as a regular soundtrack collection of both songs and incidental music from the film. The UK version is an actual Beatles’ album with 14 new songs – the excess would help Capitol create the non-UK releases that followed. Beatles VI can be viewed as a hodgepodge collection of tracks pulled from UK albums - six songs from Beatles For Sale ("Kansas City," "Eight Days a Week," "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party," "Words of Love," "What You're Doing," "Every Little Thing"), adding to the mix a couple of new songs that would later show up on the UK version of Help! ("You Like Me Too Much," "Tell Me What You See"), a pair of Larry Williams covers ("Bad Boy," "Dizzy Miss Lizzie"), and "Yes It Is," originally released as the B-side to "Ticket to Ride." However, like 1964’s Beatles 65, Beatles VI hangs together extremely well as an album with its own identity and personality. It remains one of my favorite of their early albums. Beatles VI is a near-perfect portrait of the Fab Four in the last days of the peak of Beatlemania. Rubber Soul is the album that announced the start of The Beatles most creative and music-changing period. The screaming 12-14 year-old pre-teen and teen fans of early Beatlemania are now 17 going on 21. Where it’s almost impossible to hear “I Want To Hold Your Hand” or “She Loves You” without hearing echoes of the accompanying screams, it’s equally impossible to imagine screams in “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” or “In My Life.” If you’ve seen the Ed Sullivan Show appearance where Lennon introduces McCartney who takes the stage alone and plays “Yesterday” you may recall how the occasional scream seemed so completely out of place and how the audience seemed to not know what to do. While most music critics and Beatles’ aficionados argue for the superiority of the UK album versions over the US catalog, all but the most rabid Anglophile will agree that the US version of Rubber Soul is the exception to that rule. The US version has 12 songs, the UK 14. The US album also has two tracks not found on the UK release. The first of these, “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” opens the record perfectly. The US album is unified by an overall acoustic character. The Bob Dylan influence that’s beginning to be visible on Help! is flowering on Rubber Soul. To this day hearing the UK version open with the electric jangle of “Drive My Car” just sounds wrong. By also removing “Nowhere Man” “If I Needed Someone” and “What Goes On” and adding the quite beautiful “It’s Only Love” you get a far more condensed and unified masterwork as a result. The great 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. 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). My only criticism, as with the first collection, has to do with the packaging of the long box edition. The thin cardboard slipcase and marginal art work has only slightly been improved. Now, instead of the discs immediately falling to the floor when you remove the inner box from the outer, the mini-LP sleeves (with slightly better printing) are next to impossible to remove and replace. In theory at least, the 3rd and last in the Capitol Series should contain a miniature Holy Grail in the form of a remastered Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in it’s original mono mix. We can only hope. |
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