Every US Beatles album compiled by Capitol Records
In November 1963, with The Beatles the hottest ticket in Britain and pretty much anywhere else on the eastern side of the Atlantic, the band’s record company began to exert serious pressure on a subsidiary they owned in the US to start promoting their star act. Capitol Records finally acquiesced but did little of note that actually made any difference.
Ironically, it was various negative news reports about the phenomenon of Beatlemania on American TV that exposed the group to a broader audience stateside. And it was DJ Carroll James in Washington DC who started playing their latest UK single, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, having obtained a British pressing by Parlophone Records by herself. Capitol couldn’t have had less to do with the sudden musical invasion that soon followed, sweeping all before it, but of course, they wanted their slice of the pie. A big chunk of the pie, in fact.
When ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ became the most requested song in the history of American radio, Capitol hurriedly pressed a million copies of the single in record time and released it in time for the new year. By mid-January, it was a nationwide chart-topper. Unfortunately for Capitol, they’d already passed up the rights to 16 other Beatles songs the previous summer, including the group’s biggest-selling single in Britain ‘She Loves You’.
14 of these tracks were released on the first US Beatles album, Introducing… The Beatles, by VeeJay Records on January 10th, 1964. ‘She Loves You’ and its B-side ‘I’ll Get You’ had already been released by Swan Records in 1963 but was poorly promoted, yet it still reached number one the following spring, during the first tsunami of adulation the group received from their American fans.
To remedy this problem, Capitol simply pretended Introducing… The Beatles didn’t exist and promoted their record Meet the Beatles! as the first album the Fab Four released stateside. It was released ten days after VeeJay’s album, but Capitol held the trump card. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was their album’s lead track, and they’d managed to obtain the rights for the rollicking ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, which served as the single’s B-side. They simply sliced five songs off the tracklist of the UK Beatles album With the Beatles and parked their single, its B-side, and its British B-side ‘This Boy’ at the beginning.
While this new track listing is significantly detrimental to the second half of the record, nobody took any notice. Meet the Beatles! quickly became one of the biggest-selling albums in US chart history, and inspired everyone from the Byrds to Kurt Cobain in their future musical endeavours. And so began the butchery of Beatles album after Beatles album.
How many albums did Capitol change?
It was standard practice in the United States at the time to release albums with a maximum of 12 tracks on them, but The Beatles released records in the UK with 13 or 14 tracks. Capitol saw this difference as an opportunity to repackage the band’s songs into a larger number of albums with fewer songs on each one.
They also used the Beatles movies A Hard Day’s Night and Help! as a chance to remove half the group’s recordings from the accompanying albums, replacing them with orchestral soundtrack music from the films. And, for good measure, they reappropriated any songs which had been standalone singles in the UK to be extra album tracks.
Out of this mess, they created two additional LPs in 1964, The Beatles’ Second Album and Something New, the latter of which bizarrely ends with the German-language version of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. Beatles ‘65 is a near-enough approximation of the British release Beatles for Sale, except with the single ‘I Feel Fine’ and its B-side squeezed in, as well as ‘I’ll Be Back’, the only song they hadn’t yet used from the UK version of A Hard Day’s Night.
The rest of Beatles for Sale made it onto Beatles VI in early 1965, and the rest of Help! and Rubber Soul were thrown together with a couple of singles and early Revolver tracks to make Yesterday …and Today. By now, The Beatles themselves had had enough of their records being chopped up by label executives 5,000 miles away. It was one thing messing around with the track listings of their earlier LPs, which were made to order without much thought anyway. But Rubber Soul and Revolver were genuine works of art, the whole of which meant even more than the sum of their parts.
Between 1964 and 1966, Capitol Records put together eight Beatles albums that had little or nothing to do with the configuration of any of the band’s directly supervised UK releases. And to these we can add the massacre of the two aforementioned masterpieces. But Yesterday and Today was to be the last time Capitol dared to butcher a Beatles release.
When the group posed for the album’s cover shoot with the photographer Robert Whitaker, they covered themselves in slabs of raw meat and mutilated baby dolls. It’s been speculated that this avant-garde experiment was a comment on the Vietnam War. But it was certainly a fitting comment on what Capitol had done to their albums, too.
The cover was soon recalled after initial pressings sparked outrage. Although the US version of Revolver was necessarily incomplete because three of the album’s songs had already been appropriated for Yesterday And Today, that was the last time The Beatles’ US label touched their track listings.
Every Capitol Beatles album released only in the United States:
- Meet the Beatles!
- The Beatles’ Second Album
- A Hard Day’s Night (soundtrack)
- Something New
- Beatles ’65
- Beatles VI
- Help! (soundtrack)
- Yesterday and Today
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.