Strange but true: The Beatles’ American record company decided not to release their albums. Instead, Capitol chopped them up to generate more product. Nobody at the label had any idea that future generations would revere these records as sacred artistic units. No, Capitol just wanted to squeeze more funny paper out of the moptops before the bubble burst. So they doled out 12 songs per LP instead of 14, and rushed out seven albums in a year. American fans got different versions than the rest of the world. The U.S. albums have been forgotten by history, but they’re a crucial part of the Beatles story. They’re the albums that made America fall madly in love with the Fab Four.
Now, those albums are coming back to life in a new box set. The Beatles: 1964 U.S. Albums in Mono collects the first seven U.S. albums on Capitol, all released between January 1964 and March 1965. It’s a vinyl release on 180-gram audiophile vinyl, coming out on Nov. 22 by Apple Corps Ltd./Capitol/UMe.
John, Paul, George, and Ringo played The Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 9, 1964. That was the night that made Beatlemania explode all over the U.S., after it had already snowballed through Europe. The album in the shops was Meet the Beatles — a hodgepodge of singles, B sides, and album tracks. Capitol figured they needed to grab the cash, since everybody knew these lads couldn’t last more than a year or two. So they cranked out Meet the Beatles; The Beatles’ Second Album; A Hard Day’s Night; Something New; The Beatles’ Story; Beatles ’65; and The Early Beatles.
The new versions sound phenomenal in mono — the way these albums always deserved to sound. The vinyl lacquers were cut by Kevin Reeves at Nashville’s East Iris Studios. The box set collects all seven U.S. albums; all are available individually except the documentary LP The Beatles’ Story. It also has liner notes from eminent Beatles historian Bruce Spizer. These mixes finally do right by the American tapes. As Reeves tells Rolling Stone, “They wanted to put out these unique sets that had not been out on vinyl for so long, and they wanted to try and do something to make it new.”
Generations of Americans grew up on these albums. Fans flipped for hits like Yesterday … and Today and Beatles VI, which didn’t exist in the U.K. Every album before Sgt. Pepper got sliced apart — the U.S. Revolver cut three of the best John songs. Incredibly, the original Beatles U.K. albums didn’t get released in America until 1987, when they arrived in much-heralded CD installments. The U.S. LPs dropped out of sight; they’ve been out of print as separate albums since 1995. Most of today’s fans have never heard them.
But in so many ways, the U.S. albums were even more influential than the real ones. They’re the records that the Beach Boys heard. The ones that Smokey Robinson heard. The ones that Stevie Wonder and Carole King and Marvin Gaye took as an artistic challenge. When Bob Dylan heard the Beatles, he was listening to albums like Something New. When Brian Wilson heard Rubber Soul and decided to top it with Pet Sounds, he was listening to the wrong Rubber Soul. (Brian’s copy began with “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” not “Drive My Car.”)
The Beatles didn’t believe in putting their singles on albums, because they didn’t think it was fair to make fans pay for the same song twice. So in the U.K. singles like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” were kept off the albums, on principle. Capitol had no such qualms. And they were probably right: American fans would have rioted in the streets if they bought Meet the Beatles and it didn’t have “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on it.
Consider Meet the Beatles — it opens with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (a single), “I Saw Her Standing There” (the opener for Please Please Me), “This Boy” (the flip side of “All My Loving”), and “It Won’t Be Long” (the opener from With the Beatles). You could say it trampled all over the band’s artistic intentions, a hodgepodge, even a fraud … but that is an all-time killer Side One. Meet the Beatles is a classic album — even if the Beatles never meant for it to exist.
The U.S. albums were created by a man named Dave Dexter, the Capitol exec in charge of the Beatles releases. He’s a shadowy figure in Fabs history, but fans tend to curse his name. Dexter was a jazz aficionado who just didn’t like the band, and didn’t think their records were any good. So he remastered them. “He had rejected these singles,” Reeves says. “The company forced his hand to put them out. And he did. But he figured he was going to redo them all and make them different. So he made some alterations to what was happening across the pond.” Dexter had a heavy hand in the studio. “I don’t want to be negative about it, but there’s strange decisions he made.”
That’s why the U.S. albums had their own sound issues for this edition to overcome. “Dexter definitely changed things,” Reeves says. “First of all, he took these stereo tapes and he folded them to mono. He folded everything down. He certainly used those beautiful Capitol echo chambers a little bit to enhance that sound.” That’s putting it mildly. The Dexter mixes are notorious for all the added echo, especially on Beatles ’65 — when George sings “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” he’s drowned in reverb. “Yeah, it’s in the Lincoln Tunnel,” Reeves laughs. “There’s a few songs that are striking like that.”
How did one man get to tinker with what were fairly major albums? “Don’t you think that is a total New Jersey boss move?” Reeves says. “The guy must have had some Jersey in him. Now, was he a genius or was he a villain? I don’t know, but he’s usually perceived as the latter because he took these wonderful, pristine-sounding Abbey Road tapes and decided on his own to make them into something completely different. And they were completely different.”
The U.S. pressings were also notorious for the crummy-sounding fake-stereo effects. “We always called it pseudo stereo,” Reeves says. “It’s easy to make a mono recording into a pseudo stereo one by just splitting it in drastically different EQs on each side to make it feel like it’s coming out of the speakers in different ways. But man, those tapes are less than optimum.”
Many fans have accused Dexter of being a jazz snob who hated rock & roll and sabotaged these albums out of spite. “I can’t speak to that authoritatively, but there’s certainly some evidence that might suggest that that’s the truth, right?,” Reeves says. “He wasn’t shy about sending out these famous memos about how this music was not going to sell, and it’s just going to appeal to kids who listen to their records on these $5 record players, or cutting them out of the back of a cereal box. He was pretty vocal about that.”
But the mission for The Beatles: 1964 U.S. Albums in Mono was to take the American tapes and finally make them sound Beatle-quality. “We were trying to figure out which tape we should use,” Reeves says. “The Dexter versions or the Abbey Road ones? The consensus from Apple was that they wanted to put out these unique U.S. masters. We found the original set and not any copies of them — especially not any of the pseudo stereo copies. And that’s what we cut from.”
The American albums have their own distinct personalities. Second Album has a devoted cult following, as the Beatles pay tribute to their Black American heroes, covering Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Motown. A Hard Day’s Night was a bit of a cheat, padded out with George Martin orchestral versions of Beatles songs. The Early Beatles is basically the U.K. debut album Please Please Me, which Capitol hadn’t released. Something New and Beatles ’65 (released in mid-December ’64) bring the moodier side of John and Paul, culled from A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles for Sale.
The Beatles Story is a documentary oddity, with voice-over narrators telling the band’s story along with interviews, press conferences, dialogue, and snippets of the songs. It’s a double album, less than 50 minutes, yet made the Top 10 — not bad for an album without a single full song. It’s a tribute to Capitol’s utter lack of shame — kinda like ending the otherwise flawless Something New with a German version of their first U.S. hit: “Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand.”
The Beatles: 1964 U.S. Albums in Mono is a moment of redemption for these long-neglected records — finally they sound punchy and great on their own terms. It would have been easier to just arrange the Abbey Road mixes in order to re-create the American versions. But as Reeves says, “They wanted to put out these unique sets that had not been out on vinyl for so long, and they wanted to try and do something to make it new. I was able to let the tapes breathe and sing for themselves, and hopefully it’s something that the fans will enjoy.”
