Your Mother Should Know: The Still-Relevant Beatles @ MCL
Though I am not your mother, I am old and I like the Beatles, just as she does (probably). Ask her. But maybe she never told you about them, possibly because you don’t call enough even though you were always her favorite (don’t tell the others!)? Point is, call your mother—is that too much to ask?
But in case Mom never told you, allow me:
If you type the word “Beatles” into Mercer County Library’s catalog, it will return 2261 resultsNote 1 Or did on November 2, 2016. If you do the search today, you’ll probably get even more hits because the Beatles remain pretty consistently popular. The Beatles: hits-makers still.:
The phrase “Taylor Swift”, in comparison, yields 99 results, easily reducible to 83 if you maliciously and intentionally misspell her first name “Tailor”, but why would you do that, unless you’re one of those intentionally malicious types? Misspelling “Beatles” as “beetles”, on the other hand, returns 1853 results, proving … um, what, exactly? Well, this, maybe: The Beatles are even more popular than actual beetles!Note 2 A controversial contention, I know. But bear in mind that, in 1966, John Lennon took some heat for claiming the Beatles were more popular than Jesus; so my assertion re: their popularity vis-a-vis the bugs to which they bear homonymic affiliation is comparatively less controversial. Incidentally, in 2010, the Vatican forgave Lennon his alleged blasphemy -http://bbc.in/1mVItbV. Perhaps someday the Royal Entomological Society will try to forgive me for my beetles “slur” but I’m so iconoclastic that I don’t care that I (presumably) offended them. If MCL's catalog says Beatles are bigger than beetles, I’m gonna proclaim that Truth from on high and regret nothing. I’ll never knuckle under to Big Insect. And they’re more popular than Taylor Swift. Also, beetles are more popular than Taylor Swift. (That’s gotta sting a bit if you're TS.) But take solace, Taylor Swift! You are still more popular than Tailor Swift, who’s probably just a more bespoke version of you, I’m thinking? So … wins all around for the musically gifted!
But seriously … the Beatles’ recording career lasted under eight years—their first record, “Love Me Do”, was released in late 1962; the group disbanded in early 1970—whereas Taylor Swift has been recording since 2006, and thus has already been around longer than the Beatles. Still it’s doubtless unfair to compare Taylor Swift to the Beatles because the Beatles’ disbanding is hardly the equivalent of their not being around. In fact, they’ve had over 50 years to have what we now call in the aggregate “content” (books, articles, DVDs, movies, etc.) generated about them, whereas Taylor Swift has had a mere 10 years. This is certainly a better explanation for the vastness of the information gap between them: Taylor Swift, though still active, has been “a thing” for a mere 10 years; whereas the Beatles, though no longer active, have been an industry for decades. It’s unlikely TS will, in the fullness of time, achieve as much as the Beatles have—it’s unlikely anyone will—but we don’t yet know that for a fact.
In those short eight years during which the Beatles were recording, however, they accomplished quite a bit—not only more than Taylor Swift, but more than any other recording artist:
By the end of 1963, the Beatles had already released a number of singles and two full albums in the UK. When they broke stateside, their US record label, Capitol, decided to release Meet the Beatles—based on With the Beatles, the Beatles’ second UK album, you’ll recall—as though it were their first,Note 3But it wasn’t the Beatles' first US album, either—it was merely their first Capitol album. Another US record company, Vee-Jay, had issued Introducing … The Beatles just before Meet the Beatles. (Introducing … was, essentially, a version of the UK album Please Please Me.) This is one of the wrinkles in the chronology of US Beatles record-releases that I vowed, for concision’s sake, not to discuss in the main text. I mention it here merely as an illustration of the type of side-issues that pop up time and again when you discuss Beatles albums, their release dates or their track listings. since Capitol had decided not to release a version of Please Please Me, the Beatles’ actual first album, as their first US album. But Capitol, at this early point, already began butchering Beatles releases by leaving off up to three songs per album. With the Beatles—the UK near-equivalent of Meet the Beatles—had had fourteen songs; yet Meet the Beatles had twelve, a reduction that represents Capitol at its most generous, since many subsequent early US Beatles albums had a mere eleven tracks instead of the UK versions’ typical fourteen. After a while, there were, as far as the US market was concerned, enough “leftover” tracks (between uncollected Beatles’ singles and tracks deliberately left off US album versions) for Capitol to cobble together a number of Franken-albums for which there were no true UK equivalents, the first of which was released in April 1964, a mere two months after the Beatles first came to the US. This first entirely-Capitol-created album they cleverly titled The Beatles’ Second Album because, ya gotta reckon, the only thing Capitol executives had less of than scruples was creativity. (“Whudda we call this here second Beatles album we just slapped together, boys?” “How ‘bout The Beatles’ Second Album, boss?” “Brilliant! Run with it! Now, break out the scotch and cigarettes and let’s all spend the rest of the afternoon in a Mad Men-style alcohol-soaked haze!”)
The Beatles’ Second Album would not be the last Capitol Franken-album. But Capitol execs got much better at naming as time went on; they titled their next Beatles Franken-album Something New. One marvels at the creative marketing genius. You are forgiven for assuming they titled the one after that Something Newer. They didn’t, but that title had probably been in the running.
Then there’s the special case of the US version of the Beatles’ Help! album, which really illustrates how weasely Capitol could be. The UK version, also titled Help!, has 14 tracks on it while the US version technically has 12, which doesn’t sound so bad … until you learn that the US version consists of 7 Beatles songs along with 5 non-Beatles instrumentals—incidental music from the film, essentially. (“Help! Now with 50% LESS BEATLES!!”—Rejected Capitol advertising campaign, presumably.)
It gets worse; for it’s not as though the Capitol execs who came up with this rip-off version took any pity on the consumer when it came to sequencing the songs. By which I mean, it would have been nice had they put all the real music (i.e., the Beatles songs) in order on one side of the album. You could’ve just played that side. But no. Capitol interspersed the good (Beatles) songs with the bad (non-Beatles) music; and back in the days of record players, this meant that, in order to skip over the unwanted incidental music, you had to get up from your chair after the first two tracks played, go over to the record player, pick the stylus up from the disc and plop it back down in the groove where song 4 began because song 3 was not only not a Beatles song, it was musically just horrible. And then, y’know, be obliged to repeat this ordeal as necessary. O, sure—you could choose to just listen to, e.g., “In the Tyrol”, but—trust me, here—you don't want to.
This punitive sequencing seems gratuitously petty.
It wasn’t until the 1967 release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that UK and US versions of Beatles albums became roughly equivalent, and even then, you have to add a caveat to account for the oddity that is Magical Mystery Tour, the album that Capitol released in the US in late 1967, five months after Pepper. True, MMT is, technically, yet another Franken-album, comprised of all of the singles the Beatles released in 1967 along with the double-ep set they released in the UK to accompany their Christmastime film release, Magical Mystery Tour. This gets sui-generisly weird, though, because, as luck would have it, this collection of singles and eps hung together so well that Magical Mystery Tour (the album) is today considered part of the Beatles canon, even in the UK, where it was not released as an album until 1976—this despite the fact that it began life as yet another Capitol Records US-only Franken-album. With MMT, the butchers at Capitol Records accidentally got one right, making MMT more a beautiful Rocky (from the Rocky Horror Picture Show) than a misshapen Frankenstein’s monster. Not that creating a Rocky was ever their intent. Christmas season revenue was.
Incidentally, if my graphic above seems slightly cruel toward the Capitol butchers or maybe a tad extreme, take a gander at this, which is the album cover that the Beatles themselves chose for the Capitol Franken-album Yesterday and Today:
Literally a butcher cover, with the Beatles dressed in butcher’s smocks and festooned with burned, decapitated baby dolls and random pieces of raw meat. Gee, tell us what you really think of Capitol’s Franken-albums, Beatles!
Consumers found this cover so disturbing that it was quickly replaced with a less controversial one featuring somber-looking Beatles (note how maniacally happy they look above, despite the abattoir-/House of Horrors-like setting) gathered around a giant steamer trunk, with Paul sitting inside the trunk, a cover that became controversial later on, when the “Paul is dead” hoax was making the rounds and people were looking for clues to his death on all the albums and some Paul-is-dead acolytes were all: “See? SEE!?!? He’s sitting in a coffin on the cover of Yesterday and Today!!! Wake up, sheeple! He’s dead!!!” (It is unclear why, in this conspiracy scenario, the Beatles would want only their American fans to know of Paul’s tragic demise.) [Spoiler: Paul was not dead. Or even sick. Incidentally, in plus ça change news, Avril Lavigne is also similarly not dead.]
Okay, okay—full disclosure: The oft-repeated myth that the Beatles intended the Yesterday and Today butcher cover as a comment on Capitol’s relentless “butchering” of their artistic output—a myth that I repeat above (but now skillfully walk back!)—is untrue. (Sorry I misled you but I was making a point of some kind, seemingly.) For one thing, the butcher picture had already been used in the UK to promote the release of the Beatles’ 1966 single “Paperback Writer”/“Rain”, and there was no Capitol Records butchery involved in that release. Also, the Beatles themselves never claimed they were criticizing Capitol with this picture, though Paul did try to claim it was their comment on the Vietnam War, which, okay, sure, why not?
But, you ask, weren’t the Beatles about more than rumors, weird albums covers, questionable song sequencing and record company greed? Didn’t they, y’know, record some actual songs, with music and lyrics and all of that? Where’s the discussion of that?
I’m glad you asked! That’ll be coming in my next post cleverly titled—with naming skills reminiscent of a Capitol Records exec—“Beatles Post, Part Two” (not the actual title, probably). Look for it at a Mercer County Library blog near you sometime in 2018!
8/2/16 post by Mary M. Astarita on the Mercer County Library blog
Hey Dullblog
Blog dedicated to the Beatles, featuring “people who think about the Beatles maybe a little too much”—or possibly just the right amount
The Beatles: U.S. Vs. U.K. Album Guide
The graphics on this webpage make it easy for the reader to see from exactly which record-parts the US Franken-albums were stitched together
The Beatles Discography
Wikipedia article
With the Beatles
A Hard Day’s Night
Beatles for Sale
Help!
Rubber Soul
Revolver
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Magical Mystery Tour
The Beatles (aka The White Album)
Yellow Submarine
Abbey Road
Let It Be
1 Or did on November 2, 2016. If you do the search today, you’ll probably get even more hits because the Beatles remain pretty consistently popular. The Beatles: hits-makers still.
2 A controversial contention, I know. But bear in mind that, in 1966, John Lennon took some heat for claiming the Beatles were more popular than Jesus; so my assertion re: their popularity vis-a-vis the bugs to which they bear homonymic affiliation is comparatively less controversial. Incidentally, in 2010, the Vatican forgave Lennon his alleged blasphemy. Perhaps someday the Royal Entomological Society will try to forgive me for my beetles “slur” but I’m so iconoclastic that I don’t care that I (presumably) offended them. If MCL's catalog says Beatles are bigger than beetles, I’m gonna proclaim that Truth from on high and regret nothing. I’ll never knuckle under to Big Insect.
3 But it wasn’t the Beatles first US album, either—it was merely their first Capitol album. Another US record company, Vee-Jay, had issued Introducing … The Beatles just before Meet the Beatles. (Introducing … was, essentially, a version of the UK album Please Please Me.) This is one of the wrinkles in the chronology of US Beatles record-releases that I vowed, for concision’s sake, not to discuss in the main text. I mention it here merely as an illustration of the type of side-issues that pop up time and again anytime you discuss Beatles albums, their release dates or their track listings.
But in case Mom never told you, allow me:
If you type the word “Beatles” into Mercer County Library’s catalog, it will return 2261 resultsNote 1 Or did on November 2, 2016. If you do the search today, you’ll probably get even more hits because the Beatles remain pretty consistently popular. The Beatles: hits-makers still.:
But seriously … the Beatles’ recording career lasted under eight years—their first record, “Love Me Do”, was released in late 1962; the group disbanded in early 1970—whereas Taylor Swift has been recording since 2006, and thus has already been around longer than the Beatles. Still it’s doubtless unfair to compare Taylor Swift to the Beatles because the Beatles’ disbanding is hardly the equivalent of their not being around. In fact, they’ve had over 50 years to have what we now call in the aggregate “content” (books, articles, DVDs, movies, etc.) generated about them, whereas Taylor Swift has had a mere 10 years. This is certainly a better explanation for the vastness of the information gap between them: Taylor Swift, though still active, has been “a thing” for a mere 10 years; whereas the Beatles, though no longer active, have been an industry for decades. It’s unlikely TS will, in the fullness of time, achieve as much as the Beatles have—it’s unlikely anyone will—but we don’t yet know that for a fact.
In those short eight years during which the Beatles were recording, however, they accomplished quite a bit—not only more than Taylor Swift, but more than any other recording artist:
According to the RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America], the Beatles are the best-selling music artists in the United States, with 178 million certified units. They have had more number-one albums on the British charts and sold more singles in the UK than any other act. … [A]s of 2016, they hold the record for most number-one hits on the Hot 100 chart with twenty. They have received ten Grammy Awards, an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score and fifteen Ivor Novello Awards [annual awards for songwriting and composing]. Collectively included in Time magazine's compilation of the twentieth century's 100 most influential people, they are the best-selling band in history, with estimated sales of over 600 million records worldwide….By the time the Beatles made it to the US in February of 1964, they had already been recording in the UK for nearly a year-and-a-half. In fact, Meet the Beatles, their “first” album (as far as US fans were concerned) was a somewhat altered version of their second UK album, With the Beatles. The saga of the titles of, and tracks on, US Beatles albums is an epic tale that could be a whole blog post unto itself—maybe even a whole dedicated blog, depending on how granular you want to get, and trust me, Beatles people (of which I consider myself one) love them some granules. It’s a fascinating and labyrinthine topic that I will herewith address as concisely as I can, which requires that I gloss over certain less salient differences in the US versions of Beatles albums. (A far more comprehensive account of these differences can be found here.)
By the end of 1963, the Beatles had already released a number of singles and two full albums in the UK. When they broke stateside, their US record label, Capitol, decided to release Meet the Beatles—based on With the Beatles, the Beatles’ second UK album, you’ll recall—as though it were their first,Note 3But it wasn’t the Beatles' first US album, either—it was merely their first Capitol album. Another US record company, Vee-Jay, had issued Introducing … The Beatles just before Meet the Beatles. (Introducing … was, essentially, a version of the UK album Please Please Me.) This is one of the wrinkles in the chronology of US Beatles record-releases that I vowed, for concision’s sake, not to discuss in the main text. I mention it here merely as an illustration of the type of side-issues that pop up time and again when you discuss Beatles albums, their release dates or their track listings. since Capitol had decided not to release a version of Please Please Me, the Beatles’ actual first album, as their first US album. But Capitol, at this early point, already began butchering Beatles releases by leaving off up to three songs per album. With the Beatles—the UK near-equivalent of Meet the Beatles—had had fourteen songs; yet Meet the Beatles had twelve, a reduction that represents Capitol at its most generous, since many subsequent early US Beatles albums had a mere eleven tracks instead of the UK versions’ typical fourteen. After a while, there were, as far as the US market was concerned, enough “leftover” tracks (between uncollected Beatles’ singles and tracks deliberately left off US album versions) for Capitol to cobble together a number of Franken-albums for which there were no true UK equivalents, the first of which was released in April 1964, a mere two months after the Beatles first came to the US. This first entirely-Capitol-created album they cleverly titled The Beatles’ Second Album because, ya gotta reckon, the only thing Capitol executives had less of than scruples was creativity. (“Whudda we call this here second Beatles album we just slapped together, boys?” “How ‘bout The Beatles’ Second Album, boss?” “Brilliant! Run with it! Now, break out the scotch and cigarettes and let’s all spend the rest of the afternoon in a Mad Men-style alcohol-soaked haze!”)
The Beatles’ Second Album would not be the last Capitol Franken-album. But Capitol execs got much better at naming as time went on; they titled their next Beatles Franken-album Something New. One marvels at the creative marketing genius. You are forgiven for assuming they titled the one after that Something Newer. They didn’t, but that title had probably been in the running.
Then there’s the special case of the US version of the Beatles’ Help! album, which really illustrates how weasely Capitol could be. The UK version, also titled Help!, has 14 tracks on it while the US version technically has 12, which doesn’t sound so bad … until you learn that the US version consists of 7 Beatles songs along with 5 non-Beatles instrumentals—incidental music from the film, essentially. (“Help! Now with 50% LESS BEATLES!!”—Rejected Capitol advertising campaign, presumably.)
This punitive sequencing seems gratuitously petty.
It wasn’t until the 1967 release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that UK and US versions of Beatles albums became roughly equivalent, and even then, you have to add a caveat to account for the oddity that is Magical Mystery Tour, the album that Capitol released in the US in late 1967, five months after Pepper. True, MMT is, technically, yet another Franken-album, comprised of all of the singles the Beatles released in 1967 along with the double-ep set they released in the UK to accompany their Christmastime film release, Magical Mystery Tour. This gets sui-generisly weird, though, because, as luck would have it, this collection of singles and eps hung together so well that Magical Mystery Tour (the album) is today considered part of the Beatles canon, even in the UK, where it was not released as an album until 1976—this despite the fact that it began life as yet another Capitol Records US-only Franken-album. With MMT, the butchers at Capitol Records accidentally got one right, making MMT more a beautiful Rocky (from the Rocky Horror Picture Show) than a misshapen Frankenstein’s monster. Not that creating a Rocky was ever their intent. Christmas season revenue was.
Consumers found this cover so disturbing that it was quickly replaced with a less controversial one featuring somber-looking Beatles (note how maniacally happy they look above, despite the abattoir-/House of Horrors-like setting) gathered around a giant steamer trunk, with Paul sitting inside the trunk, a cover that became controversial later on, when the “Paul is dead” hoax was making the rounds and people were looking for clues to his death on all the albums and some Paul-is-dead acolytes were all: “See? SEE!?!? He’s sitting in a coffin on the cover of Yesterday and Today!!! Wake up, sheeple! He’s dead!!!” (It is unclear why, in this conspiracy scenario, the Beatles would want only their American fans to know of Paul’s tragic demise.) [Spoiler: Paul was not dead. Or even sick. Incidentally, in plus ça change news, Avril Lavigne is also similarly not dead.]
Okay, okay—full disclosure: The oft-repeated myth that the Beatles intended the Yesterday and Today butcher cover as a comment on Capitol’s relentless “butchering” of their artistic output—a myth that I repeat above (but now skillfully walk back!)—is untrue. (Sorry I misled you but I was making a point of some kind, seemingly.) For one thing, the butcher picture had already been used in the UK to promote the release of the Beatles’ 1966 single “Paperback Writer”/“Rain”, and there was no Capitol Records butchery involved in that release. Also, the Beatles themselves never claimed they were criticizing Capitol with this picture, though Paul did try to claim it was their comment on the Vietnam War, which, okay, sure, why not?
But, you ask, weren’t the Beatles about more than rumors, weird albums covers, questionable song sequencing and record company greed? Didn’t they, y’know, record some actual songs, with music and lyrics and all of that? Where’s the discussion of that?
I’m glad you asked! That’ll be coming in my next post cleverly titled—with naming skills reminiscent of a Capitol Records exec—“Beatles Post, Part Two” (not the actual title, probably). Look for it at a Mercer County Library blog near you sometime in 2018!
Works About the Beatles
Meet the Beatles8/2/16 post by Mary M. Astarita on the Mercer County Library blog
Hey Dullblog
Blog dedicated to the Beatles, featuring “people who think about the Beatles maybe a little too much”—or possibly just the right amount
The Beatles: U.S. Vs. U.K. Album Guide
The graphics on this webpage make it easy for the reader to see from exactly which record-parts the US Franken-albums were stitched together
The Beatles Discography
Wikipedia article
Albums by the Beatles
Please Please MeWith the Beatles
A Hard Day’s Night
Beatles for Sale
Help!
Rubber Soul
Revolver
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Magical Mystery Tour
The Beatles (aka The White Album)
Yellow Submarine
Abbey Road
Let It Be
1 Or did on November 2, 2016. If you do the search today, you’ll probably get even more hits because the Beatles remain pretty consistently popular. The Beatles: hits-makers still.
2 A controversial contention, I know. But bear in mind that, in 1966, John Lennon took some heat for claiming the Beatles were more popular than Jesus; so my assertion re: their popularity vis-a-vis the bugs to which they bear homonymic affiliation is comparatively less controversial. Incidentally, in 2010, the Vatican forgave Lennon his alleged blasphemy. Perhaps someday the Royal Entomological Society will try to forgive me for my beetles “slur” but I’m so iconoclastic that I don’t care that I (presumably) offended them. If MCL's catalog says Beatles are bigger than beetles, I’m gonna proclaim that Truth from on high and regret nothing. I’ll never knuckle under to Big Insect.
3 But it wasn’t the Beatles first US album, either—it was merely their first Capitol album. Another US record company, Vee-Jay, had issued Introducing … The Beatles just before Meet the Beatles. (Introducing … was, essentially, a version of the UK album Please Please Me.) This is one of the wrinkles in the chronology of US Beatles record-releases that I vowed, for concision’s sake, not to discuss in the main text. I mention it here merely as an illustration of the type of side-issues that pop up time and again anytime you discuss Beatles albums, their release dates or their track listings.
my 8 year old is just getting into the Beatles courtesy of her teacher. This was a fun read for me as I learn more about the Beatles through my daughter's interest. Thanks!
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