Butchering The Beatles for the USA – Nostalgia Central

As the US affiliate of The Beatles‘ British record company, Capitol had first shot at the Fab Four – and passed on the honour. The Beatles’ debut British LP was thus released in the US (almost intact) by Vee-Jay Records, as Introducing the Beatles.

From the moment they changed their minds in time for the second album, the folks at Hollywood’s Capitol Tower assumed the role of butchers, dismembering every Beatles LP through 1966 almost beyond recognition.

The group’s 14-song Parlophone (EMI) LPs were hacked apart and padded with previously released singles to create nearly twice as many 11-tune Capitol “packages.”

The choicest morsel from each British LP – Eight Days a Week, Yesterday, Nowhere Man – was sure to be held off the US version and served up later as a hot “new” single.

Finally, it would appear as a prime cut on a subsequent Capitol album.

This in itself may not have constituted a criminal offence against Art.

It was, after all, only rock ‘n’ roll – good clean fun whichever way you sliced it, and extra-profitable Capitol’s way, considering the insatiable appetite of American adolescents for any and all mop-tops product.

In all fairness, popular record albums in America had always been built around previously released hit singles, and Beatles contemporaries like The Rolling Stones and The Kinks received similar treatment from other US labels.

Less excusable, however, was Capitol’s frequent negligence in obtaining the original stereo masters of Beatles songs, and its inexplicable habit of doctoring many tracks with gratuitous echo and distortion.

The people at Capitol were used to handling Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin and were not familiar with the music of young people. They didn’t really understand what all this noise from Liverpool was about and wanted to improve it.

By late 1965 and Rubber Soul, Capitol’s tactics began to seem a bit crass.

In an interview on New York’s WNEW-FM in 1974, John Lennon remembered, “We would sequence the albums and have it just the way we wanted it to sound. We’d put a lot of work into the sequencing and then we’d come over to America . . . it would drive us crackers!”

So when Capitol requested a cover photo for its June 1966 Yesterday and Today LP (which contained songs lopped off Help!, Rubber Soul and the forthcoming Revolver), The Beatles responded with a picture of themselves posing as butchers, surrounded by slabs of meat and dismembered baby dolls.

This cover, of course, soon had to be withdrawn under pressure from the usual pious guardians of America’s collective virtue, in the process reddening both the faces of Capitol’s executives and the ink on their balance sheets – and created a coveted collector’s item now fetching serious money.

From Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band onward, Beatles’ LPs crossed the Atlantic pretty much intact, though Capitol continued to irritate audiophiles with “electronically rechanneled” cuts (on the flip side of its Magical Mystery Tour album, for example).

What that meant, basically, was that Capitol used the monaural masters of singles like Penny Lane and All You Need Is Love, boosting bass on one channel and treble on the other, because the company couldn’t be bothered to track down the original stereo recordings.

It sounded awful.

Such boners were left uncorrected when the inevitable post-breakup retrospectives began to roll out of the Capitol recycling plant. John Lennon winced at the sound quality of 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, calling it “embarrassing.”

When Capitol released Rock ‘n’ Roll Music in 1976, Ringo Starr strenuously disavowed the package. “The cover was disgusting,” he told Rolling Stone. “It made us look cheap, and we were never cheap. All that Coca-Cola and cars with big fins was the ’50s.”

Capitol tried to inject a touch of class into the following year’s Love Songs, but the phoney gold-embossed-leather cover was no less tacky than Rock ‘n’ Roll Music‘s tinsel cheeseburgers.

The contents of both albums seemed entirely arbitrary, and the accompanying recording information was riddled with inaccuracies too tedious to list.

Capitol and EMI’s 1978 Beatles brain-wave was a $100-plus boxed set containing all thirteen of the group’s original British LPs, to which was added a special bonus album (Rarities), which offered 17 songs (mostly B-sides of singles) that had never been included on a British LP.

It was also supposed to feature the German renditions of Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand and Sie Liebt Dich, but Capitol somehow substituted those two English-language “rarities” I Want to Hold Your Hand and She Loves You!

The whole thing was remarkably ill-conceived. The Beatles Collection was only a handful of songs away from being a complete compilation, yet the few missing titles happened to rank among the group’s most famous (Hey Jude, for example).

Nonetheless, the limited edition bonus LP quickly became a prized collector’s item.

In 1979, EMI and Capitol decided to release it separately to the masses.

In America, Rarities was to have appeared on Capitol’s $5.98 “mid-price” line, which had offered such British Invasion relics as Hits of the Mersey Era and “greatest hits” packages by Peter and Gordon, Billy J. Kramer and Manfred Mann.

What nobody seemed to realise was that Rarities had been issued to fill the very particular British need of providing an album of songs never issued on British albums.

Thanks to Capitol’s mid-’60s marketing tactics, all but four of the LP’s “rarities” had already appeared on at least one multi-million-selling album in America.

Fortunately, someone did realise in time (Capitol’s 27-year-old director of merchandising and advertising, Randall Davis) and assembled instead an album of Beatles tracks that were considered rare in America.

They include tracks not previously issued on a Capitol or Apple LP and alternative versions of several well-known songs which were also not readily available in America.

A highlight of the album was the gatefold sleeve featuring the controversial “butcher” photo from the 1966 Yesterday and Today album.

The comprehensive chart below (courtesy of Jared Pike of beatlesmedleys.com) maps the Beatles’ UK releases to the Capitol releases in the US.

The track listings were finally standardised to the UK/international release when The Beatles’ albums were reissued on CD in 1988.

[ Click to enlarge ]