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There was finally a press release today confirming the existence of an upcoming Beatles release, The Capitol Albums, Volume 1. The box will contain four CDs based on four of the LPs spliced and diced up by Capitol Records in 1964, with extreme reluctance by the group that created and sequenced the original LPs and singles the Capitol albums were drawn from.
In the press release, current Capitol Records president Andrew Slater—who played bass and drums on Liz Phair’s “Why Can’t I?”—offered the most explicit excuse ever given for Capitol’s initial animosity towards the Beatles catalogue:
“In the Sixties, American record labels often chose to reformat British records to suit the needs of the U.S. market. In America, singles were generally included on current albums, where in the UK albums and singles were most often separate releases. [This is called “Value For Money”; British fans usually felt cheated at the suggestion of buying the same recording twice.—Rodney]
“Higher music publishing costs in the U.S. also made it impractical to include as many songs on American albums.” [This is the new claim, but it isn’t very persuasive.]
None of these explanations begin to excuse the “liberties” taken in graphic design, which caused one Beatle, George, to remark “we thought they were bootlegs.”
The box contains stereo (duphonic and true) and mono versions of Meet the Beatles (Released Jan. 20, 1964), The Beatles Second Album (Released April 10, 1964), Something New (Released July 20, 1964, largely recycled from A Hard Day’s Night) and Beatles ’65 (Released Dec. 15, 1964), skipping over the two LPs that might actually be justifiable to reissue: the United Artists soundtrack LP for A Hard Day’s Night, which included instrumental contributions by George Martin, and Capitol’s audiodocumentary The Beatles Story (which isn’t very good, but probably contains interview bits worthy of preservation).
