197. The Beatles, "Meet the Beatles!"

 


Get your head around this: I am a late-middle-aged white guy who considers himself a moderate Beatles fan and I learned yesterday there are Beatles songs I have never heard.  Not obscure B-sides that only came out in England or weird solo stuff, but actual Lennon/McCartney Beatles songs that are on an album from 1964!  Songs that grandparents and great-grandparents much, much older than me know by heart.  It is wild!  I attribute this to a couple of factors: (1) I never owned this album, duh; my Beatles interest is much more focused on the later stuff, like starting from Sgt. Pepper's; (2) In the era of my life when I would sit down with someone and listen to an entire album all the way through, it would have been comically uncool to listen to this album all the way through; and (3) once streaming started and you could listen to anything you wanted any time, it just never occurred to me.  So, new Beatles songs!  (I've never watched "The Wire" either, but don't start with me.)

Of course I know the first two, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and "I Saw Her Standing There."  I'm pretty sure I know "It Won't Be Long."  As far as I know, this is my first encounter with "All I've Got to Do," a Lennon joint with a lovely, swinging melody.  The background vocals are just OK, though.  The George Harrison song, "Don't Bother Me," is really good!  You can sort of hear Harrison's sound developing even this early.  Poor George.  

When I heard "Till There Was You" at first I was like "huh, this is different," but then I saw it was a cover.  It was in "The Music Man"?  I do not know a lot about musicals.  "Hold Me Tight" is in the same vein - that sort of frenetic, bouncy, shuffly rock.  In fact, my big takeaway is that the songs (at least the ones I didn't know) are sort of hard to differentiate!  The Beatles at this point had a sound, for sure, and they were good at plugging songs into that sound.  

Despite the big "The first album" hype on the cover, this was not actually the Beatles' first album, either in England or the US.  It seems that Vee-Jay records jumped Capitol and released Introducing.. The Beatles (which was like half covers anyway) 10 days before this came out.  That kind of shit just does not happen any more.  Imagine Columbia getting ready to release Adele's 19 and then Drag City releasing Introducing... Adele a few days before it's supposed to come out.  LOL.

Hey, if you've got $2,495 laying around, you could pick up this still-sealed first pressing of this album!  It would be such a rush to rip that plastic off and slap that baby down on the turntable.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? All the Beatles albums do.  It's the Beatles.

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