When The Beatles divorced acrimoniously in 1970, John Lennon wasn’t sentimental: it was nothing important, he said, just a rock group had broken up. He did however sometimes say with pride that The Beatles were a great little rock’n’roll band.
That was true, right from early days in Hamburg and Liverpool’s Cavern to that final live appearance on a London rooftop. There, among other songs, they played the Lennon-McCartney original One After 909, a piece of rock’n’roll juvenilia written at the dawn of the 1960s, the decade they commanded and shaped.
When The Beatles broke through in the US in early 1964, many observed they were giving Americans back their own music, albeit in a different accent.
But they also reshaped 1950s rock’n’roll and recent black soul for three guitars and drums, with three vocalists singing in harmony or unison. Their sound was unique, even if some songs weren’t originals. Americans, however, had a skewed experience of Beatles’ music, because Capitol Records – distributing music from EMI, the band’s British parent company – turned down their British hits and suddenly had to play catch-up.
Capitol’s Dave Dexter Jnr – a jazz lover responsible for not releasing Please Please Me, She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand and other British hits – quickly cobbled together albums for the American market which, until Sgt Pepper in 1967, bore scant resemblance to their British catalogue.
The influential 1964 American album Meet the Beatles (in the cover of their second British album With the Beatles) included songs from their UK debut Please Please Me and added I Want to Hold Your Hand.
Dexter delivered miserly albums – just 10 or 11 songs where British originals had 14 – and pulled leftovers and singles into albums of his own making, usually with dreadful covers.
In the same period that The Beatles released seven albums in Britain, Dexter spun out 10. And let’s not start on how he added incidental music from the films for A Hard Day’s Night and Help!
It wasn’t until The Early Beatles in 1965 that Americans got some songs from the band’s Please Please Me British debut of two years before.
Dexter’s albums weren’t all disasters. His cobbled-together The Beatles’ Second Album – the cover a ridiculous collage of photos – is an excellent rock’n’roll album with covers of Chuck Berry (Roll Over Beethoven), Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (You Really Got a Hold on Me), McCartney on Little Richard’s screamer Long Tall Sally, Lennon’s belting through Barrett Strong’s Motown classic Money and other covers, with originals Thank You Girl, You Can’t Do That, I Call Your Name, I’ll Get You and She Loves You.
A number of the early US albums have now been released in mono on vinyl to coincide with the documentary Beatles ‘64 about the band’s first American tour. But while they are interesting as mangled oddities, only The Beatles’ Second Album could be considered close to essential.
It is powerful evidence of a great little rock’n’roll band – from a time when rock’n’roll was considered passé – that gave Americans their own music back in a different and exciting way.
And why, 60 years ago, the world then fell at their feet.
The Beatles’ US mono albums on vinyl with individual contemporary essays are Meet the Beatles!, The Beatles’ Second Album, A Hard Day’s Night, Something New, Beatles ‘65 and The Early Beatles. The documentary Beatles ‘64 is on Disney+ from November 29.
