STORY OF THE MONTH: The Beatles’ Early American Singles (from January 2013)
One widely held theory about the success of Beatlemania is that the timing was just right; America was still in mourning from the assassination of President John Kennedy 50 years ago this November, and four extraordinarily talented long-haired Englishmen were just starting to get their records released over here. The Fab Four’s American success is most often tied these days to their appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, but the story is much more complicated than that actually. One fascinating view of the whole story is the history of the British Invasion as told from a musician/fan’s perspective – Cyril Jordan, a founding member of the Flamin’ Groovies (whose roots go all the way back to 1965) – which is the cover story of the current issue of Ugly Things magazine that also includes my own article on Milan the Leather Boy. Here are some fun facts that Jordan didn’t talk about.
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The Beatles’ debut album Please Please Me was released in England on EMI/Parlophone Records in March 1963, under the direction of Sir George Martin, who turned 87 earlier this month. Martin had joined EMI in 1950 and oversaw the Parlophone label, which released the early Beatles albums in the UK. The label also featured several other major acts, including the Hollies, Cilla Black, and Billy J. Kramer.
However, Capitol Records was slow to lock up the Beatles’ recordings in this country – apparently learning nothing from Decca Records’ disastrous decision in 1962 not to give the band a recording contract in the UK, giving as their reason the boneheaded prediction that “guitar bands were on their way out”.
This allowed small American labels to release many of the band’s early singles, notably “She Loves You” b/w “I’ll Get You” on Swan Records, but also including “Please Please Me” b/w “From Me to You” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret” b/w “Thank You Girl” on Vee Jay Records, plus “Love Me Do” b/w “P.S. I Love You” and “Twist and Shout” b/w “There’s a Place” on Vee Jay’s subsidiary Tollie Records. In fact, during that remarkable week in April 1964 when all of the top 5 songs on the Billboard singles chart were Beatles songs – in order, they were “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “Twist and Shout”, “She Loves You”, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, and “Please Please Me” – just 2 were Capitol releases (#1 and #4). Vee Jay was even able to get their million-selling Introducing . . . the Beatles album released 10 days before Capitol’s Meet the Beatles (though it was originally scheduled for a July 1963 release). Needless to say, considerable lawsuits were both brought and threatened over that period.
Over the ensuing years, the Beatles’ financial entanglements only worsened. This occurred, in part, because of the somewhat bitter and highly public break-up of the band; but for the most part, it was simply ill-advised business practices as I understand it. Continued standoffs by the band and the other representatives in charge of their recordings – whose owners by then included Michael Jackson – kept the Beatles canon from being available via online sales until 2010. With the acquisition of EMI by Universal Music Group in 2012 and the subsequent creation of a new Capitol Records subsidiary to oversee the Beatles catalogue, perhaps the matter is finally settled.
The Beatles’ somewhat anti-capitalist stance over this period is hardly driven by some sort of Marxist-Leninist tendencies as the band’s detractors might imagine, but it is rather a natural reaction to the scandalously brutal plundering of royalties from even top recording artists that had become routine among recording industry practitioners for decades. As one of the most egregious examples, one of the Rolling Stones’ managers, Allen B. Klein tricked the band into signing over the rights to all of the music that they had recorded (through 1971) with Decca Records. (The Stones were Decca’s lucrative consolation prize when they passed on signing the Beatles). Klein’s label, ABKCO Records is frequently encountered on Stones records, including one of their rarest albums, Metamorphosis.
(December 2015)
