MEET THE BEATLES!
Meet the Beatles! is the second Beatles album released in the United States and the first US Beatles album to be issued by Capitol Records, on 20 January 1964. It topped the popular album chart on 15 February 1964 and remained at number one for eleven weeks before being replaced by The Beatles’ Second Album. The cover featured Robert Freeman’s portrait used in the United Kingdom for With the Beatles. In 2003, Meet the Beatles! was ranked number 59 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. (More from Wikipedia)
Even after ordering the acclaimed Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab box set The Beatles / The Collection in 1982, I still picked up Beatles albums when I could. Many that I have seen over the years were and are too rich for my blood, but I found an original pressing of Meet the Beatles for $6 once. I remember walking into the back corner of a record store many years ago (sometime in the late 1970’s as I recall); they had every Beatles album on sale at the same prices as when they were originally released. I wish I had bought the lot that day!
(April 2012)
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Vee Jay Records was 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.
(January 2013)
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Interestingly, the Supremes’ little-known first album called Meet the Supremes was released in late 1962, more than a year before Meet the Beatles! came out. (Motown did the same with the debut album of the Temptations, another of their major groups, but Meet the Temptations came out two months afterward).
(April 2015/1)
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Of course, the Beatles recorded their own version of “I Wanna be Your Man”; it was included on Meet the Beatles, with Ringo Starr on double-tracked lead vocals.
(May 2015)
