CoronaVinyl Day 455 (B): Meet the Beatles! by The Beatles

For an explanation of CoronaVinyl, click here.

Today's CoronaVinyl category is "B," and even though the last time B came around, I posted about a Beatles album, that was over three months ago, and frankly, I still have a fair amount of Beatles albums left.  So, I went with their official American debut album, 1964's Meet the Beatles!

As I previously noted when I posted about Rubber Soul, due to some issues with the Beatles' label, EMI, and their American subsidiary, Capitol Records, until Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band was released in 1967, The Beatles had different albums released in North America and the UK.  Some had different titles, while some had the same title as the UK version, but a different track listing.

Meet the Beatles! was released by Capitol in the U.S. on January 20, 1964.  By this time, The Beatles had already released two albums in the UK, Please Please Me and With the Beatles, released in March and November 1963, respectively.  As you can see, the cover  of Meet the Beatles! boasts that it's "The First Album by England's Phenomenal Pop Combo."  They got the "England's phenomenal pop combo" thing right, but Vee-Jay Records had actually released an album ten days earlier called Introducing . . . The Beatles, which was basically a slightly cut-down version of Please Please Me.

Meet the Beatles! has 12 tracks:  "I Want to Hold Your Hand," which was only released as a single in the UK; "I Saw Her Standing There," which was the B-side to the "I Want to Hold Your Hand" single in the U.S. and also the first track from Please Please Me; "This Boy," which was the B-side of the "I Want to Hold Your Hand" single in the UK; and then the nine original, non-cover songs from With the Beatles in the same order, save for the inclusion of their cover of "Till There Was You" from The Music Man.  And the album cover is the same as the With the Beatles, but just with a slight blue tint.

Regardless of what songs were on this album and whether Introducing . . . The Beatles came out ten days before, Meet the Beatles! was, for many Americans, the introduction to the group that would change popular music forever.  It was released a few weeks before the band's legendary stint on The Ed Sullivan Show, which made the band international sensations.

I love all phases of The Beatles' work.  A lot of times, people shove aside their earlier work in favor of their later work, dismissing the earlier stuff as just regular pop music, forgetting how much of a sea change their music was in an era desperately wanting for music made by someone whose first name wasn't Bobby.

Meet the Beatles! topped the Billboard album chart for 11 consecutive weeks -- the first of their 14 #1 studio albums in the U.S. over the following six years -- only to be displaced by the aptly titled The Beatles Second Album.  Between those two albums and A Hard Day's Night, in 1964, the Beatles held the top spot on the Billboard 200 for 30 of the 52 weeks.  It eventually went 5x platinum in the U.S. and was ranked #187 on the all-time Billboard 200 chart in 2015.

The album isn't on Spotify, but someone made a playlist with the album's tracks, so I embedded that below.

Favorite Song on Side 1:  "This Boy"
Only available as the B-side to the "I Want to Hold Your Hand" single in the UK, American fans got a treat when "This Boy" was an album track on Meet the Beatles!  It's one of my favorite early Beatles songs -- an unabashed ode to doo wop, with John's impassioned double-tracked vocals in the chorus showing the band had as much soul as they had pop chops.

Favorite Song on Side 2:  "Not a Second Time"
I went with another John song for Side 2.  "Not a Second Time" was another step in John's progression as a songwriter, with lyrics about being hurt, but not wanting to get hurt again.  It also has some interesting minor/major musical shifts that give it both a brooding mood and a happy mood.