Capitol 2047
Producer: George Martin
Track Listing: I Want to Hold Your Hand / I Saw Her Standing There / This Boy / It Won’t Be Long /All I’ve Got to Do / All My Loving / Don’t Bother Me / Little Child / Till There Was You / Hold Me Tight / I Wanna Be Your Man / Not a Second Time
February 15, 1964
11 Weeks
Beatlemania may have seemingly happened overnight, but before the frenzy hit there was a time when the Beatles couldn’t even get a record released America, despite the fact that the group was a hit in England.
By 1964, the Beatles were already veterans, having gone through several lineups. The band’s history dates back to the summer of 1957, Lennon invited Paul McCartney to join his skiffle group the Quarry Men. In 1958, the group’s name was changed to Johnny and the Moondogs, and George Harrison was enlisted.
A year later, the group was known as the Silver Beatles. Stuart Sutcliffe, who Lennon knew from art school, became bass player. Pete Best rounded out the group on drums.
After settling on simply “the Beatles,” the band honed its chops at club engagements in Hamburg, Germany, and its home base of Liverpool. By 1961, Sutcliffe had left the band to focus on his art career, leaving the bass duties for McCartney. (A year later, Sutcliffe died of a brain hemorrhage).
At the Cavern Club in Liverpool in late 1961, Brian Epstein discovered the band. By 1962, he signed on as the group’s manger and began shopping around for a record deal. “When Brian Epstein came around, he pulled a few strings and caught the ears of some of the people at EMI with his marvelous new group, but I wasn’t consulted,” says George Martin, then an executive at EMI’s Parlophone label. “I wasn’t important.”
The second time around, however, Martin was in the loop. “At the time I finally met them, in the spring of 1962, I was unaware that literally every record company, including my own, had turned Brian and the Beatles down,” he says.
Martin, however, was impressed. “The Beatles then were just very young guys. They were desperate for someone to recognize their talent. Of course, they ignored their lack of success, because they had enormous faith in their own ability,” he says. “I was hungry for new blood and I was able to identify the potential greatness when I saw it.”
By the summer of 1962, the band was signed by Parlophone and Ringo Starr was recruited to replace Pete Best, who was asked to leave the group. In October 1962, the Beatles scored their first top 20 British hit with “Love Me Do,” and in early 1963 they had a number two hit with “Please Please Me.” A third single, “From Me to You,” brought them to Number One in the U.K. In the midst of all this, they spent one day — February 11, 1963 — to record their first album.
The album, Please Please Me, was released a month later and became a hit in Britain, but Capitol, EMI’s American label, still wasn’t interested. Instead, Please Please Me was licensed to the independent Vee-Jay label, retitled Introducing the Beatles, and released in July 1963. Initially, it failed to crack the album chart.
Finally, Capitol had a change of heart when the label was presented with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” in late 1963. On December 26, the single was released in the United States.
Capitol released the group’s second album, Meet the Beatles!, on January 20, 1964. The record’s cover photo was identical to the one used on the group’s second U.K. album, With the Beatles, but the track listing was substantially different. Capitol opted to eliminate all the cover versions featured on the U.K. album, save for “Till There Was You,” which was familiar to American listeners from its original appearance in The Music Man. The label also added the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (which would soon be the group’s first American Number One single), “I Saw Her Standing There,” and “This Boy.”
Although Martin and the Beatles weren’t too fond of Capitol’s cut-and-paste approach, the American public didn’t mind. Meet the Beatles! hit the summit in its second week on the Top LP’s chart. Beatlemania had hit America at last.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of February 15, 1964
1. Meet the Beatles!, The Beatles
2. The Singing Nun, The Singing Nun
3. In the Wind, Peter, Paul & Mary
4. Little Deuce Coupe, The Beach Boys
5. West Side Story, Soundtrack