Introducing... The Beatles

• 1. Introduction

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  Introducing... The Beatles holds a strange place in rock history: the first Beatles album released in the United States, and yet one that almost never came out at all. It arrived on the 10th of January, 1964, on a small Chicago-based label called Vee-Jay Records, ten days before Capitol's competing release Meet the Beatles! That timing gap handed Capitol an early advantage on the charts. By the time Introducing... finally climbed into its peak position, Capitol's album had already been sitting there for weeks. A legal battle stretched through most of 1964. By the time Vee-Jay's license expired in October of that year, the album had sold more than 1.3 million copies. How a cash-strapped independent label ended up holding the rights to the Beatles' American debut, and how that album survived injunctions, counterfeiting, and a corporate showdown, is a story that touches every corner of the early British Invasion.

• 2. The Road to Vee-Jay

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  The Beatles' recording contract with Parlophone began in May 1962, and under that agreement EMI held the right to offer the group's recordings to labels it owned worldwide. EMI's American subsidiary, Capitol Records, passed on the "Please Please Me" single. That rejection set off a chain of events. An EMI affiliate called Transglobal took on the task of placing the masters with a willing US label, and after negotiations with several companies, Vee-Jay Records signed a licensing agreement that gave it the right of first refusal on Beatles records for five years. Vee-Jay pressed on even after the singles "Please Please Me" and "From Me to You" both failed to chart above number 116 on the Billboard Hot 100. By late April or early May of 1963, Vee-Jay had received copies of both the mono and stereo master tapes for what would become the album. The label initially considered releasing the Please Please Me LP unchanged from its British form, and a surviving acetate made by Universal Recording Corporation of Chicago, probably in May 1963, preserves all 14 songs in the original British running order, still bearing the title Please Please Me. American albums were standardized at 12 tracks, so Vee-Jay trimmed the two songs from the first UK single and renamed the project Introducing... The Beatles. The engineer at Universal Recording Corporation also noticed Paul McCartney's count-in at the start of "I Saw Her Standing There" and, deciding the "one, two, three" was accidental, cut those three numbers from both mono and stereo masters, leaving only the final "four" intact.

• 3. Cancelled Before It Began

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  By late June and early July of 1963, Vee-Jay was deep into manufacturing. Masters and metal parts had been made, and 6,000 front covers had gone to print. Despite what many Beatles books and discographies have long claimed, no documentation exists to confirm the album was ever released at any point in 1963. The release was scrapped entirely. A management crisis at Vee-Jay was the cause. The label's president, Ewart Abner, resigned after it emerged he had used company money to cover personal gambling debts. The fallout cancelled not only the Beatles album but also planned releases from Frank Ifield, Alma Cogan, and a Jewish cantor. Vee-Jay's financial problems deepened through the summer. Because the label chose not to report royalties on Beatles and Ifield sales, Transglobal declared its contract with Vee-Jay null and void on the 8th of August, 1963. The next Beatles single, "She Loves You", was then licensed by Transglobal to the Swan label of Philadelphia rather than back to Vee-Jay.

• 4. A Desperate January Rush

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  Billboard magazine reported on the 14th of December, 1963, that Capitol Records was planning an all-out promotional campaign for the Beatles in the United States. The single "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was rush-released on the 26th of December. On the 7th of January, 1964, Vee-Jay's board of directors met for the first time since that single had landed and looked hard at what Beatles material it still held in the vault. Desperate for cash, the board voted to release Introducing... The Beatles, accepting that legal trouble was likely. Metal parts were already at Vee-Jay's three primary pressing plants, and the 6,000 front covers printed six months earlier were still usable. What the label lacked was a back cover. As a stopgap, it pressed into service a slick taken from one side of its standard inner sleeve, carrying full-color reproductions of 25 other Vee-Jay album covers. Collectors know this as the "Ad Back" version, and it is highly sought after. When that supply of slicks ran out, Vee-Jay used an entirely blank white back cover, now called the "Blank Back" edition and considered very rare. The third back cover variation carried the official design: the album title near the top and the song titles arranged in two columns below. All three variants reached stores within days of the January 10th release date. Six days later, on the 16th of January, 1964, Vee-Jay was served with a restraining order. Capitol's publishing subsidiary, Beechwood Music, Inc., owned the American publishing rights to "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You", and refused to license them for this release. Approximately 80,000 copies had already shipped with both songs included, with only around 2,000 of those in stereo.

• 5. Court Battles and Chart Climbs

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  Vee-Jay responded to the restraining order by pulling "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You" and substituting the previously omitted "Ask Me Why" and "Please Please Me". New pressings began appearing in stores around the 10th of February, 1964, though some copies retained the original track listing. The revised album entered the Billboard charts three weeks behind Capitol's Meet the Beatles! but climbed quickly to number two, where it remained for nine straight weeks. It also peaked at number two in Cash Box and reached number one in Record World. Injunctions against Vee-Jay's album were issued, lifted, and restored more than once during the early months of 1964. The constant legal pressure meant the album was often pressed in rapid bursts between court orders, and across all pressings there are nearly two dozen different label variations, in both mono and stereo, manufactured at multiple plants. On the 9th of April, 1964, Capitol and Vee-Jay settled. Vee-Jay was granted a license to issue the 16 Beatles songs it controlled in any form it chose, running until the 15th of October, 1964. When the license expired, all rights reverted to Capitol. During the full window of availability, the album sold approximately 1,300,000 mono copies and approximately 41,000 stereo copies. Stereo pressings represent only 3.1 percent of the total run, making them genuinely scarce. After the settlement, Beechwood's two songs were released by Vee-Jay as a single on the 27th of April on the Tollie label. "Love Me Do" backed with "P.S. I Love You" became the Beatles' fourth number-one single on Billboard.

• 6. Repackaging and the Vee-Jay Catalog

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  The settlement also opened room for Vee-Jay to exploit its Beatles holdings more broadly. On the 26th of February, 1964, the label had already issued Jolly What! England's Greatest Recording Stars: The Beatles and Frank Ifield on Stage, drawing on Beatles tracks from the 1963 singles and from Introducing.... The single "Please Please Me" rose to number three on the Hot 100, Cash Box, and Record World. "Twist and Shout" appeared on the 2nd of March on the subsidiary Tollie label with "There's a Place" as the B-side. "Do You Want to Know a Secret", backed with "Thank You Girl", came out on the 23rd of March. Both singles peaked at number two on the Hot 100, with "Twist and Shout" reaching number one on both Cash Box and Record World. A Beatles EP titled Souvenir of Their Visit to America was also issued on the 23rd of March, carrying "Misery", "A Taste of Honey", "Ask Me Why", and "Anna". Twice before its license ran out, Vee-Jay repackaged the album itself. Songs, Pictures and Stories of the Fabulous Beatles featured a three-quarters gatefold cover with portrait paintings of all four musicians and a text panel describing personal details. The inside cover called Paul the "Nut Beatle", John "nearsighted" and the "Chief Beatle", George the "quietest" with a "deadpan face", and Ringo the "shortest Beatle" who "will send his steak back if it is not blood red". That album entered the Billboard chart on the 31st of October and eventually peaked at number 63. The other repackage, The Beatles vs the Four Seasons, paired Introducing... with a Four Seasons compilation in a gatefold sleeve and spent three weeks on the Billboard chart in October 1964, peaking at number 142. Both Introducing... The Beatles and Songs, Pictures and Stories remained on the Billboard LP chart until the 9th of January, 1965.

• 7. Counterfeits and Legacy

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  Starting in the late 1960s and running through the 1990s, Introducing... The Beatles became one of the most counterfeited albums in rock history. Fakes can be spotted through several telltale signs. Some carry labels with the album title and band name split by the center spindle hole. Others show color bands that are off-center or missing the color green, or display large white brackets with no color band at all. Album covers with dark brown borders indicate a counterfeit, as do hype stickers reading "Featuring Twist and Shout" and "P.S. I Love You", since genuine stickers read "Twist and Shout" and "Please, Please Me". On copies dating from the late 1970s, George Harrison's shadow is absent from the right side of the cover, while it appears on virtually all legitimate copies and even most fakes from earlier years. Because authentic stereo copies are so rare, nearly any copy with "stereo" or "stereophonic" on the cover is a counterfeit. Counterfeits of Songs, Pictures and Stories of the Fabulous Beatles circulate without the gatefold cover and its interior text, often under the truncated title Songs and Pictures of the Fabulous Beatles, and they substitute three tracks not found on the original. On the Capitol side, The Early Beatles was issued on the 22nd of March, 1965, containing 11 of the 14 tracks from Introducing.... Two of the remaining three tracks, "Misery" and "There's a Place", did not appear on a Capitol LP until 1980, when they were included on the US edition of Rarities. Introducing... The Beatles has never been officially released on compact disc, though unauthorized reproductions in both mono and stereo have circulated widely, most carrying the version two track listing.