Interesting look at the Beatles album chronology in the US vs UK

I never really was familiar with the original Beatles US album releases. I just knew they were different. I had seen some of the covers and just assumed they were some weird compilation albums.

I started getting into music as a teen from junior high through college 1979-1989 and my first Beatles pruchases were the so called red and blue compilation albums. A great introduction that covered the big hits across their entire history. Later I got 1 and Past Masters and Anthology even later. But I never bothered with the original albums much.

Then I got streaming and just assumed the albums as presented on apple music was what everyone knew. It was only later that I found out that those were the UK versions of those albums (with the exception of Magical Mystery Tour). But anyway I learned what their catalogue was from those albums.

So this is kind of a shock to me to see graphically how those albums were compiled and I did a deep dive into some of why.

I'l follow up with more but basically:
- the Beatles first couple of singles flopped in the US and EMI licensed away the Beatles rights to the songs on their first UK record to Vee-Jay records which was struggling financially, faced bankruptcy and had their own internal fraud to deal with. Thus the first album never got released in mid 1963 like it was supposed to.
- instead following a surprising hit in December of 1963 Vee-Jay decided to rush out the album in January despite legal proceedings and restraints from EMI for their breech of contract.
- what resulted (not show here) was Introducing... the Beatles which had most of those tracks from the UK Please Please Me release. It had various packaging from different pressings as Vee-Jay rushed to get out any product they could so there are many versions with different audio quality and back covers (one blank, one with ads for other Vee-Jay records, and one with the track listing). Between injunctions they would print anything they could and rush it out.
- but the Beatles were about to release their second UK album called With The Beatles and EMI the parent company of Parlaphone who had the UK rights retained the rights to everything else and their US division Capitol records released Meet The Beatles 10 days later with most of the songs from this second album. This album went to #1 for 11 straight weeks and the Vee-Jay record was #2 for 9 of those weeks.

Source: texags.com

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