Meet The Beatles | The Album That Helped Heal America

The Beatles Capitol albums generally get a bad rap from those who didn't grow up with them and while this is possible justified for some, 'Meet The Beatles' is an exception. On the 59th anniversary of it topping the U.S. album chart, we look in detail at the history behind this album, not only how it was conceived and promoted but also how it sounds and what we think is the best way to experience it. Join us on a journey to discover what made this album so important in both Beatles and pop culture history.

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[NGKiernan]

Boy, do I ever remember the night the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. My Father would not allow us to watch. So, I walked the block and heard the show booming from every window. The street was completely empty, no cars, no kids outside, no pedestrians. You could feel it in the air that something big was happening.

[franksmith]

I was 11 years old in 1964. My mom, an opera and symphony orchestra music lover, one day brought my one year younger brother and me a pop record by Bobby Rydell. She didn't know if we'd be interested or not. My brother was interested, but I played it over and over so much that mom moved the record player upstairs!
Then she brought home "Meet The Beatles". This album literally changed my life! The music had SUCH an exciting and enthusiastic sound and delivery! Beatlemania was so exciting! I began miming along with the album with a Roy Rogers plastic-stringed guitar in front of a large mirror, holding it left-handed because that was the way my favorite Beatle, Paul, held his guitar. My parents had divorced when I was five, but one day my visiting dad caught me "performing" in front of the mirror and said, "You're right-handed! If you're gonna play a guitar, you'd better learn to hold it the other way 'round!"
My mom, seeing I was serious about my love of music, bought me a cheap Sears box guitar, and I spent every day after school and weekends sitting in front of the stereo learning the bass parts, note for note, on that box guitar. Next Christmas, my dad bought me a red Hagstrom Kent model bass and a Magnatone Estey amplifier that my brother, who got a 6-string guitar, and I could both plug into. I began performing with a local band, called "The Ramrods" (LOL!) when I was 13 years old, playing "Top 40" covers. We had our own teen club, made a 45 record, were once on a local "Bandstand" type TV show hosted by George Clooney's father, Nick; hooked up with a local AM radio DJ (Bob White, WSAI-AM 1360 aka John Patrick Teiken) for some gigs, and played all around our area for a few years. I'll be 70 years old this year, and I've been in and out of bands all my life, all because of The Beatles.
The Meet The Beatles album started a lifelong love of music and performance with local bands for me, and many famous musicians, when asked, also trace their musical heritage back to hearing and seeing The Beatles. For me and countless others in the U.S., it all started with the Meet The Beatles album!

[nonetheweisser]

My grandmother bought this album for my mom the week it was released (my grandmother loved the Beatles too, she was a hip lady). It was this album that 10 year old me stumbled across in 1989. I was hooked, I listened to that album over and over and over before slowly making my way thru the rest of the catalog. Sadly the cover was destroyed in a flood a few years back. Even though the record was salvaged and still plays, I'm still heartbroken over having lost that cover specifically. Thank you for the wonderful trip down memory lane!

[ricknbacker]

In Feb 1964 our family lived in Woodland Hills, a suburb of Los Angeles. I was not quite 5 years old and had a friend (Dwight) who was my age and lived around the corner. My older sisters (14 and 10 at the time) would often babysit us when our parents went out. Dwight's Father worked for Capital Records. He received an early release of Meet The Beatles in January. He gave a copy to my sisters. They played it 24/7. My sisters went bonkers over the Fabs. That album sadly is long gone, but its impact never truly faded. Great video Andrew. Cheers, RNB

[TheHarryshelton]

At the time of release in the U.S, most people only had mono record players. I first heard the song on a car radio (AM) in a 1951 Ford. ROCK music made a quantum leap that day.

[lefthand]

As a Brit, I always looked down on the US albums as not the real thing. But then I picked up a copy of The Beatles' Second last year and was struck by how great it sounded to hear those tracks in that order with those mixes - and now you've made a great case for seeking out a copy of this one. Thanks as ever!

[jameswarrren]

Please take the fork outta Meet the Beatles.

For the first time and every time afterward I was jolted to my soul whenever I heard "I Want to Hold Your Hand."
It was a shiny, happy sound I had never experienced in my sleepwalking teenage life.
The vocals, the beat, the guitars and the handclaps have stunned me for well over half a century.
The tune began to divide me from all the generations but my own.

Famous conservative William F. Buckley, Jr had a different opinion:

"The Beatles are not merely awful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music."

God bless the commenters on this great video. You knew what it was all those years ago.
We will always be ONE....

[stevec]

I still have my original Meet The Beatles album that I bought back in Jan. of '64. What an experience it was being stricken with Beatlemania.

[joporizzoo]

This album is so iconic for me, and really set me on the road to becoming a musician, and later producer and music-publisher. College friends of my parents came back from a trip to England in 1964, and witnessing Beatlemania first-hand, bought a copy of "With The Beatles" and brought it back to Boston, MA, USA. They then brought it to a dinner party my parents threw, which essentially turned into a listening-party. My father was classically trained in piano and composition, and years later told me that he remembered that night, and his feeling that the world had changed...for the better. He'd grown up on 50's rock-n-roll, but these guys from England were doing something different. In 1970, when i was 6, I got my first record player, an early, affordable stereo setup, and among some folk records by acts like The Weavers and The Kingston Trio, and a handful of kids' albums...the copy of "Meet The Beatles" that my mom had run out to purchase when it became available, also wound up in my little "starter collection." I listened to those records going to sleep every night. That album was a real "friend" of mine, and has never let me down.

[cjay]

Growing up with these original Capitol albums, I know personally the effect they had on me, my friends, my school, country and the world. Meet The Beatles is one of the greatest LPs ever made. Period. Still spinning it 60 years later. In mono.

[neiltheblaze]

I remember hearing this album a couple of weeks before they were on Ed Sullivan.

One of my sisters came home from her after school job with the album under her arm. "Look what I just bought!" Two of my sisters and I played it over and over again the first night the album was in the house - I think we listened to it three times in a row.

The three of us would frequently listen to music together - usually just a bunch of singles, but even on the odd time we'd play an album, we never would play one more than once in an evening - but that night we did. I hadn't heard any rock and roll on the radio in ages (it was all crooners and pop singers on the radio - novelty songs - Little Richard was doing "By the Light of the Silvery Moon" and stuff like that) - so "I Want to Hold Your Hand" / "I Saw Her Standing There" sounded pretty rocky for the time. It sounded great on the car radio - always my measure if a single was going to be a hit or not. That particular single jumped out of the speakers and would compel you to turn up the volume. We liked the single quite a lot - but the album - that blew away every expectation we had. We needed repeated listens because we didn't know what we'd just heard!

First off, albums back then were usually pretty awful affairs - a bunch of lame material, cranked out watching the clock, with one or two hits with the B-sides, and a bunch of same-sounding filler. But not this time. We loved the single, so thought the album might be pretty good - but we weren't prepared.

We were really impressed with their harmonies - they reminded me of the Everly Brothers - and the fact that they wrote almost all the songs and played nearly all the instruments - nobody else did that; we were impressed by the variety of music on the album. Even the guitars on "Till There Was You" seemed musical and different (my mom even liked that one!). The Beatles hit with people on so many levels simultaneously - and that's the only verbal description I can give of their impact on people at the time. They were different from everything else on the radio at the time, and for a few months in 1964, nobody else could get played! Their effect was seismic.

[timlove]

This was literally how I met the Beatles. And I met them as a second generation fan. I was in fourth grade. My family moved into our new home, and someone had left behind a copy of meet the Beatles. I instantly fell in love with the album. I played it over and over again. it is ironic that I was introduced to the Beatles by the same album most Americans were. Just 10 or 12 years later. Had the same effect on me.

[pastorjackmac]

My sister born in 1950 was a Beatle maniac. And I (born 56) got to hear all the 45s and albums. It was an incredible impact on our lives. The moptops replaced the crewcuts and slick backed Elvis styles. The guitars and 3part vocals and inventive songs wowed us and made a lot of other music dull. The fab four raised the bar of pop music to new heights. Everyone tried and failed to keep up to them but it brought out the best in the Beach Boys, Animals, Kinks and Rolling Stones

[acamaro]

As a child I remember one of my older brothers Vee-Jay pressing of '' Introducing The Beatles '' playing on his Panasonic home stereo. I believe that started his hobby of purchasing vinyl almost every week, thus accumulating his collection to more than 2000 mostly Rock vinyl records and later in the 1980's another collection of CD's. I also remember my oldest brother blasting his The Beatles '' Second Album '' on his very heavy Zenith foldable luggage style record player . It seems like if it was just yesterday but that was many many moons ago. As for me, back in 1988 I managed to purchase The Beatles blue box set in vinyl which I immediately equalized to my taste and DOLBY recorded all the albums to TDK metal bias cassettes. 35 years later those cassettes still sound as vibrant and clear as they did for the very first time.

[robertgriffith]

I appreciate that you say "I feel...", or "I think..." when discussing recordings. Too many on the internet present their opinions as facts. Every piece of music touches each person in an individual way, and a track that one person always skips is someone else's favorite.

[SPINNINGMYWHEELS]

@3:40 - Canadian album released before USA ... that explains why I see so many of that album in the states .. I think quite a few were directly imported into USA due to that.

[stephencooke]

It always warms my Canuck heart to see props given to Paul White and Capitol Canada. I've been a Beatles fan for 40 years, and yet never had a vinyl copy of Meet the Beatles since I had hand-me-down copies of the Canadian LPs, Twist & Shout, Beatlemania With the Beatles and Long Tall Sally (and I was more interested in the middle-to-late Beatles era anyway). But even after Meet the Beatles was issued in Canada, Beatlemania With the Beatles remained in print here until the early 1980s, and I didn't have a copy of MtB until that first box set with the U.S. albums on it, and playing it, it wasn't hard to imagine the impact that it had on American teens. Thanks for the insight into how the track rearrangement makes it a stronger album in many ways, although I still bristle at the policy of cutting songs and making new albums out of whole cloth with the leftovers. At least the Kinks didn't have to suffer that indignity after their first couple of albums, and they remained intact from Kontroversy onward.

[paulreckamp]

Ironically before you communicated the intention to address the 'Meet The Beatles ', I played it in its entirety for the first time in decades. I'd forgotten how fun it was to hear.
Just yesterday, my Brother and I compared all the White Albums and concluded the Dutch was the best. Then for fun I played him the full stereo version 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' mixed in Australia. It's on the Beatles Number One album. It's rather an unique master.
It was a delight to listen to it again!

[piershemmingsen]

Another great video Andrew. Well done. One minor point - and Paul White would be cross with me if I didn't point this out to your followers. A December 2, 1963 release date for Canada's Beatlemania! Lp is often cited (incorrectly), but that is not the actual release date for the first Beatles Canada LP. Dec 2/63 was actually Capitol of Canada's "vault date" .. that was the date the EMI master tape was returned to Capitol's tape vault from the mastering company, RCA Victor. The Lp was officially released in Canada, and available in record shops, one week before, on Monday, November 25, 1963. This release date was just one business day after the UK Parlophone release date for With The Beatles. In the 1990s, I visited the EMI tape vault in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada and I carefully checked the tape vault logs versus the release dates. Capitol's Meet The Beatles finally got a Canadian release in Canada in 1967, and it was initially sold through the Capitol of Canada record club in both mono and stereo editions.

[rkmklz]

Meet The Beatles is the Greatest Rock and Roll Album of all time 😊