[Severian]

Originally Posted by noisereductions

I always hated trying to make sense of their discography before the US and UK albums were the same.

Yeah, I had some serious difficulty with it when they started selling the UK versions here. I grew up listening to my dad's LP's from the '60s. There really is no simple way to sum up how complicated things got over the years with Capitol VS. Parlaphone and UA. But this quote from Ultimate Hard Rock's Beatles UK/US album guide at least shows how it started:

By the time the Beatles reached America, their record company, Parlophone/EMI, had already released two albums and a handful of singles in their native England...
U.S. albums rarely included more than 12 songs (possibly out of fear of fidelity loss due to “groove-cramming”), and all of the U.K. albums contained 14 tracks. Then there was the matter of the non-LP singles, a practice common in the U.K. but not in the U.S. Capitol needed a place to put hits like ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and ‘She Loves You.’ In those first few years, the Beatles operated under a breakneck schedule of a new single every three months and a new LP every six months...
Complicating matters even more was the issue of ‘Introducing . . . the Beatles,’ a near-repackaging of their U.K. debut, ‘Please Please Me,’ which was licensed to Vee-Jay Records when Capitol passed on it in the summer of 1963. As part of a lawsuit settlement, the rights to those songs were transferred to Capitol in October 1964 – a year and a half after they were released overseas.

When the Beatles first issued their entire catalog on CD in 1987, they decided to streamline their records once and for all, and only the original U.K. albums were released (except for ‘Magical Mystery Tour'; see below for explanation). While this may have confused American fans who couldn’t get ‘Beatles VI’ or bought ‘Rubber Soul’ expecting to hear it begin with ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’ only to get ‘Drive My Car’ instead, it ended their messy catalog headache for good.

Until 2004 that is, when Capitol put out a box of the group’s first four U.S. records, replicating track listings and artwork, and followed it up two years later with the next four albums. And now there’s ‘The U.S. Albums,’ which compiles Capitol’s 12 LPs (including the first CD appearance of ‘The Beatles Story,’ a two-record cash-grab from 1964 made up of interviews and press conferences) and the soundtrack to ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ which originally came out on United Artists. We’ve compiled this guide to the Beatles’ U.S. albums, showing how their label assembled them from what was available.


*headache*