Introducing... The Beatles is the first Beatles album in the United States. Originally scheduled for a July 1963 release, the LP finally came out on 10 January 1964, mere days before Capitol's
Meet The Beatles!. It was the subject of much legal wrangling, but ultimately, Vee-Jay Records was permitted to sell the album until the fall of 1964, by which time it had sold more than 1.3 million copies. When it issued the "Please Please Me" single in the United States, Vee-Jay Records signed a licensing agreement with Transglobal, an EMI affiliate that worked to place foreign masters with U.S. record labels, giving it the right of first refusal on Beatles records for five years. As part of that agreement, Vee-Jay planned to release the UK
Please Please Me album in the U.S., and received copies of the mono and stereo master tapes in late April or early May of 1963. Originally, Vee-Jay considered releasing the album exactly as it appeared in England. A surviving acetate made by Universal Recording Corporation of Chicago, probably in May 1963, contains all 14 songs in the same order as on the UK album, with the title still listed as
Please Please Me. But in keeping with the American norm of a 12-song album, Vee-Jay chose instead to delete the songs "Please Please Me" and "Ask Me Why" and change the album's title to
Introducing... The Beatles. Also, the engineer at Universal in Chicago thought that Paul McCartney's count-in at the start of "I Saw Her Standing There" was extraneous rather than intentionally placed there, so he snipped the "one, two, three" from Vee-Jay's mono and stereo masters. Except for those deletions, the order and contents of the album were untouched, resulting in a U.S. album that bore the closest resemblance to a British Beatles LP until Capitol’s Revolver in 1966. Preparations for the LP's release continued in late June and early July 1963, including the manufacturing of masters and metal parts and the printing of 6,000 front covers. But, despite the claims of many older books that
Introducing The Beatles was first released on 22 July 1963 no paper trail exists to suggest that the album was released at any time in 1963. After a management shake-up at the label, which included the resignation of company president Ewart Abner after he used company funds to cover gambling debts, Vee-Jay canceled
Introducing The Beatles. On 14 December 1963, Billboard magazine mentioned that Capitol Records planned an all-out promotional campaign for the Beatles in the United States. On 7 January 1964, Vee-Jay's board of directors met for the first time since that announcement, and it discussed the Beatles' material it had in the vault. Desperate for cash, the board decided to release IntroducingThe Beatles, even if it meant legal trouble in the future. Metal parts were already at Vee-Jay's three primary pressing plants, and 6,000 front covers were already printed. All of these were available on the market within days of the 10 January release date. On 16 January 1964,
Introducing... The Beatles was finally released, but Vee-Jay was served with a restraining order stopping further distribution. Beechwood Music, Inc., Capitol Records' publishing subsidiary, owned the American publishing rights to "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You", and because the two songs had not yet been officially released in the U.S., Beechwood refused to issue a license for Vee-Jay to release them. Approximately 80,000 copies of the album had been already released with the two songs on them, with only 2,000 or so in stereo. So in order to circumvent the restraining order, Vee-Jay quickly reconfigured the song list by removing "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You" and replaced them with the previously deleted "Ask Me Why" and "Please Please Me”. The new versions were prepared in late January and began appearing in stores approximately 10 February 1964. Because of the initial restraining order,
Introducing... The Beatles did not enter the Billboard album charts until one week after
Meet the Beatles!. Once it did, it quickly rose to the #2 spot, where it stayed for nine straight weeks. It also peaked at #2 in Cash Box, and it got to #1 in Record World magazine. It is interesting to note that the song "I Saw Her Standing There", which was first released in the U.K. on the album
Please Please Me, appeared in the U.S. on both the Vee-Jay album as well as Capitol's
Meet The Beatles! LP. These two albums were initially issued almost simultaneously, marking the only time that 2 different Beatles albums, each from a different record label, were released at around the same time with one song appearing on both albums. In the other hand, the songs “Misery” and “There’s a Place” were first released by Capitol as part of the
Rarities US album in 1980, and remained almost as unreleased songs since October 1964 when Vee Jay stopped distributing
Introducing The Beatles. The rest of the songs were included in
The Early Beatles, released by Capitol in mid-1965, which had very poor sales compared to the rest of the other Beatles records released back then, mainly due to the previous Vee Jay release of
Introducing... The Beatles. Here’s the second version released on early February 1964 from the original Vee Jay stereo and mono LPs.
01- I Saw Her Standing There
02- Misery
03- Anna [Go to Him]
04- Chains
05- Boys
06- Ask Me Why
07- Please Please Me
08- Baby It's You
09- Do You Want to Know a Secret?
10- A Taste of Honey
11- There's a Place
12- Twist & Shout
