With The Beatles by The Beatles
With The Beatles is the second studio album by the English rock group The Beatles. It was released on 22 November 1963 on Parlophone, and was recorded four months after the band's debut Please Please Me. The album features eight original compositions (seven by Lennon-McCartney and "Don't Bother Me", George Harrison's first recorded solo composition and his first released on a Beatles album) and six covers (mostly of Motown and R&B hits). Most of the songs from the album were released in the United States by Capitol Records as the Meet The Beatles! LP on 20 January 1964, and the remaining that were not, featured on their next US album, The Beatles' Second Album. The album was also released in November 1963 by Capitol Records in Canada, with a slight change to the title: Beatlemania! With The Beatles. This release has the distinction of being the first LP of Beatles material released in North America, pre-dating the Capitol US Meet The Beatles! and the Vee Jay Records Introducing... The Beatles LPs by two months. The LP had advance orders of a half million and sold another half million by September 1965, making it the second album to sell a million copies in the United Kingdom, after the soundtrack to the 1958 film South Pacific. With The Beatles stayed at the top of the charts for 21 weeks, displacing Please Please Me, so that The Beatles occupied the top spot for 51 consecutive weeks. It even reached number 11 in the "singles charts" (because at the time UK charts counted all records sold, regardless of format). EMI Australia did not receive the cover art, and used a caricature of the band in a similar style to the black-and-white photograph on other releases. The Beatles were unaware of this until fans showed them the cover during their only Australian tour, and informed the EMI publicity staff that they were not pleased with the substitution. On 26 February 1987, With The Beatles was officially released on compact disc (in mono only, catalogue number CDP 7 46436 2). Having been available only as an import in the US in the past, the album was also issued domestically in the US on LP and cassette on 21 July 1987. Along with the rest of the Beatles' canon, it was re-released on CD in newly re-mastered stereo and mono versions on 9 September 2009. In 2003, the album was ranked number 420 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
The Beatles didn’t get a lot of breathing room in 1963: In February, they had to be smuggled out of a show in Carlisle in a post office van by a police sergeant disguised as a mail carrier; by November, a couple of weeks before the release of their second album, <i>With the Beatles</i>, a riot broke out after fans <i>pushed a parked car</i> into a line of police officers trying to enforce a cordon outside a show in Dublin. Though the precise coinage is still debated, the word “Beatlemania” entered the public lexicon in October; at a couple of live shows, the band reportedly stopped being able to hear their instruments over the sound of the screaming.<br /> While the bulk of <i>Please Please Me</i> had been recorded in a single 13-hour session, <i>With the Beatles</i> was recorded in seven sessions over three months—a schedule that seems comparatively luxurious until you realise that every session took place on days between tour dates or other travel-oriented obligations, and in at least one case, straddled a three-and-a-half-hour stretch in the middle of the day during which the band drove to a theatre several miles from the studio to record both an interview <i>and</i> a session for the BBC. In London traffic. On a Tuesday. Oh, and they wrote most of the songs, too, and in some mysterious hour during which the accomplished accomplish things, they learned to play them as well.<br /> And so here they were again: Moody on the album cover (a black-and-white Robert Freeman photo inspired by Freeman’s images of John Coltrane), bright and unruffled in the music. Like <i>Please Please Me</i>, about half of <i>With the Beatles</i> was made up of covers of American soul and R&B (The Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman”, Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got a Hold on Me”), while half were Lennon and/or McCartney originals. If Lennon was emerging as the band’s ironist (Barrett Strong’s “Money [That’s What I Want]”), McCartney was becoming their moony romantic (<i>The Music Man</i> highlight “Till There Was You”)—a yin-yang balance that lasted the duration of their shared career. (At the <i>Royal Variety Performance</i> in early November, Lennon famously encouraged the people in the cheap seats to clap along and the rest of the audience—which included the Queen—“rattle your jewelry.”)<br /> While still basically a youth band, they’d started to get dues from the establishment, too: A couple of days before Christmas, a critic for <i>The Times</i> said they were the finest English composers of the year, noting that they seemed to think simultaneously of harmony <i>and</i> melody, while also singling out the naturalness of their Aeolian cadences and intriguing pandiatonic clusters, none of which mattered to the hoarse-voiced teenagers squatted for days outside ticket booths, but which signalled the possibility that the band was on the brink of universal appeal: pop music handled with the sanctity of art.
