"Please Please Me" by The Beatles – ***

First released: 1963

This is the album that started it all, at least in England. For the US, stardom was to come to The Beatles in about another year with this album reconfigured slightly by Vee-Jay Records and released as Introducing The Beatles. The first time I heard this album was sometime in 1980 or 1981 when my mother purchased the Beatles box set that had all 12 original Beatles albums in their UK configurations, plus a bonus “rarities” disc. I was very happy with this in the vinyl days and Capitol in the US chose to issue this album, minus a few tracks as "The Early Beatles". To this day I still don’t have "The Early Beatles" on vinyl, favoring this configuration with its 14 tracks over 11.

I completely understand this album’s significance as you had to start somewhere, but looking back on it, it is really a primitive outing as British recording technology was quite inferior to the US counterpart. Why do think Capitol layered on echo and reverb on these early Beatles recordings? It was to make them somewhat tolerable to US ears.

For me, I came to this album rather late in the game, after I had purchased or at least heard most of the later albums. As a result, I didn’t really warm up to it until the CD was issued in 1987, and then I started to respect this music. By that time, I had heard most of the originals and developed more of an appreciation for 50s music which I hadn’t before. To me, music really started getting good around 1965 and not much happened before. My opinion has dramatically changed since this original assessment and I give it a high rating for early raw energy.

Let me say here my commentary on the 1987 CD booklets: they stunk in 1987, and they stink now. Except for "Sgt. Pepper’s" and the “White Album”, all of the rest of the booklets are garbage. It’s a shame that a group as significant as The Beatles should have shoddy artwork accompanying their releases when the Yoko Ono CDs look magnificent! This is how CD booklets should be. Of course, now with the advent of digital downloading, we may never get those pristine CD booklets…

2009 update: finally, they updated the sound and the booklets, long after CDs became passe. Buy the Apple-shaped flash drive instead...