Bruce Spizer featured in Forbes article.

by Darryn King

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The release “enable listeners, young and old, to understand what all the excitement was about in 1964,” said Beatles historian Bruce Spizer, who provided new liner notes for the box set. “The only way to exactly duplicate the 1964 listening experience would be to play an album from 1964 on a poor-fidelity mono record player that produced an ever-present hum when you turned it on. Authentic—but what’s the point when you can now hear these fantastic records the way they would have sounded in 1964 had the technology existed then? These newly pressed albums give us the best of both worlds—the 1964 line-up enhanced with 2024 technology, but true to the source material.”

I asked Spizer about what it was like, as a first-generation U.S. Beatles fan, to encounter the U.K. albums years later. He too found the experience “disorienting.” “For me, it was not until the 1968 Beatles biography by Hunter Davies that I learned about the U.K. albums,” he said. “I kept hearing the U.S. running order in my head, so when I heard a song different from what I was expecting next, it felt strange.”

As Spizer pointed out, Meet The Beatles! was the perfect album to introduce Americans to the Beatles. “It started off with both sides of the Capitol single ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ b/w ‘I Saw Her Standing There.’ Then we got the U.K. B-side ‘This Boy,’ a lovely ballad, followed by all the original compositions from With The Beatles in the same running order as the U.K. LP, but without five of the six cover version songs. The one cover song on Meet The Beatles! was a lovely jazzy arrangement of the ballad ‘Till There Was You.’”

The album resonated particularly well for those who’d seen the Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9—four songs performed that night were on Meet The Beatles! “She Loves You,” along with the five rock and roll cover songs from With The Beatles, would end up on the next Capitol pieces-parts creation, The Beatles’ Second Album, “which turned out to be a fantastic rock ’n’ roll record”. The Beatles’ Second Album gave U.S. fans two songs before they were released anywhere in the world: “I Call Your Name” and Paul’s rendition of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” in Spizer’s estimation “one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll vocals ever recorded,” with “an incredible backing track, with Ringo going crazy at the end of the song—all over his drum kit but never missing a beat.”

“Those first two Capitol albums formed a great one-two punch!” added Spizer. “And they are as exciting today as they were back in 1964.”

Infamously, Capitol producer Dave Dexter Jr. slathered cavernous echo over a bunch of Beatles tracks in the U.S. “Dexter’s addition of echo was not consistently applied,” said Spizer. “For example, the mono version of The Beatles’ Second Album is flat for all songs except ‘Thank You Girl,’ whereas the stereo version has reverb on most of the tracks, particularly noticeable on the rock ’n’ roll songs that first appeared on the U.K. With The Beatles LP.” Spizer clarified that “Most fans bought the albums in mono when they first came out in 1964. Stereo albums cost a dollar more, and very few youngsters had stereo record players back then.

“When I began repurchasing the early albums again in the late sixties, only the stereo versions were available as Capitol had phased out its mono pressings. Hearing ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ on The Beatles’ Second Album in stereo was a revelation. It sounded so different and exciting. Sometimes the echo-added versions sounded great, but not always. The echo-drenched fake stereo version of ‘I Feel Fine’ on the stereo version of Beatles ’65 is horrendous. It sounds much better on the mono LP.”

Read full article here: ‘The Beatles: 1964 Albums In Mono’: ‘Like Sex Without The Sex’