So why is The Beatles’ Meet The Beatles! on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
It’s fascinating – and sometimes a little frustrating – for best 1,000 albums ever project purposes – to sort through situations where different versions of an album were released in different countries, often involving the United States and United Kingdom.
This practice mostly ended by the 1980s – and lingered a bit in indie releases into the 1990s. The same is true in book publishing, as an aside. If you’re a fan of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, for example, you might know that the critical difference between the original UK version and its subsequent American printing is absolutely wild.
In the case of figuring out what to do with The Beatles’ catalog with regard to this crazy/audacious best 1,000 albums project thing, it’s particularly fraught because every permutation of Beatles’ song collections drips with iconic and towering achievements, it seems.
Which is all to say more plainly: you know what, The Beatles are pretty good.
Meet The Beatles! contains nine of the 12 tracks that were included on With The Beatles, which had previously been released in the UK. And then what’s critical from a U.S. perspective is that Meet The Beatles! was both the first time that most Americans experienced The Beatles (see: Beatlemania taking over the land) and the fact that three songs – previous singles released in the UK – were also included: “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” and “This Boy.”
On an anecdotal note: my mother, an avid Beatles fan, will always bring up “I Want To Hold Your Hand” as the song that introduced her to The Beatles.
Attempting to listen to “I Want To Hold Your Hand” with fresh ears is challenging, but the great news is that it sounds incredibly fresh and alive sixty years after it was first released.
And it’s really mind bending to think that when The Beatles first assembled, “rock and roll” was not the dominant form of pop music in England (see: skiffle music!). So here were these kids – still very young men by the time they exploded in the U.S. (George Harrison, the youngest, was only 20), obsessed with American blues, R&B, and rock music, and blended it deftly with British traditions and, well, presto – magic was in the offing that jumps out of my speakers to this day.
I just find it incredibly exciting, and my great hope is that if you dig The Beatles or this kind of music at all, it holds at least a little of the same feelings for you.
Just at the moment, my two favorite songs on Meet The Beatles! are “It Won’t Be Long” and “All My Loving.” Each has that boundless energy, that early rock-and-roll pioneering spirit, and that now-classic Beatles sound. But it also occurs to me that even at such a young age, these lads had put in their proverbial 10,000 hours, including countless concerts in England (and Hamburg, Germany during their formative years, dating all the way back to 1960).
Then I’ll find a “new favorite” on any given listen, and just as a moment it’s the clean, minimal, and gorgeous vibe of “All I’ve Got To Do,” a song I can imagine the likes of The Kinks and The Zombies and other British Invasion bands listening to on repeat until it would become a part of their musical DNA.
Some stats & info about The Beatles – Meet The Beatles!
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, British Invasion, British Bands
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – #197
- All Music’s rating – 4.5 out of 5 stars
- When was Meet The Beatles! released? 1964
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #213 out of 1,000
The Beatles’ Meet The Beatles! on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from The Beatles’ Meet The Beatles! that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you. Tomorrow, I’ll miss you – remember I’ll always be true.
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.