Overview of the new 15-album "core catalog"
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When the Beatles albums were first released on CD in the late 1980s, the concept of a "core catalog" collection of 13 albums was established - all British albums with the tracks as they were originally released.
This "core catalog" merely perpetuated the ongoing problems of the Beatles album discography which had been festering since the beginning. Most importantly, it left many songs unaccounted, including very important ones like "She Loves You", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", "Day Tripper" and "Hey Jude". So two compilation CDs called "Past Masters" were then released. The need for these artificial and contrived compilation albums demonstrates the weakness of this "core catalog".
The discrepancies between the UK and USA Beatles album discographies are at the heart of this problem. The British custom in the 1960s, though inconsistent, was to leave singles off albums. In addition, British albums usually had more songs than American albums, generally 14 instead of 11. Another issue was what to do with soundtrack albums, none of which contain more than a half an album worth of soundtrack songs.
For example, the US Capitol album, "Something New" illustrates these problems. It had the five most obscure songs from the "Hard Days Night" movie because United Artists, owner of the movie rights, would not give Capitol access to the three most famous songs - the title theme song, "Can't Buy Me Love" and "I Should Have Known Better". Then Capitol just filled in the rest of the album with whatever they could, including the German overdub of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" of all things.
To counteract all of that, here is a new international Beatles album "core catalog" collection, with their new opus numbers from 1 to 15.
THE KEEPERS: Eight of the thirteen original UK "core catalog" albums are retained because they have clear artistic integrity, the latter four of which were also originally released in virtually identical versions on both sides of the pond. "Please Please Me" was likely the first rock music album to make any significant artistic statement at all. It is also noteworthy that the American "Magical Mystery Tour" album was not adopted by the British until six years after the Beatles broke up, to replace the anachronistic British EPs.
1 - Please Please Me (UK)
4 - A Hard Days Night (UK)
5 - Beatles For Sale (UK)
9 - Revolver (UK)
10 - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (UK/USA)
11 - Magical Mystery Tour (USA, then UK)
12 - White Album (UK/USA)
14 - Abbey Road (UK/USA)
A case can also be made for including two other albums in the new "core catalog" with their track listings fully intact, despite not being original British albums. Of these, the American "Rubber Soul" simply has more artistic impact than the British version in defining the great musical transition point for Beatles music. And "Let It Be... Naked" was commissioned by Sir Paul McCartney some thirty years later to revise and correct the original Phil Spector produced version which many people were not satisfied with.
7 - Rubber Soul (USA Version)
15 - Let It Be... Naked (UK/USA)
THE CHANGES: The track lists for five other albums can be modified to fill the criteria for the "core catalog" to include every Beatles song with no duplicates. All of these happen to be American releases except the "Help!" movie soundtrack, where the USA and UK versions took completely different but unsatisfactory courses to fill up the album. But at least the British filled it up with Beatles songs, not movie background music as did the American version.
2 - Meet the Beatles (USA)
3 - Beatles Second Album (USA)
6 - Help! (UK)
8 - Yesterday and Today (USA)
13 - Hey Jude (aka Beatles Again) (USA)
THE REJECTS: That leaves the following albums as rejects, among various others. Two of these, "With the Beatles" and "Yellow Submarine", are British albums demoted from their previous status as part of the 13 album "core catalog". "With the Beatles" poorly reflects its unique moment in history - the dawn of Beatlemania - compared to its American counterpart, "Meet the Beatles". "Yellow Submarine" was an animated film soundtrack that had only four new Beatles songs and merely used the fab four as cartoon characters. "Yellow Submarine" was also subjected to a later revision called "Yellow Submarine Songtrack" (similarly to the "Let It Be...Naked" revision) which eliminated the movie background music but tread no new ground except for some excellent new mixes.
Then there's the American album pair, "Beatles '65" and "Beatles VI", which were essentially the crude result of US Capitol chopping "Beatles For Sale" in half in order to have even more Beatles for sale. Most of the rest can be classified as contrived compilation albums which served their stopgap roles that were the result of the inadequacy of the previously released albums. So here is the "reject" album list, which should no doubt include other albums as well:
With the Beatles (UK)
Something New (USA)
Early Beatles (USA)
Beatles '65 (USA)
Beatles VI (USA)
A Collection of Beatles Oldies (UK)
Yellow Submarine (UK/USA)
Past Masters (UK/USA)
All of these albums are pretty much unnecessary, especially in this digital era of random access, do-it-yourself music programming. They had virtually zero input from the Beatles themselves, and all focus was just on putting the songs out there, not the listening experience itself. Can you imagine the Beatles treating the "Sgt. Pepper" album this way, as if they were just recording a bunch of songs without knowing where they would end up? So the rest of this blog is an album-by-album discussion of the 15 albums in the new "core catalog" collection, presented blog-style in reverse chronological order.
