Hey, Hey, We're the Beatles

Hairy Beatles Frighten Young Lad

After my introduction to the world of records through a couple of Monkees purchases back in the mid-ish 70's, I decided it was time to buy my first Beatles record. After all, I'd been smitten by the music I heard in the movies Help! and A Hard Day's Night, which I'd seen on TV. 

The year is fuzzy in my memory, but I must have been no older than about twelve or thirteen. It was shortly after Christmas, and I had some cash in my pocket, a gift from a thoughtful old great-aunt who lived in Detroit. That dough was earmarked for my record purchase. Finally, the Saturday came when my mom was going to drive me to the department store, a Walmart, I believe. The record department was daunting, since I had never set foot in one before this moment. My Monkees purchases had been made in the schoolyard, simple casual transactions with no paper trail. 

So here I was facing bins of records arranged in alphabetical order. Straight to The Beatles section I went, but there I found precious few of their discs to choose from. In fact, the first ones I looked at didn't even look like the Beatles! Hey, they were supposed to wear suits and ties, mop-top haircuts, and have smiling, clean-shaven faces. Instead, I was looking at a quartet of rather serious-looking, hairy-faced hippies on the front covers. Years later, I would understand the importance of those off-putting albums (the cover art, that is) called Hey Jude and Let It Be. For now, though, I wanted the familiar faces and music that I knew from the movies I'd seen. I came upon an album with a fun design on the cover: a grouping of several brownish-tinted (sepia tone to a grownup me) photos of the "young" band with big, bold funky lettering proclaiming this The Beatles' Second Album. I snapped it up and headed to the cashier with no further thought. I didn't know song titles or anything yet, so this was as good a place as any to start. I slapped down my ten dollar bill, which more than covered the cost of the record, and then walked out of the store the proud and happy owner of Beatles music. 

I played that record endlessly, loving every riff and vocal harmony. The order of the tracks is so ingrained in my mind that whenever I hear one of that release's songs on the radio or while I am out somewhere, the moment it ends, I begin to play the album's following song in my head. From Roll Over Beethoven to She Loves You, the Second Album packed a terrific rock'n'roll punch. Even Motown covers like Devil in Her Heart and Money, transformed by the Fab Four, became fast favourites.

Years after I'd done away with my record collection, I regretted parting with that Beatles album, among others. For portability's sake, I had scaled down to the cassette tape format not long before heading off to college. I did gradually replace all of my favourite vinyl with tapes, and the Beatles were among the first additions to my new collection. And this U.S. released Second Album (not one of the UK originals released by the band, this was a re-compiling of songs for the North American market) was among the first tapes I sought out. 

Even though the arrival of the CD medium brought to me, and the rest of North America, all of the Beatles music, these were the "proper" versions of the albums - the original UK versions. For over twenty years I was fine with my Beatles CD collection, but for some odd reason I still pined for that Second Album (for purely nostalgic reasons, I'm sure), which really was just an assemblage of songs from various UK albums. Which I already owned. But to hear those songs in their Second Album sequence, with that distinctive album artwork to gaze upon, was all I wanted. Then just a couple of years ago, I found on the internet that very album on CD. Finally! And in addition to the glorious echo-y original mono version I knew so well, a stereo version of the album was included. I won't be selling off this disc!