Best Year Ever!
The BeatlesThe Capitol Albums Vol. 2
Capitol
1965 was a cultural pivot point, the year haircuts grew longer, guitar volume grew louder and music started getting all fuzzy and freaky around the edges. At the center of the ferment were the Beatles, who in just 12 months transitioned from preternaturally gifted teen idols to sonic and spiritual questers with a taste for Bob Dylan, sitars and LSD.
That head year is documented — sort of — in this 5" by 10" box set, which compiles the Beatles' four 1965 U.S. releases. It's the second installment of a reissue project that will encompass all of their stateside Capitol albums, by definition a wonky undertaking, aimed at Beatles nuts steeped in discographical minutiae, and at unregenerate audiophiles — the kind of crazies who relish "unique Capitol stereo-to-mono mixdowns with added echo and reverb." (All four albums are included here in stereo and mono versions.)
But The Capitol Albums Vol. 2 is also the history of a lie. Capitol rejiggered the Beatles' catalog for the Yanks, with key songs deleted, sequences reshuffled and echo slapped onto many recordings to "Americanize" the sound. Several crucial 1965 records — "Yesterday," "Nowhere Man" and other yard-markers of artistic growth — didn't appear on U.S. LPs until deep in 1966.
But — purists be dammed — these records rule. The Early Beatles, released in March 1965, cobbles together bits of the great 1963 U.K. LP Please Please Me and other anachronistic odds and ends, including a ferocious cover of The Shirelles' "Boys," with vocals by Mr. Richard Starkey. Beatles VI hit stores just three months later, and it's also a glorious grab bag, featuring everything from the early Lennon-McCartney moodpiece "Every Little Thing" to a cover of "Dizzy Miss Lizzie" bashed out in a quickie session after Capitol requested some extra tracks.
The movie Help! was tripe, but on the soundtrack, Americans finally caught up with the '65 model Beatles. The title track is a gasp of desperation disguised as a pop tune (Lennon later called it the anthem of his "fat Elvis" period); on "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," Lennon channels Dylan's vocal style and world-weariness; "Ticket to Ride" is a clangorous piece of protopsychedelia, evidence of new sonic ambitions and upped drug intake.
And then there's Rubber Souls. Beatles diehards have long maligned the U.S. version of this landmark LP for nixing "Drive My Car," in the process obscuring the Beatles' debts to soul music, and their stated ambition to make an album of "comedy numbers." But it was replaced by McCartney's tumbling folk-pop masterpiece "I've Just Seen a Face" (take that, Paul Simon!), and everything else — the classic ("In My Life"), the buried treasure ("Girl"), your grandma's favorite ("Michelle") — shimmer in this remastered recording. Bowdlerized history has never sounded so good.
DOWNLOAD: "Twist and Shout," "Every Little Thing," Ticket to Ride," "You're Gonna Lose That Girl," "I've Just Seen a Face," "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)," "I'm Looking Through You," "In My Life"
