The Beatles - With The Beatles (1963)

April 11, 2023

The cover is the same, but the British edition differs significantly from the American release I purchased in 1963 or 1964. Or did my father buy this album? I would be nine years old when the Fab Four made their presence known in Los Angeles through the central culture world of television, specifically The Ed Sullivan Show. I faintly remember having Meet The Beatles before that show was broadcast in February 1964. That was the title of the American edition of the album. It had fewer songs, and I’m pretty sure it had She Loves You, and I Want To Hold Your Hand.
I’m writing this with only memory as my guidance. Their first (and British) album, Please Please Me, is a work that came out of another universe, known as England to me at the time. I wasn’t aware of that album or how it was compiled then.

I bought With The Beatles recently because I wanted to hear it without the baggage of memories attached to the recordings. And this is very much a new version of Meet The Beatles, so in a way, it is a brand new work to my ears. My favorite cut off this album is Hold Me Tight because it has an urgency and energy of either pure happiness with a touch of despair that things can go terribly wrong. Or that is the way the music is conveyed to me. I often have these emotional approaches to music, and I can transform any lyric into whatever anxiety is going through my brain. Oddly, my early memory of The Beatles is in black and white, both the physical images I have seen, such as the album cover, and the numerous images I have seen of them in magazines and in newsprint. And then their classic film Hard Day’s Night is filmed in black and white. I didn’t think of them in color until I saw the film Help, and at that point, they became a presence in living colors. My world was in black and white. We didn’t have a color TV set in the house, and the films I saw with my parents, were primarily made in Europe, all in black and white. So, as a young tot, I was not aware of the technicolor world of cinema until later in life. Like the early Godard, I saw as a youth, Hard Days Night, as a film, fitted in that European New Wave world.

Another highlight of this album is All My Loving, and I had a thing for Till There Was You. That song is very pretty, and I crazed intensely seductive melodies, but at the same time, I like the intensity of the rockin’ Hold Me Tight. The duality of both those songs described my inner feelings of being a child at that stage in my life. Listening to this album presently, it doesn’t bring memories back. Only when I see the black and white cover does it taste like my past.