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The Beatles

When the Beatles' albums were reissued on CD in 1987, the group seized the opportunity to standardize their catalog internationally, choosing to release the British version of their LPs on CD in every territory throughout the world. From their standpoint, it made sense creatively, since these were the albums they intended to make, and it also made sense from a consumer standpoint, since these British LPs were longer than their foreign counterparts, particularly the American LPs released between 1964 and 1965. While the reasoning behind the move was sound, it was controversial in America, since the vast majority of their audience there not only grew up on the U.S. versions, they may not have even been aware that there were great differences in how the music was issued in both the U.S. and U.K. up until Sgt. Pepper in 1967. To make matters even more complicated, the first four albums -- 1963's Please Please Me through 1964's Beatles for Sale -- were released in mono on CD, which was like pouring salt into the wounds for American fans: not only could they not get the versions they grew up with, they didn't even sound the same.

The Beatles were hardly the only British rock & roll band to have its LPs released in different incarnations in the U.S. During the height of the British Invasion in the mid-'60s, it was standard practice for U.S. record labels to shuffle songs between records, either to help promote singles or squeeze out as much product as they could out of a limited number of songs, and since LPs were released in both mono and stereo mixes, there several different variations of the basic album on the marketplace. This was done without the artist's consent, and the Beatles protested the issue with the notorious "butcher" cover of the U.S. album Yesterday...and Today, where the Fab Four dressed up in butchers coats surrounded by decapitated baby dolls and raw meat -- not a subtle criticism, but not an inaccurate one, either. After Sgt. Pepper ushered in the album rock era, this practice faded away. Years later, in the thick of the CD reissue boom, there was heavy nostalgia among record collectors for these American and British and stereo and mono variants, which led to '90s reissues of classic '60s rock albums containing both the stereo and mono mixes, or individual reissues of the U.S. and U.K. versions of particular albums. The Rolling Stones, Kinks, Animals, and many other peers of the Beatles were given reissues of these variants, but not the Beatles themselves, even though these were among the most requested reissues and were among the most interesting of these variations. Interesting is a word that cuts both ways -- they were interesting because they were popular, the records that brought Beatlemania to America, but interesting because they were wrong-headed, sometimes in their sequencing but often in their mixes. Under the supervision of Capitol executive Dave Dexter -- who initially rejected the Beatles for Capitol -- the original mixes were given ludicrous layers of echo on the stereo versions that changed the feel of the albums.

To those legions of American fans, it didn't matter that these American versions didn't sound as good, weren't approved by the band, and offered less value for the money, or that they could assemble the albums on CD-Rs or iPods. These were the versions that they grew up with, and they wanted them on CD, so they bought bootlegs of these albums at exorbitant prices. The heart wants what the heart wants, apparently. After years of being stuck at this impasse, Capitol suddenly announced in the fall of 2004 that the first four American albums -- Meet the Beatles!, Second Album, Something New, Beatles '65 -- would be released as a box set for the holiday season, containing stereo and mono mixes of each album. Fans in the U.S. celebrated, although there still was lingering controversy among some fans about whether