WITH THE BEATLES

Until the advent of the CD, those of us in America didn't get a chance to appreciate the early Beatles albums as they were meant to be... in the early 60's, British albums typically had 3 or 4 more songs on an album than the standard 10 American albums came with. Thank God, when the CD format came around, someone at EMI/Capitol decided to do it right and only brought out the albums in the correct UK format. About half of the British "With the Beatles" was put onto the American Capitol Debut "Meet the Beatles." The rest was saved for the next American album. I don't have a copy of this CD, but I have heard ALL the songs(who hasn't ?) so I feel confident in rating this one.

The Good: "It Won't Be Long", "All My Loving", "Money"... all catchy tunes.

The Bad: "Don't Bother Me" George Harrison's songwriting debut (aside from an instrumental he wrote in the Hamburg days). Harrison would go on to be as good a songwriter as Lennon/McCartney by Abbey Road. Here, he shows he still has much to learn about the craft of writing songs.

The Ugly: "Till there was you" is practically elevator music. It is a Meredith Wilson cover song... I personally would rather listen to Don Meredith sing "The party's over..." than hear this one. What were they thinking when they gave " I Wanna Be Your Man"for Ringo to sing ? You can just imagine the look of pain on his face when he tries to reach the higher notes.

How to rate the early Beatles albums ? I have no problem rating some of their later works highly on a prog site. The Beatles early works were very good- even in the early 60's, the Beatles were more than just another Pop band. But they weren't Prog or even Proto-Prog even as liberal as it is defined on this site. So this album is certainly good... even very good. But not essential.