More than a decade after The Beatles in Mono box set got a limited-edition release on vinyl, the collection is back in print. The Beatles website has listed the 14-LP anthology, to be re-released July 18 (the CD version is still in stock here).
The box set contains the group’s first nine LPs as they came out in the U.K. — from Please Please Me to the White Album — as well as the U.S. compilation, Magical Mystery Tour, and non-album singles collected on Mono Masters. The albums, pressed on heavyweight, 180-gram vinyl, are just as they were when they came out originally, and the mono mixes still sound superior to the stereo versions of the time. (The box set notably doesn’t feature Fab Four’s three albums to be mixed primarily in stereo — Abbey Road, Yellow Submarine, and Let It Be.)
Engineer Sean Magee and mastering supervisor Steve Berkowitz, who have each won Grammys, oversaw the releases, working with quarter-inch master tapes without any digital interference, at Abbey Road Studios in 2014. The collection includes a hardbound book.
Apart from their release as a collection, six of the seven titles will be made available for sale individually as well — with the exception being “The Beatles Story,” a sort of audio documentary double-album that will only be included in the boxed set, Variety report.
All of the individual and collected titles went out on Nov. 22.
The six albums that will be included in the collection as well as become available singularly again are, in order of original release, “Meet the Beatles!” (which came out Jan. 20, 1964), “The Beatles’ Second Album” (April 10, 1964), “A Hard Day’s Night (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)” (June 26, 1964), “Something New” (July 20, 1964), “Beatles ’65” (Dec. 15, 1964) and “The Early Beatles” (March 22, 1965).
These particular U.S. albums have all been out of print in the LP format since 1995. Almost all the material on them (excepting the non-musical oddities on “The Beatles Story,” a release most fans consider noncanonical) has been available in the interim via differently configured equivalents of the catalog as they first appeared in the U.K.
An announcement Thursday from Apple and Universal Music said that all the LP releases will sport faithfully reproduced artwork, along with freshly conceived four-panel inserts featuring essays written by American Beatles historian Bruce Spizer. The vinyl lacquers for the reissues were cut by Kevin Reeves at East Iris Studios in Nashville.
O.G. Beatles fans in the U.S. may cherish these reissues like long-lost friends, while some of those who only began following the group in the decades well after their 1970 breakup may become acquainted with these domestic configurations for the first time via this set, as Apple has largely stuck with the British versions of the Beatles’ early and mid-’60s releases in the CD-and-beyond era.
As Universal noted in a press release, an album like “Beatles ’65” — which was put together specifically for the American audience and was not issued in the U.K. — consisted of eight tracks from “Beatles for Sale” (an LP that did not originally come out in the U.S.) and added three U.K. singles (“I’ll Be Back,” “I Feel Fine” and “She’s A Woman”). If you’re a latter-day fan who has a hard time charting why the Beatles’ U.S. and U.K. releases prior to “Sgt. Pepper” were so different, you’re hardly alone — everything about the group’s early catalog should be labeled “it’s complicated.”
