Ken Ficara

Tower’s going-out-of-business sale is now at 30% off everything, which means that even the outrageously priced $18.99 CDs are about the same price they’d be on sale at J&R. There’s still a lot of selection, so it’s worth a visit. (DVDs are on sale too but after dropping mumble dollars on CDs I decided I didn’t need to buy any movies.)

The main thing I got was the Capitol Albums, two boxed sets of the original Beatles albums as they were released in the U.S. The Beatles were my first love musically (not counting Johnny Cash, whose San Quentin album was the first adult record I owned, but whose albums I didn’t start buying with my own money until many years later), and like anyone who grew up in the U.S. before the CD era, the albums that I bought were very different from the ones in record stores now. The Beatles’ U.S. record company took the five albums they released in the U.K. in 1964-65 and turned them into eight albums, each with only 11 or 12 tracks versus the 14 on the originals.

Nothing like The Beatles had happened before, and nothing would again. It was the end of the era where artists would have so little control over their work that albums could be changed arbitrarily, and the beginning of the modern music marketing machine. The Beatles’ arrival in the U.S. was the first time record-label promotion had succeeded on such an enormous scale, taking them from being virtual unknowns in the U.S. in late 1963, to occupying the top five spots on the Billboard charts in April of 1964. No one has dominated the charts like that since, largely because no record company since has flooded the market with so much music so quickly. Capitol released a new Beatles album every three months for two years. Those were the albums that introduced U.S. fans to their music, the albums that I grew up buying and listening to. And now here they are on CD, packaged in miniature versions of the album covers I pored over as a child.

This rock&roll has gotta stop, Junior’s head is hard as rock!