Introducing…The Beatles
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Chicago’s Vee Jay Records releases first Beatles record in United States - Introducing…The Beatles
Chicago’s Vee Jay Records was the first label to release any music by the Beatles in the United States. While that seemed like it would be a good thing for the label, resulting in the sale of millions of records, it catapulted them into a legal quagmire. Over time, Vee Jay released nearly two dozen different versions of the album Introducing…The Beatles as it dodged a barrage of restraining orders.
Initially, the Beatles had signed a recording contract in England in May of 1962 with Parlophone. This gave their parent company EMI the rights to offer any of the group’s recordings to various labels that they owned throughout the world. The EMI subsidiary in the United States was Capitol Records. However, Capitol turned down the rights to release “Please Please Me.”
With that, Transglobal, an EMI affiliate whose goal it was to place foreign masters with U.S. record companies, signed a licensing agreement with Vee Jay, giving it the right of first refusal on Beatles’ records for five years.
Vee Jay released the single “Please Please Me” b/w “Ask Me Why” and had plans to release an album titled Please Please Me. With those plans intact, Transglobal delivered copies of the mono and stereo master tapes to Vee Jay in the spring of 1963.
Originally, Vee Jay considered releasing the Please Please Me LP unaltered, as it appeared in the UK. A surviving acetate made by Universal Recording Corporation of Chicago, probably in May, 1963, contains all 14 songs in the same order as on the UK album, with the title still listed as Please Please Me. But in keeping with the American norm of a 12-song album, Vee Jay chose instead to omit "Please Please Me" and "Ask Me Why" (which had comprised the first single release) and change the album's title to Introducing... The Beatles. Also, the engineer at Universal in Chicago thought that Paul McCartney’s count-in at the start of "I Saw Her Standing There” was extraneous rather than intentionally placed there, so he snipped the "one, two, three" (leaving the "four") from Vee Jay's mono and stereo masters. Except for those differences, the order and contents of the UK version of the album were untouched.
Preparations for the album's release continued in late June and early July 1963, including the manufacturing of masters and metal parts and the printing of 6,000 front covers. Per Beatle historians, the album was to be released in July. However, Vee Jay was mired with internal problems after label boss Ewart Abner had siphoned off the company’s money to cover personal gambling debts. That resulted in his resignation from Vee Jay, and the postponement of the release of the album.
Mired in debt, Vee Jay was not reporting sales nor paying any royalties on their sales on “Please Please Me.” As a result, Transglobal declared its contract with Vee Jay to be null and void, licensing the next single “She Loves You” to Swan.
