In today’s global marketplace, the idea of any Beatles product being different in another country is unthinkable. But with the launch of the 8-track and compact cassette in the late 1960’s EMI totally reconfigured The Beatles albums to fit the new formats making them unrecognizab;e from thier vinyl counterparts. I this video we look not just the hstory of the format but what each album looked like in the alternate reality of tape.
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Nice video. Over here in sneezeland, the reel to reel tapes are the one's I seek out the most. While the "White Album" is the one that's most baffiling. In the U.S. it was issued first as a single tape, then re-issued as a double tape with songs shortened and rearranged. This still makes no sense to me in why would you issue two tapes with edited versions? If anything you would think the single tape would be the one with the edits.
The U.S. cassette for The White Album was issued on two tapes in 1968, enclosed in a beautiful thick black sleeve, with The Beatles name etched in gold. (I still have my copy).
Very, very informative and interesting!
Always hated the reordering and 'splitting' of tracks done for 8-tracks. After watching this video, I went back to check something else and got a new surprise: the reordering and splitting was not always consistent between the US and UK. Take Magical Mystery Tour:
UK 8-track (8X-PCS 3077)
1: Magical Mystery Tour / Fool On The Hill / Flying / Blue Jay Way [part 1]
2: Blue Jay Way [part 2] / Your Mother Should Know / I Am The Walrus [part 1]
3: I Am The Walrus [part 2] / Hello Goodbye / Strawberry Fields Forever / Penny Lane [part 1]
4: Penny Lane [part 2] / All You Need Is Love
US 8-track (8XT-2835)
1: Magical Mystery Tour / Blue Jay Way / Your Mother Should Know
2: Strawberry Fields Forever / Baby You're a Rich Man / I Am The Walrus [part 1]
3: I Am The Walrus [part 2] / Fool On The Hill / Hello Goodbye
4: Flying / Penny Lane / All You Need Is Love
The UK maintains the strict split between film and non-film songs, but at a high cost with splitting 3 songs. The US mixes film and non-film, but at least only Walrus gets split. I wonder if the splits come in the same place – can't assume.
Andrew, here's an idea for a future video:
The bonus inserts in the Sgt. Pepper LP Magical Mystery Tour EP, and the White Album, and then why there was nothing for Yellow Submarine and Abbey Road LPs.
The Uk cassette of Rubber Soul is the version I grew up with, and I love the running order!
She Loves You was "processed electronically to give a twin channel Stereo effect." That makes it sound like they found a way to place the vocals on one channel and the instruments on the other. Which is what would have happened if this was released in true stereo in the first place!
I never had any Beatles cassettes but it was fun learning about the random order of the track listings. I love listening to cassettes and making my own mixtapes I recently bought one of my favorite blank cassette tapes two of them in fact Killa Keise and also max cells does our 120 minute wait because that takes those are good because I love to record an entire album more mixes of different songs.
No format better that the CD, including the practical aspect of it. Period.
PS: But in the old days, I liked 90 minute empty cassettes, where I could copy a whole lp on each 45 minute side. I still have many such recorded cassetes and i would play them but alas i have 4 cassette decks, all of them gone kaput and too expensive to fix if i find someome to fix at least one of them.
I love learning about the formats of cassettes and eight track tapes I will definitely have to track down all of the Beatles albums on cassette I did find one Cassatt two cassettes that’s what I will get the red and the blue albums which I’m glad I found online.
I became a Beatles fan in 1987. The first Beatles albums I actually owned (as opposed to taping from the radio, taping from public library copies, etc.) were Abbey Road and Let It Be on cassette, Christmas presents from my brother. This is America, so they were Capitol-branded. Abbey Road reflected the tape in your video, with the opening tracks juxtaposed, but Let It Be moved "I, Me, Mine" to the beginning of side 2. I didn't know that was different, so I was kind of blindsided when the CDs came out and I heard "I, Me, Mine" seemingly out of place! Those were really the only Beatles cassettes I ever owned, except someone (probably my brother) got me one of the Tony Sheridan reissues some time later. I started buying the CDs in 1990 after I got a CD player.
Also in America — "Revolution 1" and "Revolution 9" were listed as "Revolution No. 1" and "Revolution No. 9" on the Capitol cassettes. And Yellow Submarine actually had sort of a bonus track: "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" kicked off side 2!
I'm stunned that for the cassette they didn't put "I Saw Her Standing There" back in its place rather than just follow the 8-track arrangement!
They could have kept HELP! in a reasonable order by just switching their tape sides. Side 2 opens with Help!–why not make that side, side 1? It appears no one at EMI, even when tapes were coming out, paid any attention to the integrity of the original running orders. (And this comes from a guy who grew up with the US albums!)
Fascinating episode, Andrew! Back in the mid-to-late 70s, I had a copy of Sgt. Pepper on 8-track here in the States. Aside from the butchered track sequencing, my recollection of it was that the sound quality was crisp, clean, and warm, and I enjoyed listening to it on my dad’s hi-fi whenever I could. It was the closest thing to an audiophile experience a young teen in the New Jersey suburbs in those days could get. Now my preferred experience is on vinyl, at home anyway.
I think the only Beatles cassette I ever bought was a double play tape of the Blue album I got from a charity shop in 2001. I know it was 2001 because I remember hearing the news the next day that George Harrison had died.
Anyway, that only had a slightly different sequence, with Revolution and Back In The USSR swapped round, that can’t have made much difference in duration surely but it sounds okay.
Hello Andrew, regarding the listing of 'Rubber Soul', although I love the UK vinyl/CD listing, I think the US Capitol is way better, that is one man's opinion. My uncle used to have some of those Capitol 8-tracks and I do remember they sounded very good, with no noise or vinyl scratches.
I bought myself a cassette player a couple of years before a record player. It was in the 1970’s and I was a teenager.
My girlfriend bought by mistake “Please please me” on cassette for my birthday. It was really “1962-66” I’d wanted but I didn’t say anything – except thank you. Her mistake was understandable, it’s practically the same photo on the cover.
Later I started collecting Beatles on vinyl.
It took me a long time to get used to the “right” track listing on the vinyl “Please please me”😆
As a kid in the US in the late 70s, I became a Beatles fan solely because my parents had the red greatest hits albums on 8-track in the car. I could either listen to bad country music on the AM radio, or listen to Drive My Car again for the 500th time; I always made the right choice.
Interesting and I agree that the track listings for Help!, Rubber Soul and Revolver aren't bad at all and even seem an improvement in some spots when I play them in my head.
And poor old Philips used to be such an innovative company… Today it's not a shadow of its former self. ASML even started under the wings of Philips in the 90s.
Growin up in the 70's i always found Capitol 8-tracks were of very high quality…….MCA had some of the worst..lol
The first time I heard the White Album was on my dad's reel to reel in the early 80s
What about recordable 8-track tapes? My brother had a recordable machine. And then when he moved out he left a blank tape behind. 8-track machines were off the market when I found the tape. So there was no way for me to test it. Did they record well?
We had an 8 track player in the mid 70s. No Beatles cartridges, but we did have Wings At The Speed of sound, which I remember fondly…….fast forward, and literally this weekend I acquired a box of cartridges from a deceased estate – and in there is a copy of 1967-1970, with I Am The Walrus split over 2 programmes – sacrilege!
I like Devil In Her Heart. Also regarding the Help! and Rubber Soul tapes, they are out of order but they contain the original stereo mixes of those albums. Would it be possible to do a video on the story of those original mixes versus the 80’s remixes by George Martin?
Pink Floyd Cassettes and 8 track tapes from EMI UK were also re-arranged to fit the format until Dark Side of the Moon.
Well, Andrew, we have a little generational divide on this one. Being American, I had, until 1987, access only to the Capitol versions rather than the EMI ones, and CDs were expensive then. So my Beatles albums were Capitol vinyl versions recorded onto 90m cassettes. I think the only store-purchased cassettes were The Beatles (Part I and II on cassette), Rock 'N' Roll Music Vol 1 and 2 (at 14 in 1987, the Capitol budget line was helpful) and Sgt Pepper. And because my Rubber Soul was Capitol vinyl, I've Just Seen A Face is definitely my opening song. I have a Hey Jude/Yesterday And Today vinyl dub on cassette, which was mostly listened to in 1987-1990. But those 8-tracks are long before my time. My father remembers having The Beatles on his reel to reel (though he was more a vinyl person, and the Magical Mystery Tour album was my intro to the Beatles entirely) but not sure whether it was a home recording off air or an actual release.
My final Beatles cassette was With The Beatles, sometime in the early 1990s, but it was a mimic of the EMI release.
Andrew, to be honest, Capitol's cassettes weren't really spectacular. They were fine for a teenager in the late 1980s and a Walkman, but don't waste ant time on them.
Great episode! The Capitol Sgt. Pepper 8-track is perhaps the only instance of a Beatles song being extended specifically to fill the 8 track release: the Sgt. Pepper Reprise has another "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely, Sgt Pepper's Lonely…. " verse added after Paul's "woooo!" I'm not sure if this is the case with the UK version.
Very good episode! To me, growing up in Spain, in the late 80s, I discover The Beatles with Please Please Me and With The Beatles on cassette, so that's the order always in my head. When I finally got Rubber Soul, this time I had upgraded and got a turntable, it was surprising that the running order of the vinyl was the 8-track/cassette's order, so I agree that Rubber Soul starting with Norwegian Wood is great! 😂
60th anniversary video next week… Rolling Stones perchance?
Take the vinyl record, an 8 track recorder,80 or so minute cartridge, and viola….. you have the lp on the 8 track in tact! No rearranging the tracks for the convenience of record companies. Even when the track changes, the song continues with only a minor annoyance. No wait for it here. That's how we did it back then. What a memory. Thanks again Andrew, another great Beatle video. Keep them coming, PLEASE.
I Need You is so good as an opening track
I remember my younger sister had an 8 Track stereo. She had The White Album in her collection, so I decided to listen to it…
I live in the USA btw.
“Kerchunk!” in the middle of a couple songs, seems to me they were Long Long and Revolution #9.
I remember it really bothered me.
You don’t cut Long Long Long in half.
And Revolution #9 is art. You don’t cut a Hockney in half (unless you don’t understand it).
8 track stereos: Never owned one.
You're still missing the White Album, on the other hand I know from a prior video that your Abbey Road is a mint green first issue.
I, a cassette collector, have almost every release of the Beatles from the UK, US, and Canada, with the exception of 2 of the known Capitol US club releases which are only distinguishable by an extra set of numbers. The rarest is the withdrawn box set from 1969, which held Meet the Beatles, Yesterday and Today, and Magical Mystery Tour. The earliest cassette is a United Artists Hard Days Night from 1966, the latest is Now and Then from 2023. Not including the substantial solo and related albums (such as Off the Beatle Track by the George Martin Orchestra) what I've listened to in my life (once, in most cases) is stored in 2 sections:
Listened to 1990-2019: 368 tapes.
Listened to 2019-present: 101 tapes.
The relative lack of Part 1/Part 2 fade-out/fade-in tracks reduces the formats "bizarre level" a bit. Here in the US circa 1970 a college buddy bit the bullet and invested in a magnificent 8 track recorder and leveraged the exquisite record collections of his good friends. Signs around campus boasted that he could make tapes of almost any popular record for people's in-dash 8 track players. Of course, he spent zero time rearranging the track list so these products had truly bizarre transitions from one program to the next. A song might play for 30 seconds until "wait for it" happened…
In the mid 70s, I was given a few Capitol 8-tracks of The Fabs albums. By this time, I was very familiar with the vinyl versions. I had a home system with an 8-track, and also a car system. To be honest, the 8-tracks I was given had already been played to death, and sounded like absolute rubbish. So I really cannot give an accurate review of their initial sound. Yet it gives you an idea of the downside of 8-track: inferior tape, high-speed tape duplication, baking in a parked car for hours on end which led to disintegration and of course………..the worst: the more you played the tape, the tighter the reel became. That meant breakage. I had to buy a tape-splicing kit from Radio Shack to repair most of my tapes. In the short (but extremely painful) 6 years that I had 8-tracks, I was so happy to move on to cassette. But I rarely bought pre-recorded cassettes, but I know from experience they were not much better. By this time, I had already seen the future, and it was CD. I was also a recording studio engineer at this time, so I knew that any format was a compromise. Today, most people listen to music on their smartphone or earbuds, so hi-fidelity is no longer an issue for most. This is a shame, but the underlying factor is that it is free. Yet, there remains a hard-core lot that fight the power, and want to hear music the way it was meant to be heard…….in a better format that is steps above AM radio. I heard a few years ago that albums would be released on SD cards, but that never happened. Oh well. So let's go back to 1966, when I dropped the stylus and heard……"Four! Well, she was just seventeen, and you know what I mean………….* Forever The Fabs
My Beatles introduction was through cassettes. My dad would buy them so he could listen in the car as well. The only 'real' album he had was Hard Days Night, so, for me, the tracklisting on that is what I always think of, ending with You Can't Do That (one of my faves). He also had red and blue from the same series, the ones with the gold/brown background, which I think we're programmed correctly.
Cassettes❤❤
I just bought a US Rubber soul, to me the two songs they added are much weaker than the four they took off, but i can sort of see how it sort of works if you like a more acoustic sounding LP, or a folk rock album , but i always thought it was folk rockish anyway. I prefer the UK version though, the US version just felt lacking in something to me.
This may be my favorite video from you, well informed, well produced and perfectly written great job.
When i listen to the singles ripped to my computer i still expect the next song to be what followed on Past Masters and I haven't spun a CD in 24 years 😂
I first received Yellow Submarine as an album in 1980, and as a cassette 2 years later (US). It always struck me as odd that on the US cassette, they opened side 2 with Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds as opped to including any of the other songs in the film snd not on the album.
I assumed it was a timing issue and Lucy filled in nicely.
A friend of mine had the US White Album in a two cassette package in 1970; as I recall, it came in a faux black leather slip case.
I remember when Capitol Beatle's records were being deleted. While I was in a record shop, a dealer received a phone call from a company stating that Yesterday And Today was just deleted. This was the early seventies, while I was seeking to buy the debut America album, just released.
I grew up on the tapes, and had no idea the songs were in the "wrong order". When the CDs came out I just couldn't get used to Rubber Soul or Revolver, so burnt my own CD copies in the cassette running order – which I still prefer!
8-tracks sucked, I grew up with them. Bad sound, easily ruined, broken songs, etc. But I will give them credit for giving music listeners choice on the road. One big difference in 8-track success between Europe and North America is geography, and I'm not talking distance. In the 1960s and 1970s, almost anywhere in Europe you could get radio reception in a car or on a transistor radio. But in North America at that time, you could go thousands of kilometres, six to twelve hours, without any AM radio reception (unless you were near a 10,000+ watt radio station). 8-tracks provided music on the go, something that was never available before.
I’m surprised that the early albums couldn’t be sequenced properly since they were short and more or less similar in length. That’s such an abrupt cut on “I’ve got a Feeling”! I had Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” on 8-track. In sequence (thank God) but “Time” was split between the first two programs and it faded out and in. I can still hear it in my head when I listen on another format. Can you imagine a record company taking such liberties on a cut like that today?!?
Was it necesary to change the order? How does it make any easier? Is just order. Sorry doctor Robert & i want to tell you are two of the Best early Beatles tracks
In the 80s I had a xdr Hard Day’s Night. Due to some tape damage, I had to cut a piece out of When I get Home and splice it back together. Even now when I listen to the track on any format, I still wait for 3-5 second skip.