Capitol releases their Beatle Box

On November 16, Capitol records will throw their hat into the Beatle Box ring with the release of the first four Capitol Beatles albums on CD. The Capitol Albums Vol 1 contains Meet The Beatles!, The Beatles' Second Album, Something New and Beatles '65. As Beatle purists know, Capitol reconfigured the British versions of the first Beatle albums, offering fewer tracks and preserving content to build additional LP releases. Most of us on this side of the pond didn't realize what was going on until the Parlophone EMI sets started to come out on CD several years back. Whether or not there was a method to Capitol's madness is discussed by Bruce Spizer in his piece for the whatgoeson.com website titled New Beatles Capitol box set misunderstood by critics. It's a good article although the author's Capitol bias is pretty clear. He thinks the record company was thinking about customer satisfaction, rather than raw profits. The New York Times points out some really cool features of the set, like both mono and stereo mixes from the Capitol masters, which were punched a bit for American airplay. And I had forgotten that there is an extra verse on the American version of "I'll Cry Instead." Another intersting link regards an interview with David E. Dexter, the guy who "produced" the culled Capitol LPs, talking about how the Beatles came to Capitol.