(Album ©1964, EMI / Capitol Records)
This record was the 
first “official” LP released by the band in the US, and the photo on the cover is truly iconic, having also been the image used on the UK LP With The Beatles, released a few months earlier. The photo was taken by Robert Freeman, and a blue tint was added to this release, to differentiate the two covers. This album contained only 4 of the same songs as the With The Beatles collection, eschewing almost all of the the cover songs they released on the UK album for more original songs. That’s because their popularity had exploded in the months since the UK release.
The songs on this album are the ones that cemented them as THE BEATLES – “I Want to Hold You Hand,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “It Won’t Be Long,” “All My Loving.” Four stone cold hits. Plus “This Boy” and the one remaining cover tune, “Till There Was You.” Throw in an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and *boom* – Beatlemania!
After being released in the US at the end of January, 1964, the album spent 11 weeks at #1 on the Billboard charts and sold 4 million copies by the end of 1964, a shocking figure for an LP at the time. It’s astonishing to see these faces and compare them to the cover of Let It Be, which was released only 6 years later. They looked so young when this was shot in 1963 – totally unaware of and unprepared for what was coming their way.
