With the Beatles


With the Beatles is the second studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. It was released on 22 November 1963 on Parlophone, exactly eight months after the band's debut Please Please Me. Produced by George Martin, the album features eight original compositions and six covers. The cover photograph was taken by the fashion photographer Robert Freeman and has since been mimicked by several music groups over the years. A different cover was used for the Australian release of the album, which the Beatles were displeased with.
In the United States, the album's tracks were unevenly split over the group's first two albums released on Capitol Records: Meet the Beatles! and The Beatles' Second Album. It was also released in Canada under the name Beatlemania! With the Beatles. The album was ranked number 420 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2003, and was included in Robert Dimery's 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. It was voted number 275 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums. It was rated the 29th greatest album in the book Paul Gambaccini Presents the Top 100 Albums. This book "canvassed a panel of experts in seven countries" to determine the greatest albums.

Recording

Unlike Please Please Me, the bulk of whose tracks were recorded in one day, With the Beatles was recorded over seven sessions across three months, from 18 July to 23 October. None of its 14 tracks were issued as singles in the UK. In between sessions, as Beatlemania took off across the UK, the group were busy with radio, TV, and live performances.

Packaging

Impressed with Robert Freeman's black-and-white pictures of John Coltrane, Brian Epstein invited the photographer to create the cover image. George Harrison later said that, whereas the cover of Please Please Me had been "crap", their second LP was "the beginning of us being actively involved in The Beatles' artwork... the first one where we thought, 'Hey, let's get artistic.'" The group asked Freeman to take inspiration from pictures their friend Astrid Kirchherr had taken in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962, featuring the band members in half-shadow and not smiling. To achieve this result, on 22 August 1963, Freeman photographed them in a dark corridor of the Palace Court Hotel in Bournemouth, where the band were playing a summer residency at the local Gaumont Cinema. To fit the square format of the cover, he put Ringo Starr in the bottom right corner, "since he was the last to join the group. He was also the shortest". Paul McCartney described the result as "very moody", adding: "people think he must have worked at forever and ever. But it was an hour. He sat down, took a couple of rolls, and he had it." The original concept was to paint the picture from edge to edge, with no bleeding, title or artist credit – a concept that went against music industry practice and was immediately vetoed by EMI. The first album to carry an edge-to-edge cover was the Rolling Stones' self-titled debut, released five months later. EMI also objected to the fact that the Beatles were not smiling; it was only after George Martin intervened, as head of Parlophone, that the cover portrait was approved. Freeman was paid £75 for his work, which was three times the fee first offered by EMI.
Music critic John Harris finds the cover most reminiscent of the photos Kirchherr took in Hamburg of Lennon, Harrison and Stuart Sutcliffe using the "half-lit technique" and says that, together with songs such as "Roll Over Beethoven" and "Money ", With the Beatles thereby represents "a canny repackaging of their early '60s incarnation: Hamburg shorn of Prellies and leather, and sold to their public as a mixture of accomplished rock 'n' roll and art-house cool". Harris also sees the LP cover as a "watershed" design that encouraged other acts to eschew "the more cartoonish aspects of pop photography" and continued to exert an influence in the 1970s on covers such as those for Lou Reed's Transformer, Patti Smith's Horses and various punk rock albums.
EMI Australia did not receive the cover art, and used different shots of the band in a similar style to the black-and-white photograph on other releases. The Beatles were unaware of this until fans showed them the cover during their only Australian tour, and informed the EMI publicity staff that they were not pleased with the substitution.

Release and reception

The album became the first Beatles album released in North America when it was released in Canada on 25 November under the augmented title Beatlemania! With the Beatles, with additional text on the album cover, and issued only in mono at the time, catalogue number T 6051. For the United States release, the original running order of With the Beatles was unevenly split over the group's first two Capitol albums: nine tracks were issued on Meet the Beatles!, while the remaining five songs, all cover versions, were placed on The Beatles' Second Album.
The LP had advance orders of a half million and sold another half million by September 1965, making it the second album to sell a million copies in the United Kingdom, after the soundtrack to the 1958 film South Pacific. With the Beatles remained at the top of the charts for 21 weeks, displacing Please Please Me, so that the Beatles occupied the top spot for 51 consecutive weeks. It even reached number 11 in the "singles charts". No other group or singer has achieved 51 consecutive weeks at number 1 in the album charts. However, the soundtrack for the South Pacific movie did achieve 70 consecutive weeks at number one in the album charts.
On 26 February 1987, With the Beatles was officially released on compact disc. Having been available only as an import in the US in the past, the album was also issued domestically in the US on LP and cassette on 21 July 1987. Along with the rest of the Beatles' canon, it was re-released on CD in newly re-mastered stereo and mono versions on 9 September 2009.

Track listing

Personnel

According to Mark Lewisohn:
The Beatles
  • John Lennon – lead, harmony and backing vocals; rhythm and acoustic guitars; handclaps; harmonica on "Little Child"; nylon-string acoustic guitar on "Till There Was You"; tambourine on "Don't Bother Me"
  • Paul McCartney – lead, harmony and backing vocals; bass guitar and handclaps; piano on "Little Child", claves on "Don't Bother Me"
  • George Harrison – lead, harmony and backing vocals; lead and acoustic guitars; handclaps; nylon-string acoustic guitar on "Till There Was You"
  • Ringo Starr – drums, tambourine, maracas, handclaps; lead vocals on "I Wanna Be Your Man", Arabian loose-skin bongo on "Till There Was You" and "Don't Bother Me"
Production
  • Robert Freeman – cover photograph
  • George Martin – arrangement, production and mixing; organ on "I Wanna Be Your Man", piano on "You Really Got a Hold on Me", "Not a Second Time" and "Money"
  • Norman Smith – engineering and mixing

    Charts and certifications

Charts

;Album
Chart Peak
position

;Album cuts
YearSongChartRank
1964"All My Loving"Billboard Hot 10045
1964"Roll Over Beethoven"Billboard Hot 10068

Certifications

Release history