The Beatles, Meet the Beatles!
Capitol, 1964: Paul McCartney (vocals and bass), John Lennon (vocals and guitar, died 1980), George Harrison (vocals and guitar, died 2001), Ringo Starr (vocals and drums)

Songs (Side one is Beatles dynamite.)

• I Want to Hold Your Hand
• I Saw Her Standing There (always one of my favorites)
• This Boy
• It Won't Be Long
• All I've Got to Do
• All My Loving
• Don't Bother Me
• Little Child
• Till There Was You
• Hold Me Tight
• I Wanna Be Your Man
• Not a Second Time

This is the group's second US-released album (Introducing the Beatles was first released on the Vee Jay label), but this is the one that mattered. It's a great album, frenetic, lively, an original rock & roll record, and it kicked off Beatlemania!

The album contained all original Beatles songs except for one. That was very unique for the time as singers/musicians/groups usually did not perform their own music.

Great cover photo by Robert Freeman.

Longest song is McCartney's "I Saw Her Standing There" at 2:50.

The record sold over four million copies in 1964 alone, and "I Want to Hold Your Hand" is the best-selling Beatles single of all time with maybe 12 million copies sold. The songs on this album were performed on the group's Ed Sullivan Show appearances in February 1964.

See where Meet the Beatles! was ranked on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

I didn't have any Beatles records when I was a kid in the 1960s. The first that I can remember hearing the Beatles on the radio was about early 1970 when "Let it Be" came out. When I did get my first stereo in the early 1970s, I played the Beatles red and blue albums a lot. Those were my first Beatles records.