Bibek Acharya
Any product that an artist releases normally has to go through some unnecessary hands first. There are many moving parts of any music industry product, and as much as it should be about the music, people are usually more interested in seeing how much money can be made off of their artists rather than whether they’re going to be able to make the music they want to release. And no matter how big someone gets, even The Beatles had to deal with those kinds of shenanigans now and again.
When they first began writing songs, though, they only wanted to have a slab of vinyl to call their own. Please Please Me was good enough for them to base their career on, but once they started to go from being teenyboppers to true artists, they wanted greater control over what was going out that had their name on it. But what the artist wants and what the label wants are almost always two very different things.
Outside of having to mutilate their records for the American market by dropping a few tunes here and there, countless compilation albums were also released without their permission, both in and out of the group. Every George Harrison solo greatest hits package was made as a soulless cash grab in the 1970s, but before the band had even begun to test themselves, they already had to deal with the label breathing down their necks when they left the road.
To play devil’s advocate for a second, though, let’s look into the mind of a music executive. It’s a bit slimy in this liminal space, but the goal is to get the most profit out of an artist as they can, and since The Beatles had become too big to tour anymore, how the hell were you supposed to earn back the profit for their music? Well, you could either throw them back on the road or make a quick buck off fans with a compilation album, and since the Fab Four were never going to play a show again, releasing A Collection of Beatles Oldies practically sold itself.
But before the record even had time to settle, The Beatles disowned it from their central discography, with Tony Barrow noting, “The record company was already most upset that a fresh album had not been delivered in time for Christmas, forcing the issue of a compilation entitled A Collection of Beatles Oldies, including ‘She Loves You’, ‘From Me To You’, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. The Beatles disliked the timing of this oldies-but-goldies bundle. They would have preferred to get Sgt Pepper out first to show off their latest stuff.”
And considering the kind of stuff they had in the pipeline, there was no better record to make the band look washed up. Everyone had already been questioning whether they would have anything worthwhile to say after touring. Then, that they were putting out their own greatest hits album, it was like the label was inadvertently reading them their last rites.
In fact, the only reason the album is brought up today is often because people are trying to decipher every ‘Paul is dead’ myth. Since the cover is said to depict the car that Macca was in when he was killed in 1966, people have had a field day dissecting the cover, which isn’t the first thing people should look out for when judging an album that’s supposed to be about the music.
But The Beatles didn’t have time to care much for this new pivot that their record company was focused on. They had already made ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’, and both those songs were bound to stand on their own merits compared to what their label wanted out of them.
