The Beatles' Second Album Rare Apple Records Japanese Import Vinyl NM w/OBI

$

100

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The Beatles' Second Album Studio album by  the Beatles Released 10 April 1964 Recorded 5 March 1963 – 1 March 1964 Studio EMI, London Genre

• Rock and roll 
• R&B

The Beatles' Second Album is the second Capitol Records album by the English rock band the Beatles, and their third album released in the United States including Introducing... The Beatles, which was issued three months earlier by Vee-Jay Records. Following its release in April 1964, The Beatles' Second Album replaced Meet the Beatles! at number 1 on the Billboard Top LPs chart in the US. The album was compiled mostly from leftover tracks from the UK album With the Beatles and the forthcoming UK Long Tall Sally EP, which are predominantly rock and roll and R&B covers, and rounded out with several Lennon-McCartney-penned non-album b-sides and the hit single "She Loves You". Among critics, it is considered the band's purest rock and roll album and praised for its soulful takes on both contemporary black music hits and original material.

Release

Capitol Records issued The Beatles' Second Album on 10 April 1964 with the catalogue number Capitol ST 2080. The tagline in the advertising for the release read: "It's Here! It's on Capitol!! and It's ALL Beatles!!!" In Canada, this record could not be called The Beatles' Second Album, since Beatlemania! With the Beatles and Twist and Shout had preceded it. A slightly different track listing was released for the Canadian market with similar cover art, under the title The Beatles' Long Tall Sally. In 1968, The Beatles' Second Album, The Early Beatles and Meet the Beatles! were issued in Canada, although the earlier Canadian LPs remained in print (eventually with stereo mixes) until the late 1980s, when the CD era precipitated their deletion.

In the US, the album debuted at number 16 on the Billboard Top LPs for the week ending April 25, 1964. It peaked at number one the following week, replacing Meet the Beatles!, which had held the top spot for eleven weeks (for the last nine of which Vee-Jay's Introducing... had placed at number two). The Beatles' Second Album remained atop the chart for five consecutive weeks and stayed in the top 200 until May 1965. It reached 1,668,435 copies sold by 31 December 1964, and 2,051,486 copies by the end of the decade. It was certified Gold by the RIAA on 13 April 1964, and 2× Platinum on 10 January 1997.

Critical legacy

Second Album was one of the first four rock albums purchased by future music critic Robert Christgau. Writing of the album in 1969, he said it disproves the fallacy among new rock scholars and listeners that the Beatles had not succeeded artistically until the more melodic period of Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966). Instead, he argued it was their ebullient performing style, as on the Second Album's covers of African-American rock and roll songs, which "were touched with soul (compare their Money to the Beach Boys' Barbara Ann) but avoided the sodden seriousness of other white imitators." He included the album in his basic rock "library" of 25 albums for Stereo Review that year, and later in a more comprehensive library of essential 1950s and 1960s recordings for Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981). In 2020, Christgau voted for the album in his ballot for Rolling Stone magazine's third edition of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

According to Bruce Eder of AllMusic, The Beatles' Second Album "stands as probably the best pure rock & roll album ever issued of the group's music" because it "avoid[s] any trace of the pop ballads favored by Paul McCartney that usually slowed down the group's other early albums, and the result was the longest uninterrupted body of hard rock & roll and R&B in their entire output." In his 2014 review of the Beatles' Capitol albums, for Guitar World, Jeff Slate commented that "the oomph of the over-compressed Dexter tracks" had since been removed, but the album was arguably their "first great rock and roll record". Referring to the assortment of tracks assembled by Capitol, Darryl Sterdan of the Toronto Sun wrote: "The hodge-podgery begins [here] ... Surprisingly enough, it holds together OK, thanks to a strong string of rockers like Money, Roll Over Beethoven and Long Tall Sally."

Track listing

All songs were written by Lennon–McCartney, except where noted. Composer, track length and lead vocal credits are taken from Beatles scholars Mark Lewisohn, John C. Winn and Ian MacDonald.