Capitol Records: Encyclopedia II - Capitol Records - Record altering

Capitol Records - Record altering

Capitol has been criticized many times for the heavy modification of albums being sold by Capitol in the USA that had been released in other countries beforehand. Possibly most infamous is Capitol's creation of "new" albums by The Beatles. This began with Capitol's release of Meet the Beatles!, the first album by the group to be released by Capitol in the USA. It was quite literally the British album With the Beatles, with five tracks ("Money", "You've Really Got A Hold On Me", "Devil In Her Heart", "Please Mister Postman", and "Roll Over Beethoven") removed in favor of the band's first American hit single, "I Want To Hold Your Hand/When I Saw Her Standing There". They also added on the British version of the single's B-Side, "This Boy".

When With the Beatles was initially released in Brazil by EMI-Odeon, this same album received the modified title of Beatlemania. Afterwards, this same album passed to be edited with the British original title.

This trend continued through the Beatles' American discography, until the albums had little relation to their original British counterparts. The Beatles' albums were finally released unmodified starting with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

This continued with other bands:

• Pink Floyd's first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, had several tracks removed in favor of their first hit single "See Emily Play". This was criticized because the removed tracks combined ("Flaming", "Bike", and "Astronomy Dominie") were much longer than "Emily", making the removal of the three completely unnecessary for reasons of running time.

• Iron Maiden's first two albums, Iron Maiden and Killers, had additional tracks as opposed to their UK counterparts. Iron Maiden's 1980 self-titled debut was released in the US a few months after its UK release with the track "Sanctuary" added on. Its follow-up, 1981's Killers, was also released a few months after later in the US after its initial UK release with the track "Twilight Zone" added to the album.

• Megadeth's Risk album was littered with samples and guitar pieces that Dave Mustaine never authorised, causing him to release the final album on Captiol, Capitol Punishment, and moving on to a new label Sanctuary Records. As of right now, future with Capitol seems very bright now, as they have released all their Remastered disks with Captiol and their last Greatest Hits albums. It is rumoured that after leaving Sanctuary Records, they will return to Capitol.

The company has also had a history of making mistakes with album releases; the American release of Klaatu's debut album 3:47 EST had several spelling errors on the track list, and later Capitol pressings of CD versions of Klaatu's albums suffered severe quality problems. The poor sound quality of Duran Duran's May 1982 release Rio (on Capitol subsidiary Harvest), contributed to the lag in initial sales, until a remixed version of the album was released in November.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Record altering", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki