Meet the Beatles!

这是the Beatles的第二张专辑。大家可以注意到它的出版与第一张Please Please Me是在同一年。如果说Please Please Me使得the Beatles在英国崭露了头角的话，那么Meet The Beatles则是the Beatles席卷美国的开端。

初期的Beatles得以走红的最大原因在哪里？在John Lennon。Beatles是很幸运的，因为他们刚出道的时候，John Lennon的才华就已经十分接近成熟期了。无论是在写词作曲，还是在唱功，John Lennon都无疑是当时的Beatles的领军人物。且看这张唱片:It Won't Be Long,All I've Got to Do,Little Child,I Wanna Be Your Man,Not a Second Time等五首歌的词曲创作均由John一手包办，另外他还担任了七首歌的主唱。

可以说Meet The Beatles里的很多歌曲都是为了体现John Lennon的杰出演唱才华而存在的。

必须指出的是，这只是初期的Beatles得以走红的原因。而the Beatles能够成为一支伟大的乐队，其原因则在于此后Paul McCartney，George Harrison，Ringo Starr的成长。而the Beatles最终解散的原因，我认为并不在于小野洋子，而在于当时Paul McCartney的才华以及他对beatles的贡献都事实上已经超越了John。在一个人群里出现两个主导人物的时候，其结果往往是分裂。

在这张专辑中Paul McCartney，George Harrison的才能已经开始萌芽。Paul创作并演唱了十分甜美的情歌All My Loving,Hold me Tight,其中甚至可以看到后来的Yesterday的影子,而由George创作并演唱的Don't Bother Me也有相当不俗的表现。

PS：Meet The Beatles是With The Beatles的美国版，也是The Beatles登陆美国的第一张唱片。在2004年，这张唱片第一次以CD形式重新发行，被收录在Capitol公司的The Capitol Albums vol. 1中，将经典单声道录音与数位化重新混音作品完整保存于一张CD内。这里发布的就是这个CD版本，其中第1到第12首是经过重新混音处理的立体声版本，第13到第14首是原始的单声道录音版本。

Beatles第二张专辑With the Beatles的美国版，但曲目差别比较大，增加了三首歌。

这张专辑在滚石杂志选出的500张历代最强专辑中排名第59位。

by Dave Connolly

Most can call it from memory: the image of the Beatles disembarking from their plane on a cold February day in New York. Less visible in the old black-and-white film footage, but perhaps more important, is a young girl clutching a copy of the Beatles' just-released second album, Meet the Beatles!, as if the world depended on it. And, to her and millions of other young people, it did. Meet the Beatles! wasn't simply an album; it gave the intangible yearnings of youth a voice and a face (actually, four voices and four faces), and it created a parallel world where escape was only a turntable away. Today, Meet the Beatles! is a collectible in danger of becoming forgotten, if not for the diligence of Beatles fans around the world. Compact discs have replaced vinyl, and the decision to release the original U.K. versions of the Beatles' albums in favor of their U.S. counterparts has rendered albums like Meet the Beatles! and The Beatles' Second Album obsolete. But nothing could make the music on these LPs obsolete. The infectious charm of songs like "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "I Saw Her Standing There," "It Won't Be Long," and "All My Loving" still weave their magic which, if less potent in an age jaded by a generation of musicians who had the benefit of the Beatles' songbook tucked underneath their arms, still carries an aura around it -- just as the first moon landing will never be eclipsed by subsequent forays into space. Meet the Beatles! soon topped the charts, aided by electric appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show that carried the flames of Beatlemania across the ocean, and (together with the single "She Loves You") kicked off a string of number one singles and albums. Most of the songs were holdovers from the U.K. album With the Beatles, released two months earlier. Capitol, who wisely decided that there might be money in releasing the band's work in the U.S., chose original tracks from their second U.K. album and added the contents of a recent U.S. single plus a B-side, John Lennon's ballad "This Boy," to the mix. This created the illusion that the Beatles wrote all their own material (since only Meredith Willson's "Till There Was You" was a non-original), an illusion dispelled by the necessarily cover-heavy The Beatles' Second Album. So, in many ways, Meet the Beatles! distilled what was best about the band: original material from Lennon, Paul McCartney, and even George Harrison (his first, "Don't Bother Me"). Everyone gets a chance to sing, including Ringo Starr ("I Wanna Be Your Man," which Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham had coaxed from the band earlier), and the mix of rockers and ballads proves to be a beautiful blend. Let compact disc companies try their hand at historical revision: they can't steal the memories of Americans who still remember how they first met the Beatles, any more than they could pry that album from that young girl's hands.