Damn.

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It wasn’t until the Seventies that it I became fully aware of how different most of the British Beatles albums were from most of the American Beatles albums. They had different tracks and were longer, and the pressings tended to be better — and they were the albums the Beatles created, rather than the cut down and rearranged albums Capitol created.

In the Seventies — in New York City at least, where I was living — you started to see the imported British albums for sale in record stores. They cost a lot more than the American albums but seemed well worth the extra cash. I started collecting them album by album. I was living hand-to-mouth in those days, so I’d have to save up for months sometimes to get a new one.

I remember sitting in my badly heated loft one day, looking out my large front window down at 21st Street, spinning a new copy of the British edition of Beatles For Sale. I suddenly thought, “You know, the Beatles just never let you down.”

Those British Beatles albums always cheered me up, got me through some hard and uncertain times — five or six long years of hard and uncertain times.  They persuaded me that things would get better sooner or later . . . as they did.

I lived at the time I’m speaking of on the third floor of the gray building above, the one squeezed in between the two larger buildings.  Back then it was a run-down place faced with cheap-looking unornamented red brick, covering up whatever facade it originally had.  I lived there illegally, because the loft wasn’t zoned for residential use.

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This is how I remember it sounding when it first came out in America.

This is the only Beatles album that contains nothing but Lennon-McCartney songs. It’s their early career masterpiece and in the new vinyl edition it feels as though they’re playing the songs live in your home — the sound is that clear and crisp and full.

It’s worth getting a turntable just to play this one record.

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The new vinyl editions of the Beatles albums sound pretty amazing. They were cut from the new digital masters made for the CD re-issues of 2009, but not subjected to compression, except in a few isolated moments, amounting to five minutes of music in all, to deal with egregious hiss and crackle present in places on the master tapes.

What this means is that you get the full-bodied sound of the CD remasters without the slight but noticeable thinning out of the high-end range, which always distinguishes even the best CDs from vinyl. The result is quite spectacular.

Lots and lots of vinyl — about six pounds of it, to be precise, exclusive of packaging.

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Click on the image to enlarge.

Click on the image to enlarge.