Beatles 1987 cd Packaging and Manufacture Questions in USA

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by RnRmf, Aug 21, 2017.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. Mlle. Aurora

    Mlle. Aurora Señor Member

    Location:
    Southern Germany
    2 after 909, too :righton:
     
  2. teag

    teag Forum Resident

    Location:
    Colorado
    Where and when did you buy this numbered version?

    I bought mine week 1 and it is not numbered. Looking at it now, it's interesting to see all the plastic on the jewel case is white. Meaning the plastic that is usually dark grey - the clear plastic is standard.
     
    Detroit Rock Citizen likes this.
  3. mBen989

    mBen989 Senior Member

    Location:
    Scranton, PA
    I'm surprised we never did a retrospective on the '87 CD's.
     
  4. Roland Stone

    Roland Stone Offending Member

    Costco and BJs (and maybe some other discount club stores I'm forgetting) were the last to abandon the longbox, because their store fixturing was so basic and CDs shared space with other merchandise. I'm sure there are many discount club exclusive longbox designs from this era.
     
    Mr. Explorer and Platterpus like this.
  5. jmxw

    jmxw Fab Forum Fan

    I used to have all my longboxes. Until the great flood of '96 when I had to leave them behind... :cry:
     
    c-eling likes this.
  6. mrjinks

    mrjinks Optimistically Challenged

    Location:
    Boise, ID.
    I would've bought mine week one, as well. I can't recall if I have white jewel case inserts or not - I think so, but I'll have to verify when I get home.

    My recollection was that all the original US White Album cds (1987) were numbered (?) - that was part of their appeal! Odd that yours apparently isn't...
     
    Last edited: Nov 8, 2017
  7. tootull

    tootull Looking through a glass onion

    Location:
    Canada
    White album sold in Toronto, Canada - First day of sale (made in USA) original CD - 037378
     
  8. Bingo Bongo

    Bingo Bongo Music gives me Eargasms

    Location:
    Ottawa, Canada
    Don't forget the bread box

    [​IMG]
     
  9. Morton LaBongo

    Morton LaBongo Forum Resident

    Location:
    Manchester NH
    I remember the same thing as everyone else pretty much. These were all sold in longboxes with a pic of the original album on an all-black background. The exception was The White Album, which came as two cd's in a single white longbox. I have looked but cannot find my White Album right now, I do remember it had white plastic holding the disc inside a clear case. I got mine within a month or so after release, I think it was numbered in the 80,000 area. I saw the White Album in a fat double case a few years later. I saved all my longboxes but they got beat up over the years, I cut out the LP pictures though and still have them somewhere.

    The release of The Beatles cd's was a big deal. Up until this point, the only Beatles cd's were interview discs and grey-area stuff like the live show at the Star Club from 1962. I remember seeing news reports about it, and some audio magazines were saying things along the lines of "this will be the final push to get holdout yuppies to finally buy cd players." The first four discs were released at the same time and sold for -- I think -- 16.99 or 17.99 each. But if you got all four together, some stores like Strawberries or Record Town would give you a deal for like $60 for the set. Some of the fancy record stores sold these imported sets that included a nice looking LP-sized box and a collector's pin and other items, but I only ever saw a few of those. The initial release in early 1987 had a big promo push with it with posters everywhere and some DJ's did radio shows where they would play the discs for a few hours and comment on their quality. There was even more attention paid later on about The Beatles albums after George H. released Cloud 9 toward the end of the year. There was a picture in Rolling Stone of George eating dinner with Paul and Ringo and a brief one-paragraph story said something like "Beatles might be thinking of getting back together." In the summer, Sgt. Pepper was (re)released to great fanfare and again this was covered by the news at the time. It was also the 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love and there was a PBS documentary about that and how Sgt. Pepper tied into it. As I recall, that summer there was more Beatles music being played on the air than I'd ever heard before, and I think MTV even started showing the Beatles Cartoon series for a brief time. This was the biggest Beatles promotion I can remember until the Anthology series later in the 1990s.
     
  10. Platterpus

    Platterpus Senior Member

    I've never been to a Costco and am unfamiliar with BJs.
     
  11. Paul Saldana

    Paul Saldana jazz vinyl addict

    Location:
    SE USA (TN-GA-FL)
    I kept that one long Box for that specific reason, the cutouts.
     
    Detroit Rock Citizen likes this.
  12. Paul Saldana

    Paul Saldana jazz vinyl addict

    Location:
    SE USA (TN-GA-FL)
    Turtles had those discs for $15.49 each the day of release. And Turtles did get the Kate Bush cover with the A Hard Days Night disc in it.
     
    Morton LaBongo and Mr. Explorer like this.
  13. RnRmf

    RnRmf Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Orlando, FL and NJ
    Lots of great info posted in this thread. Thanks for all the contributions!
     
    Mr. Explorer, tootull and mrjinks like this.
  14. mrjinks

    mrjinks Optimistically Challenged

    Location:
    Boise, ID.
    @teag
    Yup, white jewel inserts. Cd/booklet 1 comes with thick booklet of lyrics and photos from the poster collage, with center pages being the four famous portraits, in color. Cd/booklet 2 is a single foldout, with the four famous photos in b&w. Made in USA.
     
    Detroit Rock Citizen likes this.
  15. teag

    teag Forum Resident

    Location:
    Colorado
    Exactly. But mine has no number. Bought it in Boston upon release. Strange.
     
    Dan The Man1 likes this.
  16. Hamhead

    Hamhead The Bear From Delaware

    I bought all of mine the day they came out and they were all WG Sonopress, I still have my '87 Sgt Pepper Sonopress CD
     
    c-eling likes this.
  17. RnRmf

    RnRmf Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Orlando, FL and NJ
    Did the "bread box" only come out after all the discs were released, individually?
     
  18. Morton LaBongo

    Morton LaBongo Forum Resident

    Location:
    Manchester NH
    Yes, it was a compilation that came out later but I don't think too long after. I only ever saw a handful of these and last spotted one "in the wild" so to speak at a music store in Illinois around 1993-94.
     
    pantofis, davers and RnRmf like this.
  19. mrjinks

    mrjinks Optimistically Challenged

    Location:
    Boise, ID.
  20. ohnothimagen

    ohnothimagen "Live music is better!"

    Location:
    Canada
    [​IMG] :D
     
  21. c-eling

    c-eling They're made of light,We never would have guessed

    Excellent! I love these oldies :)
     
  22. I did too and mine was not numbered - made in USA by Sony DADC. Most of those who got numbered ones that I knew personally had 6 digit numbers.
     
  23. Sam's Club did too. What I remember was that with few exceptions of really big artists' releases, who got full graphics enclosed long boxes like the past, most of the CDs came in generic longboxes with the CD album cover showing in a die cut window on the top and shrinkwrapped. I was told they did for theft reasons due to the small size of CDs, which these warehouse stores do this with many products that would normally be sold in standard packaging in box stores like Walmart and Target.
     
  24. lennonology

    lennonology Formerly pas10003

    Location:
    St. Louis, MO
    Thanks to Mark Easter...

    A few weeks before the release of Pepper, people started returning copies of Heart's Bad Animals (mfd. in Jacksonville) to the store where Mark worked - because they played Sgt. Pepper. So he held on to some of these misprints and for the price of a Heart CD, Mark's friends were treated to a week or two advance on the Sgt. Pepper CD. I traded one of mine for a Japanese Abbey Road, which hadn't officially hit the States yet.

    Chip Madinger
    www.lennonology.com
     
  25. Morton LaBongo

    Morton LaBongo Forum Resident

    Location:
    Manchester NH
    That is a good deal! I used to think $15 for a new cd (in 1987 money) was a good deal. I remember going to a Turtles in Florida, really good selection and they had oddball stuff like that cardboard Apple EP. How the heck Turtles or their distributor did that mixup is beyond me, but that is kind of funny.
     
    Mr. Explorer likes this.
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.

Share This Page

molar-endocrine