Beatles on Vee Jay

In my research of the Four Seasons Vee Jay years, I've been diverted to The Beatles time on Vee Jay Records.

Whats really interesting is this:

Vee Jay had a 5 year contract with Trans Global Corp to release any Beatles Records offered to them by EMI.

Then, because of a paultry few hundred dollars in nonpayment of royalties on the Feb 25, 1963 release of "Please Please Me" 45 (this was the first issue of ANY record in the USA credited soley to The Beatles) , EMI claimed that the 5 year contract was null and void. Because of THIS, "She Loves You" was offered to SWAN Records and not Vee Jay. True, the first SWAN release of SLY didnt sell, but the re-release a short time went to number 1 !! This really should have been on Vee Jay!!

Think of different things could have been had Vee Jay been the Beatles American label!!

 

Yeah, Vee Jay might still be around today.

And there probably wouldn't be so many fake Vee Jay Beatles LPs out there!

 

Ha!! Very True!!!

 

Can you imagine the amount of repackages if VJ was their label...They probably hold the record! Yes, It sure would have been interesting!

 

I still find it amazing with all the Beatles and Four Seasons records that Vee Jay sold that they still went bankrupt. Very ironic.

 

Yeah, maybe they were JUST destined for failure!!!!!!!

 

In Bruce Spizer's book, The Beatles on VJ (www.beatle.net), it mentions that the nonpayment of royalties was because the boss was using company money for personal reasons. Maybe this helped cause the label to totally fail.

 

I'm sure all of the lawsuits against them by the Four Seasons and by Capitol/EMI probably didn't help either.

 

Was 2/63 the REAL release date of the PPM 45 on Vee Jay, or was that the "catalog" date. I remember reading something to the effect of:

Vee Jay assingned a catalog number to the "Introducing" album early that year, but it seems not to have actually hit the streets till almost a year later. They were in no real rush to get it out until the buzz from the UK was so strong they were threatened with renewed interest from Capitol. That is one of the reasons tat the "ad back" cover existed - they wanted it to appear these babies were distributed some 10 months earlier than they actually were, so there wasn't enough time to get a proper rear jacket printed up.

 

Not quite. "Please Please Me" really did come out on Vee-Jay 498 around late February 1963; it appeared on several charts in the Chicago area, including WLS', so its release at that point is not an urban legend. Also, Vee-Jay mentioned "Please Please Me" in a Cash Box ad in March 1963 and a Billboard ad in April 1963. It also, notoriously, misspelled the Beatles as "BeaTTles" on the first pressings of the 45.

The real reason for the "ad back" seems to be rather prosaic. Evidently, when ITB was going to be released in 1963, Vee-Jay was going to use a slightly altered version of Derek Taylor's original UK liner notes. Then the album was canceled amid Vee-Jay's money problems involving its former executive; the label chose to severely curtail its release schedule and take fewer chances on unknowns. When Vee-Jay decided finally to capitalize on Beatlemania in early 1964 and release its canceled album, it simply didn't have any other cover ready, and wanted to get the LPs out in a hurry, thus the "ad back." By the way, this same illustration was used in many Vee-Jay LP inner sleeves of the era.