The Beatles "1" Compilation. Why So Successful when Past Masters Wasn't?

Sorry guys, there is still a bit of misinformation being floated around here. 3 things:

1--"Something/Come Together" was The Beatles 4th double A-side, as promoted in the UK. Numerous books and articles of the day attest to this fact. Including one of the most recent, Kenneth Womack's bio of George Martin Vol 2, titled "Sound Pictures" from 2018. Also the internet is full of sites quoting this record as a double A-side (though yeah, we are not to believe everything we read on the internet, ha). "Something" may have been given the 'full apple' side of the label, and Come Together 'the half slice', but this record was promoted by Apple UK as a double A-sided record.

P.S. The chart performance of Something/Come Together in the UK was hampered because it was released 5 weeks after the album it came from. Why buy the single when you've already got it on the album? In the US, both single and album hit the charts together.
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2--And in this same book, Martin is indeed quoted as regretting the pairing of Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever. But the reason is not clearly stated. Perhaps Martin might be thinking if Penny Lane had been paired with When I'm 64, that Penny Lane would have sold more, or gotten more airplay, sharing less split sales and split airplay with SFF. Thus PL would have reached #1 on its own. Total speculation of course.

The other side of this argument is that 64 might have helped generate MORE total sales and airplay for the record, because 64 would have better appealed to all the grannies and grandpas out there, but I don't think Martin is going there, ha. I can't imagine 64 as the b-side would contribute to more sales and airplay than SFF, but you never know.

But Womack unfortunately quotes some factually false statements here as well, ultimately sourced from an article in Billboard decades after the fact, where THAT author flat out did not know what he was talking about. Womack quotes (a) the sales of PL/SFF were split, and this splitting hurt its chart performance, and (b) that PL/SFF in combined side sales outsold Engelbert 2 to 1. This is totally false, on both counts: (1) all 4 major UK record charts of the day listed both sides together in one combined chart position, not split. Fact !! You can pull out the charts and see for yourself. (2) The truth is Engelbert outsold PL/SFF by 2 to 1. Yes, they were duking it out at the top of the charts in a vicious battle, very very close for 7-ish weeks, but Engelbert truly came out on top a majority of those weeks, even allowing for PL/SFF at #1 for 3 weeks on the Melody Maker chart. Sales data is out there to prove it, google it, Engelbert selling over 1 million copies, PL/SFF half that.

Crazy to say, but as much as we all love and appreciate PL/SFF as 2 of The Beatles greatest songs/recordings, it just was not among The Beatles strongest chart hits in the UK. In terms of total sales, it was only their 14th or 17th best (depending on the source), if you can believe it:

The Beatles' Top 50 biggest selling songs revealed

The Beatles :: Charts & Sales History - UKMIX Forums

Beatles British singles sales - BeatleLinks Fab Forum

https://www.beatlesbible.com/2009/09/01/bbc-chart-reveals-best-selling-uk-beatles-songs/

While Engelbert's "Release Me" was a monster hit, charted for over a year on and off. In 2011, the Official Charts Co published a list of the biggest sellers of the 60s, Release Me was #8, PL/SFF was #51:

List of best-selling singles of the 1960s in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia

The biggest UK records of 1967: Release Me #1, PL/SFF #24:

UK-Charts - 1967

So this false information when let out of the bag keeps repeating itself over and over across the decades, you can't kill it off when it's been out there so long, it's a never ending whack-a-mole, ugh.

My thinking is perhaps Martin was thinking that if he had released PL and SFF as separate singles on their own, then they would have sold twice as many total copies, being monster hits in their own right, with PL most likely achieving #1 on its own, and possibly also SFF.
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3--Regarding A-side and B-side and Double A-side status, there are multiple things going on here, and they are all different:

ONE is what did the record company actually promote the record as being when it was released?
TWO is how did the record company physically label the record?
THREE is what did or did not happen on the charts, side vs. side?
FOUR is what was the decision to place a song on the '1' CD based on?

Theses are all different issues, they all do not necessarily fit together well, though closely related. We are 'arguing' over top of each other here, not understanding all the moving pieces.

Rock on, crock on...

 

I disagree entirely. Something was the A-side in the UK. I've given my irrefutable sources and you give me a book written about George Martin published in 2018. Where are your "Numerous books and articles of the day"?

I agree that the sales of Something were hampered because most people had already bought the album.

In the book Summer of Love : the Making of Sgt. Pepper George Martin himself explains his regrets about the Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever double A-side. It doesn't matter if he was right or wrong. The main thing is that this is how he perceived things. So afterwards he would have advised the Beatles not to do any more double A-sides.

Songs were placed on "1" if they were number one on Record Retailer or Billboard. Nothing to do with being A or B-sides.

For You Blue should have been on there since it's an official Billboard number one with The Long and Winding Road but it was left out for two or three reasons. First it wasn't a very well-known song compared to the other big hits. It only made 71 on the Cash Box Top 100 so it mustn't have been getting much airplay. And finally they didn't have enough time on the CD format to include it.

I think they made the right decision

 

Later as I recall Martin made it clear that he wished he had held PL/SFF for the Pepper album. I don’t think he indicated a specific preference. I agree about the double A side and mentioned it for Something and come Together but was told that wasn’t how Billboard recorded it (I pointed out though that the intention was for it to be a double A side regardless of how it was charted). Agree about point 3 as well. While I get that 1 was looking primarily at the U.S. and U.K. As the charting sources for each single, I still think Please Please Me deserved a place on 1 because it was a #1 on st least one of the U.K. Charters.

 

Well and good and that may be how,it charted in the U.K. And was listed but, according to most other sources, it was intended to be a double A side.

‘The single entered the US charts on 18 October. At the time it was customary for sales and airplay for both sides of a single to be counted separately. As both songs were popular with the public, there was doubt as to whether either would reach the top. In the u.S. as mentioned previously, on 29 November, Billboard began combining both sides to make a single chart placing. As a result, the single topped the charts for a week, before dropping down. Hence, how both songs ended up at #1 in the U.S. On the Cash Box chart, which continued to count both sides separately, ‘Something’ peaked at number two, while ‘Come Together’ spent three weeks at the top.’ For what it’s worth from Beatles Bible.

Be that as it may, how it was listed by a chart didn’t necessarily reflect EMI’s, Klein’s or The Beatles’ intentions. I don’t think anyone doubts your information. I think the situation is a little more complex.

 

What other sources are you talking about? Why this obsession with wanting to prove it was a double A-side?

In the meantime here's something I just came across from wikipedia. Internet craziness at its best :

"Come Together" – 4:16 Released in the U.S. on 6 October 1969, and in the UK on 31 October. As the B-side of a double-A-sided single with "Something", it reached No. 1 in the U.S. for one week on 29 November 1969.

 

Humperdinkmania

You should have been there.

 

Well, Engelbert is only 4 years older than Ringo.

He was born in the same city as Pete Best.

His fans in the late sixties called themselves "Humperdinckers". (Not unlike Beatlemaniacs.)

 

I hear ya, and I agree, it's loony tunes, there is an absence of logic here. But there are oodles of websites out there that claim "Something" is the A-side of a double-A-sided single. Just do an internet search on "Beatles Something double A-side". Most sites claim double-A-side, and along with that still assign an A and a B, sites even disagreeing about which is which.

Even The Beatles own official site TheBeatles.com says up top Something is the B-side, then down at the bottom says it was released as a double A-sided single with Come Together:

Something | The Beatles

 

The "double A-side" wasn't really a thing in the US in the '60s, but the "double sided hit" was. Apple and Capitol were certainly aware that the designated B-side of a Beatles single could also be a hit.

How many Beatles B-sides made the Soul Brothers Top 20?


(from Jet magazine, January 1, 1970)

 

Yes indeed, it's sheer madness out there.

Unfortunately Apple is not always to be trusted.

For years they insisted Please Please Me was a number one single then they caved in suddenly.

Their information in the box sets is usually more reliable.

 

For what it's worth, on the UK charts "Something / Come Together" was listed as the following, for its entire chart run on each:

--NME = both sides together S/CT
--Record Mirror carrying the BMRB charts = both sides together S/CT
--Melody Maker = Something only
--Record Retailer carrying the BMRB charts = both sides together S/CT
--Top Pops/Music Now = Something only

 

Are you sure about NME?



You're right about Record Mirror.

 

Yes that's wrong concerning the NME.

The NME reviewed Something Nov 1 1969 under the title "Mean and moody George". The review didn't even mention Come Together.

The NME chart was for Something alone as shown in the previous post.

The Record Mirror used the Record Retailer chart' (the one copied in the Guinness book) and they wrongly put both the songs.

So in fact the chart with the mistake is always the same chart.

The NME, the BBC and the Melody Maker all got it right. These were the charts that mattered and whatsmore who respected the Beatles' decision to make Something the A-side.

Sorry but I'm going to be away for a couple of days but I'll be back !

 

Imo, there's never going to be a definitive answer to the Something / Come Together conundrum. It's always just going to be a never ending debate.

Suffice to say, it is likely, but not 100% proven beyond all reasonable doubt, that Something was intended as the one and only A-side. Even historical sources from the time of release differ. Yes, you can choose to pick one publication or chart over another, to convince yourself you are right. That doesn't definitely mean you are right, though.

Next, you've got to look at the 2 songs. Both are exceptional songs. Both were popular and both still are. There's almost nothing between them, in terms of popularity. If Come Together, was indeed a B-side, it's probably one of the strongest B-sides of all time. It also slightly outperformed Something in the US. Who knows which was more popular in the UK? There wasn't an airplay chart. They had joint sales.

The fact that the majority of sources, in books and on the Web (including Beatles.com) rightly or wrongly, seem to have the record as a Double A-side, to me and almost everybody else (including Apple, when compiling 1, otherwise For You Blue would have had to have been included), it is NOW and always will be considered a double A-side, by the majority. That's about as definitive as we're ever going to get, I'm afraid.

 

Wow, I'm truly sorry guys about my NME mis-information. Regrettably I did not go back to the original charts as can be found on the World Radio History site, and I easily could have done so. Instead I pulled out my copy of the NME chart book, "40 Years of NME Charts" by Rees, Lazell, & Osborne (c) 1992, assuming they correctly retyped the chart data. But alas, no.

Why on earth did these authors do that? They probably thought they were doing us a favor. But it really ticks me off when things like this are done, when people who write chart books don't give us the exact data as found on the original charts. If they wish to give us extra info or thoughts, then fine, but do it with a note. Don't add or change things without informing us, dag nabbit !! Because of this book, many NME chart websites out there have reprinted this information, with whatever assumptions or errors were in this book. Many good websites that I regularly visit, ugh.

Never again will I trust chart books, always go back to the original charts.
Flogging myself all day long, ouch !!!

I also went back to visit the other original charts as well, and Record Mirror, Melody Maker, and Top Pops/Music Now are correct as stated above. I do not have access to originals or scans of Record Retailer, they are next to impossible to find on the internet as their circulation was very small compared to the other music papers of the day, but that's another story. It's likely that a good number of sources and websites that claim to show retyped RR charts 1962-69 are probably using RM chart data.

Note 1: beginning Feb 1969, Record Mirror no longer carried the Record Retailer charts. Rather, both RM and RR carried the BMRB charts, which was the start of what came to be known as the 'official' sales based charts. And there can be occasional differences between RM and RR, as crazy at that sounds. Apparently BMRB presented their data, and RM and RR independently decided what to do with it. Maybe only a few scattered differences or errors here and there on the main Top 50 chart. But there were a lot of differences with the "bubbling under" charts. Sometimes RM would do the bubblers one way, RR another way. One chart might assign specific numbers, while the other might just list the records alphabetically. But also sometimes (rarely) a record would appear on one bubbler chart but not the other. It's a zoo for the completest chart freak. Though more bubbler differences pre-Feb 1969 when RM was carrying the RR charts.

Note 2: The BBC also switched over to the BMRB charts in Feb 1969. I don't have BBC charts after Feb 1969. In general, the BBC never published their charts to the masses, but people have gone into the BBC library at times and gotten copies. I'm not aware of any post-Feb 1969 BBC charts being circulated anywhere. In theory they are the same as RM and RR, as they are all BMRB charts. But there might be differences. One way to check is to listen to old tapes of the BBC radio show Pick of the Pops, and/or watch videos of Top of the Pops, if they exist. So I truly don't know how the BBC treated Something/Come Together. Were they in agreement with the RM (from BMRB) charts that we do have? I would guess most likely, but we don't know for sure without more evidence.

Sorry again guys !! Cheers n crisps...

P.S. The US chart positions I posted up-thread came from actual chart scans of the Billboard, Cash Box, and Record World singles charts, so no worries with that data. Rock on...

 

"The Beatles new record's a gas..."

 

I don't think "respecting the Beatles' decision" (or Allen Klein's decision, in this case) should be the goal of the charts. If BMRB's survey indicated both sides were hits or the intended B-side was the actual hit, it was appropriate to report that.

 

Past Masters is disjointed. It has many greatest hits with lesser known B sides, alternate versions, foreign language versions, EP songs and cover songs in chronological order. I think it would have been better to put the more popular songs first and then append the lesser known songs. The chronological ordering of the songs on Past Masters is a buzz kill, in my opinion. I think it would have been even better to add the Past Masters songs as bonus tracks to the nearest corresponding album during the time they were originally released.

 

Something / Come Together on the BBC charts

OK, this is interesting. I found 6 of the BBC's Pick of the Pops radio countdown shows from Nov and Dec 1969, as in listen to the audio online, where Something and/or Come Together might have been played, as this record was in the BMRB charts these weeks. The online audio could have included Alan Freeman's introductions or outgoes before and after each record was played, and could have included mention at the end of the shows during Alan's Top 20 recap.

For the 1st of these 6 shows 11-9-69, The Beatles record(s) are missing from the (amateur provided) tape, as is the end of show recap. For the next 4 shows 11-16, 11-23, 11-30, and 12-7, only "Something" is played and mentioned by Alan during the countdowns, and the recaps are all missing at the end of the tapes.

Things were not looking good, ha. For the 12-14-69 show, only "Something" is played and mentioned during the countdown. But during the recap at the end of the tape, Alan indeed says: down at #11 "Something / Come Together" The Beatles.

So this at least makes a bit of sense, since Record Retailer, Record Mirror, and the BBC were all now using the BMRB charts (as of Feb 1969), and all 3 are in agreement with "Something / Come Together". We have the RM charts from World Radio History, I have a contact on another forum who has the RR scans and he says they do indeed show S/CT, and we have this audio from the BBC.

For what it's all worth, if anything, ha.

Here's the link to the full 2 hour BBC Pick of the Pops radio show from 12-14-69, it's most groovy keen fab gear !! Wow, history flashing right before our ears. "Something" is played at #11, and the Top 20 recap is during the last 90 seconds. Rock on:

Mixcloud

 

Oops - I got it backwards. I thought the Elvis release was first!

I confused my early 00s Beatles releases and thought "1" was late 2003... but that was "Let It Be... Naked".

 

I answered the thread's question in a prior thread but apparently the OP didn't like my answer so he started a thread...

...where the answer has been just what I said in that prior thread.

But hey, at least we've had endless debates about whether or not "For You Blue" was an A-side!

 

Fairly easy as to why "1" was massive and "Past Masters" wasn't.

Contray to common thinking, not everyone in the world was into all these b-sides and oddities. Your average person was familiar with the stuff they heard on the radio or had grown up with before life overtook them. They didn't want the hassle of "Sie Liebt Dich" or "You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)" - too much to process. But sacchrine dirges like "The Long And Winding Road" or "Let It Be" - background nonsense of the highest order? Yep, and the red cover is a nice colour.

"1" was probably Apple's best decision ever, because 30 million people agreed with them and bought it.

 

Don’t try logic Colin. It mystifies them.

 

Indeed, it was -in a sense-the logical successor to the Red and Blue albums because it just kept the hits.

 

I think we all tend to be a little (I don't like to say it) selfish when it comes to compilations. Assuming we're not completists who have to have every issue, when a compilation comes out what matters to us is: "What's it got that I want/am missing, and am I prepared to pay that price for it?" If it's got stuff we want at a decent price, then to us it's a good compilation!

Having got the non-single version of Love Me Do on EP, LP and CD (more of that later) I really wanted to get the single version for its historical significance (and I had the B-side, twice). Research showed me one way I could get this, cheaply (original singles are very expensive, even in not very good condition) was via Past Masters. I found a superb copy on Amazon, just over £8 including postage - and have been delighted with it. I was also delighted to pick up three tracks I didn't already have - the two German ones and the original Across the Universe. I hadn't been bothered about not having them (I'm not a completist) but it was nice to have them as well. I also don't have Magical Mystery Tour or Yellow Submarine, so those exclusive tracks would have been nice - but I've got what I consider the three best MMT tracks on the Blue album, and the best YS track (Hey Bulldog) on Rock'n'Roll Music. So I'm very happy with Past Masters (although I've got every other track on vinyl it's nice to have them collected together, so I can listen to them in the car) but I can quite see that other collectors, with different priorities and different gaps to fill, will think differently.

I do also own "1" - I found a copy in a local charity shop, for 50p, and reckoned I'd support the cause in the hope that it would prove to be the original Love Me Do. It's not, of course, and having got every track on vinyl I wouldn't have bought it had I known.