There may have been some trepidation at EMI as the respected record conglomerate prepared to issue the Beatles' new double album in November 1968, the first album from the group on their new Apple label. After all, it was a double album, which would sell in America for about nine or ten bucks - a lot to ask the fans to pay back then. And George Martin was worried about the damage it could do to the lads' reputation; after all, he thought that thirty tracks were, well, all too much, and, as noted here before, he had never wanted a double album. And all of the anticipation was building up big time, as it had been over a year since Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released. Not a lot of Beatles fans in the States considered Magical Mystery Tour, with all of its previously issued single cuts, a real album (it wasn't, as they would later find out, just like Yesterday and Today wasn't), and even though the Beatles had put out the equivalent of an album in the form of thirteen songs spread out over the Magical Mystery Tour record and four singles since June 1967, nothing beat the look, the feel, the mere presence of a real long player, with all-new songs, in one's hands. A brand new album from the Beatles was much more of an event than even a Beatles single - and this new album was to have two LPs!
And then, on November 22, 1968 in Britain, and on November 25, 1968 - fifty years ago today - in the United States, it happened.
The original reviews for The Beatles were mostly positive, with Derek Jewell of the Sunday Times in Britain writing, "Musically, there is beauty, horror, surprise, chaos, order. And that is the world; and that is what the Beatles are on about. Created by, creating for, their age." Over at the Observer a little farther down Fleet Street (give or take a few blocks), Tony Palmer declared, "If there is still any doubt that Lennon and McCartney are the greatest songwriters since Schubert, [The Beatles] should surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice swept away in a deluge of joyful music making." When commissioned to write liner notes for the Yellow Submarine soundtrack album, Derek Taylor was so impressed with Palmer's review that he used that instead. (Not that American fans got to read it; for the U.S. release, Capitol had liner-notes writer and future label vice president Dan Davis compose a clumsy explanation of the Yellow Submarine movie's plot in a blatant - and blatantly unsuccessful - attempt at replicating Liverpool humor.)
In America, Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone - then only a year in publication - led the chorus of praise, writing, "Nothing could have been more ambitious than the current release: The Beatles is the history and synthesis of Western music. And that, of course, is what rock and roll is, and that is what the Beatles are." Wenner singled out the Beatles' genius for adapting themselves to genres beyond rock and roll, saying that their ability to assume a non-rock style was "so strong that they make it uniquely theirs, and uniquely the Beatles. They are so good that they not only expand the idiom, but they are also able to penetrate it and take it further." Even Richard Goldstein of the New York Times, who had panned Sgt, Pepper, said that The Beatles was "a major success" and "far more imaginative" than Sgt. Pepper or Magical Mystery Tour. (Goldstein would later call Sgt. Pepper a success as well, saying of his original negative 1967 review, "I was wrong.")
Once in awhile, though, the White Album would get a raspberry, such as New York Times critic Nik Cohn calling it "boring beyond belief" and dismissing many of the songs as "profound mediocrities" in a counterpoint to Goldstein's review. Robert Christgau of the Village Voice, meanwhile, dismissed it as a collection of a "pastiche of musical exercises." The problem for the White Album's detractors was its admittedly exhausting 94-minute length, making it an endurance test for some. Putting out an album with too many songs at one time seemed pretty fishy to George Martin, who suspected that the Beatles were trying to fulfill a pre-set song quota in their EMI recording contract sooner rather than later, and Beatles author Nicholas Schaffner even calculated a few years later that, after the White Album's two long players, the song quota clause meant that the group would only owe EMI one album after that. (They ended up recording two more albums.)
Some reviewers faulted the Beatles not for the quantity of tracks on the new double album but for the overall conservatism of the album, saying it marked a retreat from the adventure of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper. Indeed, the White Album's primarily traditional sound would conventionalize pop for a decade, just as Abbey Road would inspire the rock and pop performers of the seventies to add a high sheen of polish and gloss to that conventional sound. Paul McCartney defended the Beatles' decision to be more traditionalist on the White Album, saying it was possible to make good music without coming up with a new sound, adding that too many critics wanted the group to innovate for the sake of innovation "until we vanish up our own B-sides." (He was likely not referring to songs like "The Inner Light" and "Revolution." :-D )
The fans would ultimately decide if paying a couple weeks' worth of their allowances or paychecks, depending on how far along they were in school and/or the workforce, was worth the trouble. Radio disc jockeys on the free-form FM radio stations emerging in 1968 would help them make that decision by playing the White Album on their shows, and one such DJ was Vin Scelsa (above), then just beginning a radio career that would span decades at various FM stations in the greater New York area before his retirement in 2015. In 1968, Scelsa was a 21-year-old student at Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey (coincidentally, the college where Allen Klein earned his accounting degree) working at the campus radio station WFMU. (Upsala closed in 1994, its campus turned into a McMansion development aimed at black home buyers in now overwhelmingly black East Orange, but WFMU is still on the air, now broadcasting out of Jersey City.) In November 1968, Scelsa, depressed over Richard Nixon's recent election to the Presidency, went over to nearby West Orange to browse in the record department at E.J. Korvette, a now-defunct discount department store chain. (The store's West Orange location happened to be a few blocks away from where Carole King and Gerry Goffin briefly lived, their suburban neighborhood inspiring them to write the Monkees tune "Pleasant Valley Sunday.") He knew the Beatles were coming out with a new album soon, but with the release date still a few days or so away, he wasn't looking for that on the store racks.
And then . . . in the middle of the record department . . . away from everything else in the record department . . . was a huge cardboard box, and on its slightly open flap . . . in capital letters . . . huge font . . . without parentheses or quotation marks . . . read the following words: CAPITOL RECORDS. Scelsa peaked in and found a bunch of white album covers with the embossed words "The BEATLES" on them.
Scelsa and his friends at Upsala wouldn't have to pay a dime for their copies of the White Album. He stole a bunch of them - he literally took an armful out and left the store without a word - and brought them back to the college campus, giving each of his friends a copy and playing cuts from his own copy on the campus radio station. Thus, WFMU was one of the first radio stations, in not the first radio station, in the United States to play the White Album. And it happened in Essex County, New Jersey, my own neck of the woods. (I remember E.J. Korvette in West Orange very well - it's a K Mart now, in fact - and I'm more than a little familiar with Pleasant Valley and the former Upsala campus.) Today, incidentally, WFMU wouldn't play old Beatles records; instead, it plays a lot of avant-garde and experimental music that the Beatles themselves couldn't have anticipated.
The music, once played on the radio, clearly helped to sell the album - it sold nearly two million copies in its first week of release in the United States, making it one of the fastest-selling new-album releases ever. It sold four million copies worldwide by the end of 1968, and in the United States it's been certified platinum nineteen times over. Really. (Or so Wikipedia says.) For awhile, it was the most commercially successful double album of all time, but a decade later, the two-record soundtrack album for the movie Saturday Night Fever surpassed it in sales. But The Beatles is still the most commercially successful Beatles album in the United States - even more so than Abbey Road - and it spent nine weeks atop the Billboard album chart in late 1968 and early 1969, though it was a nonconsecutive run (it was a run interrupted one week by a Motown TV-special soundtrack featuring the Supremes and the Temptations). Until Robert Stigwood compiled the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack from recordings from the Bee Gees, Tavares, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, and some other folks (telling, isn't it, that it took a various-artists two-record set to top the Beatles?) in 1977, the only double album that came close to the White Album's success was Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, from 1973.
As to the question as to whether the White Album was too long and too excessive, with a few inferior songs . . . I'll let Paul have the last word here. :-)
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