Video: 'Please Please Me (Remastered 2009)'

(Thursday, February 7, 1963) — Vee Jay Records today released the first record by the British rock music band The Beatles in the U.S., the single “Please Please Me” and “Ask Me Why.”

Capitol Records, EMI’s United States label, was offered the right to release “Please Please Me” in the U.S., but turned it down.

Instead, it was placed with Transglobal, an EMI affiliate that worked to place foreign masters with U.S. record labels. It was told to find an American outlet for the record as quickly as possible, in order to appease producer George Martin and Beatles manager Brian Epstein.

Video: 'Please Please Me (Mono Version / Remastered 2009)'

“Please Please Me” was then offered to Atlantic, which also rejected it. Finally, Vee-Jay, which had released the top-five hit “I Remember You” by Frank Ifield in 1962 (another record that Capitol had turned down), was offered the right to issue “Please Please Me” in the States, and chose to do so.

The exact date of the U.S. issue was lost for decades, but research published in 2004 showed that the single, “Please Please Me”/”Ask Me Why,” was released by Vee-Jay today.

Dick Biondi, a disc jockey on WLS in Chicago and a friend of Vee-Jay executive Ewart Abner, played the song on the radio from February 1963, perhaps as early as Feb. 8, 1963, thus becoming the first DJ to play a Beatles record in the U.S.

On WLS, “Please Please Me” peaked at No. 35 on March 15 on the second of its two weeks on the “Silver Dollar Survey”,  in addition to its two airplay weeks. However, the song did not chart on any other major national American survey until 1964.

Video: 'Ask Me Why (Remastered 2009)'

The first pressings of the Vee-Jay single, which was assigned the catalog number 498, featured a typographical error: the band’s name was spelled “The Beattles” with two “t”s.

WLS used this spelling on its Silver Dollar Surveys in 1963. Later copies of the single corrected this misspelling. However, the same spelling was also on the Silver Dollar Surveys for the first two weeks of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in 1964.

Also, the composers on the Vee-Jay edition were credited on both sides as “J. Lennon-P. McCartney,” unlike on the UK Parlophone edition (which listed the names in the reverse order). However, with the exception of Chicago, the record was a failure as it sold approximately 7,310 copies.

Today, copies of Vee-Jay 498 — whether with the incorrect or correct spelling of the Beatles on the label — are valuable collector’s items.