The Beatles Box

(Image from Wikipedia)

Back in 1989, when I was a student in Edinburgh with more curiosity than cash, I walked into a second-hand record shop looking for something to keep me company through late-night study sessions and long weekends with no plans. I walked out with a box set of The Beatles.

Not just any box set, mind — this was the Readers Digest version. Yes, that Readers Digest. The same folks who bring you Laughter is the Best Medicine and condensed novels for people who don’t have time for the full-length kind. Somewhere along the way, they also decided to put out a box set compilation of Beatles tracks, and the cassette version was what I forked out a tenner for. I'm guessing I was eating from the chip shop for the rest of the month. That was fine, I liked salt & sauce.*

This thing was... odd. It wasn't the full Beatles catalogue. It didn’t have the album covers, the lyrics, or any of the artwork. Just eight cassettes in a sober little box with a tracklist that hopped from "Love Me Do" to "Let It Be" with no regard for original album sequence or context. And despite this, or perhaps because of this... it worked.

See, for someone like me — who hadn’t grown up with The Beatles in real-time — this was my first real exposure to their music. And it was unusual in that I developed a familiarity with the Beatles songs without having the famous album covers in my hand as I did so. And come to think of it, that wasn’t all that unusual for those of us in Gen X. A lot of the music we first heard came to us on C90 cassette tapes lovingly, or sometimes lazily, compiled. There were no liner notes or cover art. Just handwriting that said “Side A” and maybe a few track titles scrawled across the insert card.

That kind of blind-listening shaped the way we took in music. You weren’t guided that much by an album’s imagery or to a certain extent by its cultural weight. In some ways, the Beatles Readers Digest box set fit right into that aesthetic. There wasn't much separating it from a bunch of C60s put together by one of your friends. Or, if you prefer a curated playlist.

Years later, I’d hear the albums in their proper form, discover the context, the covers, the controversies. And, of course, that added richness. I like physical product. But at the same time, there’s something to be said for first impressions that arrive stripped of the legend.

*Edinburgh reference, IYKYK.