In early October 1977, Capitol Records cancelled a Beatles single it had already prepared. The record was meant to promote Love Songs, a double compilation of the band's romantic material, but the copies were never pressed for sale. The Beatles' Love Songs had arrived in American shops on 21 October 1977, and the missing single became one of its strangest footnotes.
Two releases and a leather-look package
The album itself was a carefully dressed package. Parlophone handled the British release on 19 November 1977, almost a month after Capitol put it out in the United States. Love Songs gathered tracks recorded between 1962 and 1970, selected for their lyrical tenderness rather than their chronology or chart history. The collection spanned the group's entire recording life, from the earliest singles to the final sessions. Every song was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, except where the credits noted otherwise. The two discs held material chosen for its gentle, romantic mood rather than for any commercial logic. The American edition carried the catalogue number SKBL-11711, while the British pressing was numbered PCSP 721. The two discs held material chosen for its gentle, romantic mood rather than for any commercial logic.
Capitol had assigned the promotional single a catalogue number, 4506, and printed the picture sleeves. One side would carry 'Girl', with 'You're Going to Lose That Girl' on the flip. Then, for reasons nobody has explained, the label pulled the plug in early October 1977. The sleeves survived; the single did not.
Booklet, collage and gilded oval
The packaging made up for the absent single. American copies included two inner sleeves and a full-size booklet with song lyrics, printed in a calligraphic type on parchment-textured paper. The record jacket opened to a black-and-white photo collage of the group, adapted from a 1967 Richard Avedon portrait originally shot for Look magazine.
A smaller version of that collage became the oval logo on the front cover. First pressings in the United States and Canada went further: the logo was embossed and gilded, and the cardboard jacket imitated leather. Oval gold stickers were fixed to the shrink-wrap. The design suggested silk and hide more than rock and roll.
Stereo quirks and yellow vinyl
The music inside had its own quirks. Four songs from Rubber Soul appeared in slightly narrowed stereo, while three early tracks were presented in Duophonic mixes. The left and right channels were swapped, just as they had been on the group's Rock 'n' Roll Music collection the previous year. The Canadian pressing stood apart from the American and British editions in one visible way: it came on yellow translucent vinyl, announced by a promotional sticker on the sleeve. A New Zealand version used the same catalogue number and printing plate as the American release, but appeared on two different EMI labels.
Love Songs reached number 24 on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart, where it stayed for 31 weeks. By 2000, the RIAA certified three million copies sold. The compilation was deleted from the catalogue in the late 1980s, yet the certification arrived years after the album had vanished from stores.
The record travelled further than America and Britain. In 1982, the Bulgarian label Balkanton licensed the compilation from EMI and exported it to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries in Europe. A Beatles love-song collection, wrapped in fake leather and gold, reached listeners behind the Iron Curtain.
Nearly half a century after its release, the album is remembered as much for its objecthood as its songs: parchment paper, gilded oval, cancelled single. The most collectible piece of the whole project may be the Capitol 4506 sleeve that never held a record.