55 Years Ago: The Beatles Clean Out the Closet for ‘Hey Jude’ LP

The Beatles were winding down in the late '60s, but there were still some songs that their U.S. label had never put on an album. Capitol remedied that with the Hey Jude LP on Feb. 26, 1970.

By the time label execs realized they could make a profit on them, the Beatles had already released two albums and a bunch of singles. Capitol attempted to catch up, though it wasn't easy with the Beatles' prolific output in their early days. The label fashioned new records by taking some recent songs and combining them with leftovers. Beatles albums wouldn't include the same track listing on both sides of the Atlantic until 1967's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Nevertheless, a handful of cuts remained – and the Hey Jude compilation served as a repository of sorts. The record is sequenced chronologically, with "Can't Buy Me Love" and "I Should Have Known Better" kicking things off. Both songs had appeared on the soundtrack to A Hard Day's Night, but that album was released on United Artists, not Capitol. "Paperback Writer" and its B-side, "Rain," got placed on an LP for the first time, as did "Lady Madonna."

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Hey Jude also included their most recent non-LP single, "The Ballad of John and Yoko" and its George Harrison-penned flip "Old Brown Shoe," as well as "Don't Let Me Down," the "Get Back" B-side. But the LP's main selling points were the title track, which had spent a record nine weeks at No. 1 in fall 1968, and the song it was paired with, "Revolution."

Watch the Beatles' 'Hey Jude' Video

Why the 'Hey Jude' Album Still Matters

Even in their attempts to rectify this oversight, however, the label erred. Three of the earliest Beatles songs that hadn't appeared on a Capitol album – "There's a Place," "From Me to You" and "Misery" – were omitted, as were a couple of B-sides, "I'm Down" and "The Inner Light," plus the German version of "She Loves You," "Sie Liebt Dich." With Hey Jude's running time at a little more than 32 minutes, there was no reason to exclude these six songs, which totaled 13 minutes.

The quality of music was up to the Beatles' incredibly high standards, but Capitol's haphazard approach remained frustrating. The label would eventually get around to releasing the five English-language cuts over the next 10 years on such compilations as Rock and Roll Music and Rarities.

When the Beatles' catalog was first issued on compact disc in 1987 using only the British album titles and sequences, their non-LP songs were compiled in a two-volume set called Past Masters which rendered Hey Jude and those later collections redundant.

Still, there is one aspect of the record that remains historically relevant: The front and back cover photos were taken at Lennon's Tittenhurst Park estate on Aug. 22, 1969 – becoming the Beatles' last-ever shoot.

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