The Beatles sign with Vee-Jay - January 10, 1963
From BeatlesWiki
| Event | |
| Date | January 10, 1963 |
| Short description | Brian signs with Vee-Jay. |
| Location | |
On this date, Brian Epstein signed The Beatles to Vee-Jay Records. Capitol Records, EMI's sister company, had refused to issue Beatle records in the US because they saw little potential for the band. Despite already being issued by EMI in the UK and having success, Alan Livingston, who was in charge of signing the Beatles to Capitol, did not want them on their label, believing they would not sell well. He later said this, "Selling ‘British Beat’ in the early sixties was like selling ants to a zoo – a complete waste of time. Out of courtesy, I would occasionally take an EMI record, English in particular, and release it in the States with no success whatsoever. There was just no interest in English artists here. And they would pressure me somewhat, but not too bad, and I’d keep trying them every now and then. We had no success at all, but because of the relationship, I felt we had to screen everything they sent us. I couldn’t just brush it off, so I gave one of my producers the assignment of listening to every EMI record that was sent to us. His name was David Dexter. And Dave was a good musicologist, he was a writer, he was a producer, and I trusted his ears and was not concerned about it." David Dextor turned down disc after disc of The Beatles. Another company, Transglobal, to find a label to issue records in the US. They had found Vee-Jay, a small record company who had recently had a number five hit from an EMI artist Frank Ifield. Because they already had experience advertising this British act, it was decided that they'd try to sign with Vee-Jay. Because Brian thought that The Beatles would sell, a contract was drawn up to rerelease their single Please Please Me/Ask Me Why only. The deal was later changed so that they could rerelease any of the songs they chose to. The only problem with this contract was that they must reissue them within thirty days of their original release. They would encounter this problem later on when trying to rerelease the album Please Please Me under the title Introducing... The Beatles in January 1964 and they would be forced to stop pressing the album. They also had to pay royalties within forty-five days, which would also get them in trouble when Vee-Jay's boss gambled away the money before he could pay them it. As a result, he was fired that summer.
