Photographer Robert Freeman, who took the legendary picture which appeared on the cover of Meet The Beatles!, died on November 8th, at 82. Mr. Freeman also took the photographs for the covers of other Beatles albums, including Rubber Soul.Meet The Beatles! was released in the United States in January of 1964, on Capitol Records.
The photograph by Mr. Freeman had previously been used--absent the blue tint seen on Meet the Beatles!--on the cover of the UK album With the Beatles, which had come out, on the Parlophone label, a couple of months prior to Meet the Beatles! (I had never known until today, while reading about With the Beatles, that the album had been released in the UK on November 22, 1963, the day of the Kennedy assassination.)
With the Beatles featured a number of the songs which would later be heard on Meet the Beatles!, but also included several cover recordings (such as "Roll Over Beethoven," and "You Really Got a Hold on Me") which would appear on the April, 1964 American release, The Beatles' Second Album.Although the cover of Meet the Beatles! asserts that it is "The First Album by England's Phenomenal Pop Combo," it was, technically (though just barely), the second album released in America by the Fab Four; Introducing the Beatles, on Vee-Jay Records, was brought out in the U.S. ten days prior to the release of Meet the Beatles! (In addition, the group's first studio album, Please Please Me, had been released in the UK, by Parlophone, in March of 1963.)
Here is an obituary of Robert Freeman, from the New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/arts/robert-freedman-beatles-photographer-dead.html
