The Best Beatles Album?

If I had to introduce The Beatles to someone with just one album, it would come down to three choices:

A) A Hard Day's Night (Parlophone version)

B) Rubber Soul (Capitol Version)

C) Abbey Road

And the winner is:

The North American version of Rubber Soul is the perfect mid-point of the Beatles' career. Still accessible to the bubble crowd, it was also their first LP that appealed to college kids and adults. And unlike the British version, it does away with the weak Ringo number 'What Goes On' and the out of place noisy 'Drive My Car'. Instead, Capitol used leftovers from Help! that were a better fit for the rest of the collection, namely, 'I've Just Seen a Face' and 'It's Only Love.'

I'm also basing my choice on the opinions of friends and family I've heard over the years. Rubber Soul holds a special place in the hearts of a lot of folks that I don't hear expressed with any other Beatles LPs. People truly love this record.

And while A Hard Day's Night perfectly captures the early sound and is the best example of early Lennon (it's practically a solo John Lennon album), I sense a 'you had to be there' feel to it.

Abbey Road, is a near perfect album and has the best production quality of all their records. But being their last album, it doesn't feel like a group effort. Like 'The White Album', it's a four-way solo album with the other guys playing sidemen on each others tunes.