Sometime in January 1964, my high school buddy Paul, who lived around the corner from me in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, visited the neighborhood record shop and picked up a copy of The Beatles’ debut Capitol single “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The 45 had become an instant sensation during the Christmas holidays, and was being spun incessantly on the local top 40 station WLS. When I saw Paul a few days after he made his purchase, he told me that he didn’t really like the record, and had traded it in for another single – The Trashmen’s frenetic “Surfin’ Bird.”

The Beatles were not done with my friend, however. Paul was a distinguished cellist, and a few years later he became a touring member of a well-known group that had followed the Fab Four’s lead and mated Eastern, classical, and pop strains in its sound. A few years and a good deal of drug experimentation after that, he changed his name and became a disciple of an Eastern spiritual group. Seeking did not end with The Beatles’ departure from the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh.

I recount Paul’s story because it perfectly delineates the tenor of that time. The Beatles were a ubiquitous force during the ‘60s, and even if you resisted or even rejected their charms, their impact was so pervasive that they wound up working their way into your consciousness, no matter what your musical disposition might have been. Paul may have been disappointed by his first exposure to the band, but he ended up following many of the diverse musical and cultural paths they opened up.

Ambitious as they were, The Beatles probably had no inkling of the scope their achievements would attain when they stepped into EMI’s recording facility at 3 Abbey Road, London NW8, on June 6, 1962, for their audition session for the Parlophone label. (In fact, the band had not even settled on its definitive lineup: Drummer Pete Best was replaced by Ringo Starr two months later.) But the body of work they would create in that homey facility over the next seven-and-a-half years would prove to be the bestselling and most influential catalog ever produced by a rock ‘n’ roll band.

Thus, the Sept. 9 compact disc re-release of The Beatles’ albums (in their original U.K. configurations) by Apple Corps and EMI – day-and-date with the bow of the video game “The Beatles: Rock Band” -- is being celebrated for a variety of reasons.

First, the remastered CDs revisit what is unquestionably the most popular collection of recordings ever issued by a group. Of the 13 original titles being re-released, 11 reached No. 1 on the British charts; cumulatively, they spent 162 weeks – more than three years -- at the top in England. Magical Mystery Tour was originally issued in the U.K. as a double EP, and not as an album; the bulked-up U.S. LP version, which is being reissued on CD in September, spent eight weeks at No. 1 in the States. Only Yellow Submarine, which comprised just six new songs and a selection of orchestral music from the feature-length cartoon (which was a flop in Great Britain), failed to hit the top, peaking at No. 3 in England and No. 2 in America.

English and American audiences experienced The Beatles’ music on LP in greatly differing formats. Parlophone in the U.K. began issuing the band’s 14-track albums nearly a year before EMI’s U.S. label Capitol officially signed the group; in America, the material was diced up onto re-titled, re-sequenced, and re-engineered packages of only 12 cuts. No Beatles album was released in identical packages on both sides of the Atlantic until Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).

When The Beatles’ catalog was released on compact disc for the first time in August 1987, Apple and EMI decided that the English configurations of the LPs would become the worldwide CD standard. (Two Past Masters CDs – which are being conjoined on one set in the September 2009 re-release – collated the band’s U.K. non-LP tracks.) At that time, the band’s first four albums – Please Please Me (1963), With The Beatles (1963), A Hard Day’s Night(1964), and Beatles For Sale (1964) -- were issued solely in mono, owing in no small measure to ongoing controversy about the fidelity of stereo versions of the group’s early sides. Addressing the wishes of American fans who wanted their original U.S. albums on CD (and in both stereo and mono mixes), Capitol issued the first eight domestic LPs in two boxed sets in 2004 and 2006.

The 2009 Beatles re-release will restore the catalog to consistency. The U.K. studio albums will all be released in remastered stereo editions, both individually and in a boxed set. (The box, and early editions of the original albums, will include mini-documentaries by Bob Smeaton, writer-director of the Grammy-winning The Beatles Anthology.) A separate box, The Beatles in Mono, will collect the mono versions of 10 original U.K. albums (six of them new to CD) and will include Mono Masters, a set of non-LP sides similar to the Past Masters compilation.

The main reason the 2009 re-release has been anticipated so enthusiastically is that the present reissue program represents the first real sonic upgrade of the material on CD in more than a quarter of a century. When The Beatles’ LPs came to the format in 1987, digital remastering was still in its infancy. In the years that followed, most of the key rock albums of the ‘60s were scrupulously retooled and polished – sometimes more than once -- employing state-of-the-art technology.