Pop-Up Stores to Offer Beatles\' Vinyl Reissues

New stereo vinyl versions of the Beatles albums will go on sale Tuesday.

The reissue of the Beatles' original albums on vinyl, on Tuesday, restores the music to the 12-inch LP format that thrived when the discs were first released, between 1963 and 1970. But one crucial thing has changed: back in the day, one of the joys of collecting was turning up at a record shop the day a new album was released and getting your hands on a fresh, shrink-wrapped copy. But now brick and mortar record stores are few and far between.

Capitol Records is addressing that flaw in contemporary American culture with one-day only pop-up shops - actually, a couple of British-st yle double-decker buses - in both New York and Los Angeles on Tuesday. Both the 14 individual albums (from “Please Please Me” through “Let It Be,” plus the two-disc “Past Masters” compilation of tracks originally released only on singles or EPs) and the box set, which includes all the albums and an otherwise unavailable 252-page book, will be sold on the buses. So will the 2009 CD versions of the discs, in both mono and stereo (the LPs are stereo only; the mono versions are due out next year), as well as other recent CD and video releases, and newly-minted memorabilia.

The buses will be easy to spot: on one side, they have the Beatles logo, with its distinctive elongated T, and the logo for Apple, the group's company; on the other, the Beatles, in a 1963 publicity photo, are perched on a stack of jacketless LPs. And Beatles obsessives will note an anomaly. The photo, shot at the same session as a similar one used on the pictur e sleeve for the American single release of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” originally showed Paul McCartney holding a cigarette. The cigarette has now been expunged, as it has been on reissues of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” since that disc's 20th-anniversary reissue in 1984.

In New York, the bus will make a 90-minute stop at Seventh Avenue, between 49th and 50th Streets, starting at 9:30 a.m., with later stops in SoHo (on Broadway between Prince and Spring Streets, at noon) and downtown (on Broadway between Cortlandt and Liberty Streets, at 2:30). The Los Angeles bus will be at the Capitol Records tower (1750 North Vine Street, at 9:30 a.m.), ICE at Santa Monica (1324 5th Street, at noon) and L.A. Live (Olympic Boulevard and South Figueroa Street, at 2:30).