50 years after a “first night” of love
by Bruce Mason
In 1964, Newsweek got it unequivocally wrong: “The odds are they will fade away, as most adults confidently predict.”
The world has never experienced anything like the Beatles’ first live performance in the US. The Earth moved and 50 years later, personal and historic images still flicker brightly.
The stage had been set for 8PM, February 9, 1964. CBS Studio 50, in New York, was packed to its 700-seat capacity. There had been 50,000 requests for tickets after the gob-smacked band waved hello to a massive mob of teenage girls at the renamed JFK Airport, 11 weeks after the young president’s tragic assassination. A record-breaking 73 million plus viewers – one-third of the country’s population – were focused on small black and white TV screens as host Ed Sullivan made his famous introduction:
“Now, yesterday and today our theatre has been jammed with newspapermen and hundreds of photographers from all over the nation. And these veterans agreed with me that never before has the city seen such excitement as stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool… Ladies and gentlemen, let’s bring them on, the Beatles.”
It is difficult to imagine (even for John Lennon) what happened then, amid the familiar parade of animals, acrobats, puppets, plate-twirlers, stand-up comics and nightclub singers, hand-picked by the odd-talking, ex-gossip columnist who looked much like a high school principal. It was almost as if something from another planet had invaded the eclectic, but predictable, Sunday evenings of most North Americans – before colour, back when there were only three channels, no remotes, long before Miley Cyrus twerked her backside against the nearest male crotch on stage.
Following an energetic, scream-laden (live, not lip-synched) All My Loving, cameras panned the ‘Fab Four mop-heads,’ identifying each of them by their first names superimposed on the screen, with an extended caption for Lennon.
Relieved adults applauded as Paul crooned the tame Broadway ballad Till There Was You. But all Hell broke loose during the rocking version of She Loves You, whenever the band went “Woooo!” and shook their heads. By the time the Beatles reappeared with I Saw Her Standing There and I Want to Hold Your Hand, the British Invasion had begun, global Beatlemania was born and it seemed that nothing would ever be the same again.
Explosively – between January and March that year – the Beatles racked up 60% of all record sales in the US. By April, their songs occupied the top five Billboard singles spots and the top two album ratings – a triumph that’s never been equalled.
Scholars have made much of how the Beatles provided relief from the melancholy that lingered following JFK’s murder. However, there were many other forces at play. Often overlooked is the overwhelmingly obvious appeal that parents, including Sullivan, just ‘didn’t get it’ and couldn’t really see the big picture that was much bigger than the “big shooow!’
Newsweek opined, “Visually, they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian/Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically, they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody. Their lyrics – punctuated by nutty shouts of ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ – are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments. The odds are they will fade away, as most adults confidently predict.”
Others knew better. Bob Dylan, who later turned the Beatles on to marijuana, recalled, “They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies, made it all valid. But I kept it to myself that I really dug them. Everybody else thought they were for teenyboppers, that they were gonna’ pass right away. It seemed to me a definite line was being drawn. This was something that never happened before.”
Rock critic Greil Marcus wrote that the Beatles had created “that elusive rock treasure, a new sound that could not be exhausted in the course of one brief flurry on the charts… so fluid and intelligent that, for years, they made nearly everything else on the radio sound faintly stupid.”
During pre-Sullivan press conferences there had been hints of their trademark cheeky repartee, “How do you find America?” the US press asked. “Turn left at Greenland,” Ringo responded. “What do you call that haircut?” “Arthur,” said George.
No overnight sensation, the Beatles – in various incarnations – had struggled for eight long, hard years in seedy, beer-soaked British clubs. They played eight hours a night in filthy venues in the red-light district of Hamburg. John said he was “born in England, but grew up in Germany.” “Where are we going?” he often asked the lads. “To the top,” they replied.
He had famously closed a Command Performance in London with: “For those of you in the cheap seats, I’d like ya’ to clap your hands to this one; the rest of you can just rattle your jewelry!” Risque, but certainly short of his backstage reference to the Royals’ “fookin’ jewelry.”
Rock-and-roll – through the likes of Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and others – had created a separate, slightly rebellious and distinct music culture. It wasn’t just British sound; youth music was surfacing everywhere, from Motown to Surf sounds, the Supremes and Dylan. Already an unprecedented craze across Europe, the Beatles rode the crest of a wave, joyfully forming as the power of music coalesced with a massive demographic: Baby Boomers’ disposable incomes, unleashing an untapped, white-capped economic riptide and generational revolution.
At the same time, the civil rights movement was awakening long-slumbering rage in black America; millions of whites were moving to newly built suburbs, an unheard of percentage of youth were attending universities, the US military was making moves on the little-known country Vietnam and TV was bringing it all back home into living rooms.
In total, the Beatles made 10 appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, which included their promotional films being aired. Each one – like their successive albums – was eagerly anticipated and visually innovative. That’s where music videos and MTV got started. Yellow Submarine had revitalized and revolutionized animation. And when the Beatles sang All You Need Is Love, live, along with 600 million people, the first-ever, live global television event aired on four different orbiting satellites as if being broadcast to a village.
“When we watch TV and see quick cutting, hand-held cameras, interviews conducted on the run with moving targets, quickly intercut snatches of dialogue, music under documentary action and all the other trademarks of the modern style, we are looking at the children of A Hard Day’s Night,” the late, great film critic Roger Ebert wrote about a Beatles’ movie.
Visual impact constantly evolved and was closely observed, from Beatle boots to suits, collarless or solid white, psychedelic and East Indian, facial hair and wire-rimmed glasses. “We changed the hairstyles and clothes of the world, including America – they were a very square and sorry lot when we went over,” Lennon claimed.
Back in the Big Apple in 1965 for another Sullivan appearance, the Beatles also played Shea Stadium. Tickets for the first-ever stadium rock concert – $4.50 and $5.75 – sold out in 17 minutes. In a mere half-hour concert, 55,000 screaming fans witnessed – but didn’t hear – the Beatles. The gross revenue for the spectacle was $300,000, the top box-office bonanza for many years to come.
A year later, in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, the Beatles played their last public concert.
After six years of extended touring, exhausted, unable to hear themselves onstage, fearful of death threats and quite frankly bored, they decided to stay in the studio. They wrote and produced timeless masterpieces, transforming studio techniques and creating concept albums, including Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the first album with printed lyrics on the magnificently and unapologetically artful cover.
Six years after their first Sullivan appearance, the Beatles had broken up, having turned the world on and upside-down. They were last seen together in public atop the Apple building in what became the climax of their Let It Be film. On that cold January 30, 1969, Lennon, clad in Yoko Ono’s fur coat said, “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and myself and I hope we passed the audition.”
In 1980, Lennon was gunned down outside his New York home, filling the streets of the city once again. And after surviving a stabbing in his quiet English mansion in 1999, George Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001.
TV specials and news-clips will also mark the 50th anniversary of the first appearance. Survivors Paul and Ringo will reunite both privately and publicly to commemorate five decades. An unending barrage of new books continue to try to retrace the adventure, including everything from Martin Sandler’s How the Beatles Changed the World for young readers to the fascinating How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin by Leslie Woodhead, who produced the first film of the Beatles in Liverpool’s Cavern Club in 1962.
You had to be young (at heart, at least) to ‘get’ the picture and see and seize the possibilities. Of the Ed Sullivan appearance, Rolling Stone magazine noted, “One of the best things to happen in the 20th century, let alone the sixties. They were youth personified.”
And their presence will likely outlast even You Tube.
Rockers remember
The day after the Beatles first appearance on North American TV, teens returned to school with more than different hairstyles. For many, the broadcast was life changing. They wanted guitars and drums and to form bands in numbers that transformed music and the business.
Nancy Wilson from Heart
Tom Petty: “I think the whole world was watching that night. It certainly felt that way. You just knew it, sitting in your living room, that everything around you was changing. The Beatles came out and just flattened me. To hear them on the radio was amazing enough, but to finally see them play, it was electrifying.”
Gene Simmons (Kiss): “There’s no way I’d be doing what I do now if it wasn’t for what I saw that night. Those skinny little boys, kind of androgynous, with long hair like girls. It blew me away that these four boys from the middle of nowhere could make that music.”
Chrissie Hynde (The Pretenders): “I remember exactly where I was sitting. It was incredible, like the axis shifted. If you were a little virgin and didn’t want to grow up… didn’t want to enter the adult world… it gave you some kind of new avenue of sexuality… more cerebral. You didn’t have to actually touch the person’s acne. The day after, the boys all combed their hair down and made bangs! Me too! I never set my hair in rollers again. Oh, yeah. It was a whole other thing.”
Joe Perry (Aerosmith): “Talk about an event. I never saw guys looking so cool. I wasn’t prepared for how powerful and totally mesmerizing they were to watch. It changed me completely; something was different in the world that night. Next day at school, the Beatles were all anybody could talk about.”
Nancy Wilson (Heart): “The lightning bolt came out of the heavens and struck Ann and me, the first time we heard the call to become rock musicians. I was seven or eight, they were really pushing hard against the morality of the times. That might seem funny to say now, since it was in their early days and they were still wearing suits. But the sexuality was bursting out of the seams. We didn’t want to marry them or anything – we wanted to be them.”
Steven Van Zandt (Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band):“The main event of my life and for many others, whether or not they knew it at the time. There’s no equivalent today – TV shows that literally everybody watched. All ages, all ethnic groups, all in black and white on a 14-inch screen It was their sound, their looks, their attitudes. A time to look at things differently and question.”
Decades later, in I Saw it on TV, John Fogerty wrote and sang, “We gathered round to hear the sound comin’ on the little screen / The grief had passed, the old men laughed, and all the girls screamed / ’cause four guys from England took us all by the hand / It was time to laugh, time to sing, time to join the band.”
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Bruce Mason is a Vancouver and Gabriola-Island based five-string banjo player, gardener, freelance writer and author of Our Clinic. brucemason@shaw.ca
