Beatles Arrived In Us 40 Years Ago From Today

[DudeAsInCool]

Who feels old here? :)

Critic's Notebook: They Came, They Sang, They Conquered

February 6, 2004

By ALLAN KOZINN

From the distance of 40 years it seems almost silly, but on

Sunday, Feb. 9, 1964, at 8 p.m., nearly 74 million

Americans - just under half the country, according to the

Nielsen ratings - plopped in front of their television sets

to watch four English rock 'n' rollers in their early 20's

introduce themselves to the country by playing five songs

on "The Ed Sullivan Show" on CBS. The band was, of course,

the Beatles, and their debut, which is being celebrated by

the Museum of Television and Radio with a photography show

starting today, drew the largest TV audience that had been

measured up to that time.

Those viewers were not universally enthralled. Some had

already declared themselves hostile to the Beatles because

they found the group's pudding-bowl hairstyles,

velvet-collared jackets and pointy boots silly; or the

falsetto "woos" and head shaking that punctuated their

songs gimmicky; or simply because anything that caused such

a furor among teenage girls had to be objectionable. Others

were simply curious what the fuss was about, and no doubt

some tuned in out of habit to watch an almost universally

beloved variety show that, on this Sunday, also included a

semistaged excerpt from the Broadway hit "Oliver!,"

impressions by Frank Gorshin, Tessie

O'Shea's somewhat rumpled British vaudeville and a few

comedy and gymnastic acts.

All this attention the Beatles were getting was peculiar in

the context of the time. Not least, it upended the balance

of trade in popular music between Britain and America. This

transaction had previously worked in only one direction:

American stars were popular in Britain, but British singers

and bands, who tended to produce either watered-down cover

versions of American hits or derivative rock that was

unexciting to American ears, found it impossible to crack

the American market. The Beatles had a foot in that

tradition: they opened and closed their concert sets with

American rock standards - Chuck Berry's "Roll Over

Beethoven," the Isley Brothers' "Twist and

Shout" and Little Richard's "Long Tall

Sally" - and their first two albums included covers of

other American songs, too.

But it was their own music that grabbed listeners'

attention, and the songs that had most thoroughly saturated

the Top 40 airwaves at the start of 1964, "I Want to Hold

Your Hand" and "She Loves You," were the work of the

group's principal songwriters, John Lennon and Paul

McCartney.

Cultural Transformation

In the Beatles' music a listener could identify the

influences of American rhythm and blues, as well as show

tunes and older pop forms and, for an exotic touch, the

modal harmonies of British folk song. This amalgam quickly

became a winning formula for the British Invasion bands

that followed in the Beatles' wake.

In a huge reversal British music was transformed from

box-office poison to solid gold, and American bands would

soon be imitating it.

That first "Ed Sullivan Show" performance proved a cultural

turning point, one of those moments when everything

changed, or at least, a point to which one can trace

changes in everything from style in its broadest sense (in

music, art and fashion, for example) to the way rock 'n'

roll was marketed and perceived. It was one of the few such

moments in recent American history that did not involve an

assassination or a surprise attack, although one school of

thought holds that the explosion of Beatlemania across

America in early 1964 was part of the country's way of

healing itself after the assassination of President John F.

Kennedy.

The ripples reached even into the classical music world,

where rock was regarded as ephemera, the musical equivalent

of, say, potato chips. Leonard Bernstein and Leopold

Stokowski were among the first to declare the Beatles'

music to be good stuff; Aaron Copland and Ned Rorem soon

offered arguments in the group's defense, too, and it

wasn't long before young composers who came of age during

their reign began describing the Beatles' work as

influential.

Conquering the Airwaves

Because the Beatles' records and look had so fully

commandeered America's attention in the weeks before their

arrival at Kennedy Airport on Feb. 7, their two-week stay

in the United States - which included three Sullivan

appearances, concerts at the Washington Coliseum and

Carnegie Hall and a vacation week in Miami Beach - was so

copiously documented that anyone interested in revisiting

that heady time will find the materials easily at hand. The

Museum of Television and Radio is commemorating the

anniversary with "It Was Forty Years Ago Today . . . The

Beatles in America," an exhibition of photographs from the

CBS Photo Archive and the collection of Bill Eppridge, who

covered the Beatles' visit for Life magazine. The museum is

also offering a selection of radio interviews conducted by

the journalist Larry Kane during his travels with the

Beatles six months later during their summer American tour.

The museum's video collection, which includes extensive

Beatles holdings, may also be perused by visitors, and for

certain items, it is the place to go. An example is a clip

from Jack Paar's NBC variety show from Jan. 3, 1964. When

CBS announced that Sullivan would present the Beatles'

first American performances, Paar acquired film of the

group performing "She Loves You" in Southport, England, on

Aug. 26, 1963, for a British television special, "The

Mersey Sound." He did not have them live in the studio as

Sullivan would, but he was technically the first to present

the Beatles singing a complete song on American television.

Beatlemania was in the news before then, though. It was

first explored in a segment on NBC's "Huntley-Brinkley

Report," on Nov. 18, 1963. The "CBS Morning News" weighed

in with a condescending report from London on Nov. 22;

overshadowed by the Kennedy assassination later in the day,

it was rebroadcast on "The CBS Evening News" on Dec. 10.

As comprehensive as the museum's collection is, a nostalgic

fan or an armchair historian need hardly leave home to

relive the Beatles' introduction to America. A handful of

recent DVD releases cover most of the major stopping

points, and a few new books go a long way toward filling in

the blanks.

Chapter and Verse

The books, in fact, are useful guides to the video

productions. Bruce Spizer's "Beatles Are Coming!" is a

lavishly illustrated, carefully researched, fine-grained

examination of the Beatles' visit and everything leading up

to it, including the legal maneuvering among the various

American record labels that released the group's earliest

recordings here, and the details of the publicity and

marketing campaign that stoked the fires of American

Beatlemania.

"The Beatles Come to America," Martin Goldsmith's more

personal rumination on what the Beatles' visit meant to the

generation that experienced it, also includes ample

historical detail. And John C. Winn's "Way Beyond Compare,"

the first installment of a two-volume analytical catalog of

every known snippet of film and tape of the band, including

newsreel footage, is an invaluable companion. (The second

volume, "That Magic Feeling," covering the group's later

years, has also just been published.)

Mr. Winn's book comes in handy, for example, when watching

"The First U.S. Visit," an 81-minute documentary reissued

by Apple on DVD this week in an expanded form, fleshed out

with nearly an hour of outtakes in a documentary about the

documentary. The film, by Albert and David Maysles, begins

with the Beatles at Kennedy Airport stepping off the plane

and holding the introductory news conference in which they

charmed a skeptical press with snappy answers to questions

about their hair and music. ("Why does your music excite

your fans so much?" one reporter asked. John Lennon

answered, "If we knew that, we'd form another group and be

managers.")

From there the production cuts to what appears to be the

group's limousine ride from Kennedy to the fan-besieged

Plaza Hotel, during which the Beatles listened to reports

of their progress on transistor radios in the shape of

Pepsi vending machines. But as Mr. Winn points out, that

ride actually occurred the next day, when the group

returned to the Plaza after rehearsals for "The Ed Sullivan

Show."

Dramatic license notwithstanding, "The First U.S. Visit" is

an extraordinary film. The Maysles brothers had been

commissioned by Granada TV, a British television company

that had been documenting the Beatles since the summer of

1962, when it filmed the band performing at the Cavern Club

in Liverpool six weeks before the release of "Love Me Do,"

the group's first single.

Granada asked the Maysles brothers to follow the Beatles

around New York and down to Washington, where they

performed their first public concert in the United States

on Feb. 11. David Maysles flew to London with the early

material, which was quickly edited for a 40-minute program,

"Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Beatles in New York," broadcast in

England on Feb. 12. Albert Maysles, meanwhile, continued

filming, and CBS showed an expanded 50-minute documentary,

"What's Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.," on Nov. 13.

The Eye of the Hurricane

The Museum of Television and

Radio has "What's Happening!" in its collection, and in

some ways it is more of its time than the Apple film, a

1990 revision. One example is the coverage of the Ed

Sullivan performances. As Albert Maysles explained in an

interview included on the new DVD, when union rules

prevented the filmmakers from shooting the shows, they

knocked on the door of a random apartment and filmed the

family (which included three young girls) watching the

Beatles.

Apple had greater flexibility: in the new version, clips

from the Sullivan performances are edited in. Similarly,

the Maysles brothers managed to film parts of the

Washington Coliseum concert from seats in the hall.

Visually and sonically, the film has a gritty,

you-are-there feeling. Apple inserted excerpts from a more

professionally produced film made for a closed-circuit

theatrical showing of the concert in March 1964.

In either version, though, the unvarnished quality of so

much of the Maysles brothers' work is the principal

attraction. They capture the circus atmosphere: the fans

singing, chanting and screaming outside the Plaza (and, in

a couple of episodes, getting caught trying to sneak into

the group's rooms); the airport news conference and a

Central Park photo session; and the disc jockey and

self-styled fifth Beatle Murray the K creating his own

waves of hype and riding them, along with the bemused

Beatles, on his WINS radio show. But they also show what

Lennon used to call "the eye of the hurricane," or the

relative calm in the Beatles' hotel suites.

The Delights of Fame

Seen here the Beatles are

fresh-faced and new to fame. George Harrison, the youngest,

is about to turn 21; Ringo Starr, the oldest, is 23. The

camera captures the musicians' delight as they watch

television news coverage, read newspaper accounts of their

visit and describe their reception in a telephone interview

with the BBC in London. (A different version of this

section, filled out with audio from the BBC broadcast, is

included in "The Beatles Anthology," the group's video

autobiography.)

They are also clearly knocked out by the energy of popular

culture in New York, particularly the radio, on which

nonstop pop programming and the welter of competing

commercial stations was entirely unlike what they were used

to at home. Through much of the film, their

Pepsi-vending-machine radios seem glued to their ears,

although they leave them aside to go dancing at the

Peppermint Lounge and to chat with fellow travelers on the

train to and from Washington. In a way, "The First U.S.

Visit" is remarkably similar to "A Hard Day's Night,"

which the group began filming immediately

after this trip. The difference is in the spontaneity of

the Maysles brothers' film.

Apple dropped the ball in "The First U.S. Visit" by not

including the Washington Coliseum show intact as part of

the bonus material. Two new DVD's include the show, but

neither is authorized. "The Beatles in Washington, D.C."

presents only part of the concert, with the songs separated

by interview clips (not all from 1964).

A better and more complete presentation is included (along

with an April 1964 television special, "Around the

Beatles," and a dreadful print of a 1966 Tokyo concert) on

"Beatles Around the World." In both cases the quality is no

better than the bootleg versions that have been traded

among collectors for 20 years.

Curiously, "The First U.S. Visit" skips the group's two

concerts at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 12, probably because the

Maysles brothers paused to edit the early footage after the

Washington show. They did not resume filming until the

Beatles were in Florida, where they played their second

Sullivan show in Miami and spent a few days in the sun.

The Sullivan Revolution

The central performances from

this trip, though, were the Sullivan shows. The Beatles

mostly played their hits: "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was

included in all three shows; "She Loves You," "All My

Loving" and "I Saw Her Standing There" were in two; "This

Boy," "Till There Was You," "Please Please Me" and "Twist

and Shout" in one.

They are presented in pristine quality on "The Four

Complete Historic Ed Sullivan Shows Featuring the Beatles,"

a two-DVD set that includes the three consecutive

appearances from February 1964, as well as one taped on

Aug. 14, 1965. The shows are intact, with all the other

acts and most of the commercials included (only the

cigarette advertisements have been deleted).

There are some surprises. The "Oliver!" sequence stars

Georgia Brown, but also includes the young David Jones, who

three years later joined the Monkees, a Beatlesque group

created to star in its own television show. But to a great

extent the Beatles stand apart in this context. From

today's perspective even they seem a bit antique (a rock

band in matching suits and ties?), but the other performers

- and the variety show format itself - seem stuck in an

earlier era.

This has everything to do with the Beatles and the rock

revolution that reshaped our perceptions of popular culture

and, in a way, led to its fragmentation into specialized

niches. At the start of 1964, for example, it was possible

for a show tune like "Hello, Dolly!" to top the pop charts.

The Beatles had a hand in sweeping that world away, yet

they might have done so unwittingly. A centerpiece of their

1964 stage set, after all, was "Till There Was You," from

"The Music Man."

The Beatles' own world, as captured in these DVD's,

crumbled under the weight of their success, too. There is

considerable joy in their Ed Sullivan and Washington

performances, but in the two and a half years that

followed, that quality would slowly be drained from their

stage work as the din of their screaming audiences and the

hassles of traveling made touring untenable.

But that's another story. Probably the best way to

celebrate the anniversary of the Beatles' arrival is to put

aside the wisdom of hindsight, for better and worse -

forget about the later tours, the disputes that led to the

group's breakup in 1970 and even the great musical

innovations of their studio years - and look at Feb. 9,

1964, as a frozen moment when it was all fresh and fun and

that was all it had to be.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/06/arts/mus...47e6e4932341466

[Kooperman]

I distinctly recall the excitement as I sat in front of the TV at a friend's house, waiting for The Beatles to perform. It would be impossible to explain how the Beatles changed the face of American culture, and even society, in words that could convey the energy and enthusiasm that blossomed from the group's visit. It's been said that America's young people were so emotionally wounded after the murder of President Kennedy that they were unable to break loose with any joyous public displays of emotion. The Beatles changed all that and the young people of this country embraced them and their music. Even today, 50'ish people like myself still get a tingling feeling thinking about those days. They were and are special memories.

[DudeAsInCool]

Everyone watched the Ed Sullivan Show back then. It was a really corny variety show, but Sullivan was smart enough to capitalize on the British rock invasion, and thats where the Beatles were really launched. They not only changed the face of music, they set the trends of fashion and politics globally. I would argue that the revolution they started did a lot more to bring down the communists than politicians ever did...

[DudeAsInCool]

Time Magazine on the Beatles Invasion:

Meeting the Beatles

A longtime editor of TIME who covered the Fab Four reflects back upon the group's first frenzied visit to the States 40 years ago 

By CHRISTOPHER PORTERFIELD

It was, my editors had assured me, a dream assignment. And I, as a 26-year-old trainee in TIME's Washington bureau, was lucky to get it. Maybe so. But then why was I shivering alone on a corner of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue on this cold February night? The subjects I was supposed to be covering were ensconced 12 floors above me in the Plaza Hotel, encircled by a cadre of security gargoyles dedicated to making sure that neither I nor anybody else got anywhere near them. I'd been tracking them all day, but even the few quotes and details I'd gleaned had also been picked up by hundreds of competing journalists. So where was the dream part?

Well, I was looking in the wrong place. The subjects, after all, were the Beatles, the sensational English rockers who currently had the No. 1 album ("Meet the Beatles") and the No. 1 single ("I Want to Hold Your Hand") on the U.S. charts. They'd arrived for their first U.S. tour on that day, Feb. 7, 1964 — the most momentous British invasion, if you believed the hype, since the War of 1812. And the point was not to make intimate contact with the Fab Four themselves — at that point, it would've been easier to line up a chat with the Pope, or even J.D. Salinger — but to enjoy the excitement, the crowds, the hysterical adolescent girls, the sheer exuberant fun that surrounded them. The Beatles certainly enjoyed it all. Ducking into limousines, waving to screeching fans across police barricades, fielding silly questions at press conferences, they mugged and clowned and gagged it up to the delight of us reporters, who quickly wore out the adjectives "cheeky" and "irreverent." (Reporter: "How many of you are bald so you have to wear those wigs?" Beatles, in unison: "Oh, we're all bald." Reporter: "What do you think about the campaign in Detroit to stamp out the Beatles?" Paul McCartney: "We've got a campaign to stamp out Detroit." Reporter: "Who writes the music?" John Lennon: "What music?")

The crucible moment of the tour was their performance on the Ed Sullivan TV show on Sunday night, Feb. 9. Some 73 million Americans tuned in that night, the largest viewership in the history of television to that point. More than 50,000 fans and curiosity-seekers had applied for seats in the studio audience, of whom only 728 could be accommodated. I was one of the reporters watching from the back of the theater. (Maybe this actually was a dream assignment.) What struck us journalists that night was the noise that engulfed the Beatles as they trotted out onstage — intense, high-pitched, piercing. We agreed that it was louder, more frenzied, than Frank Sinatra's fans had ever been, or even Elvis Presley's. And it never let up: you could hardly hear the five songs the Beatles sang. Three nights later, when the Beatles played two concerts in Carnegie Hall, New York Times critic John S. Wilson reviewed the pandemonium of the audience as if it were the performance and the Beatles a barely audible accompaniment.

Did any of us — journalists, fans, the public, the Beatles — sense that all this hullabaloo represented the upswelling of the heady, tumultuous '60s, an early wave in what would become a tsunami of rock 'n' roll and social and political upheaval? I don't believe so. The decade had begun, it's true, with civil rights demonstrations and protests against the Bomb. And the Beatles' arrival came just months after the shattering event of President Kennedy's assassination. But Woodstock, the Vietnam Quagmire, the hippie phenomenon, the killings of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy‘all this and more was still ahead, and largely unforeseen.

Just as the '60s weren't quite the '60s yet, so the Beatles weren't quite the Beatles. They were delightful celebrities. It would take a couple more years and the release of albums like "Rubber Soul," "Revolver" and especially "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" for us to see that they were also brilliant musical innovators.

So onward rolled the merry caravan, through more press conferences and high jinks, by train to Washington, D.C., where the lads played a concert at the Coliseum and partied at the British Embassy, back to New York City, then by plane to Miami, where a second appearance was scheduled on the Ed Sullivan Show, this time live from the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach.

Now and again I managed to snatch a moment of face-to-face conversation with one of the foursome. On the Miami flight I crept into the first class cabin to interview Lennon, and returned bearing the stunning intelligence that his then wife Cynthia, who was traveling with the group, cut his hair with fingernail scissors. In a documentary film of the tour made by Albert and David Maysles, I can be seen joshing with Ringo Starr at a cocktail reception over whether Beatlemania was "all just a con." This bit of footage, authenticating that I had once basked in the presence of a Beatle, would in later years endow me with a measure of heroism in the eyes of my three children.

Now, however, I had to get back to New York for the unheroic task of closing TIME's story. The system in those days was that correspondents like me would send in voluminous "files" from which a staff writer would distill the polished piece that ran in the magazine. In this case the writer was John McPhee, who would go on to become a distinguished contributor to The New Yorker and author of 25 books, including "Coming into the Country" and "Annals of the Former World." John's story, to my chagrin, used only a few snippets of my material. But it was a breezy, bemused account that had something my reporting lacked: perspective. I hope I learned something from it. In any case, two and a half years later, I got my own back. When the release of "Sgt. Pepper" prompted TIME toput the Beatles on the cover — becoming one of the first major U.S. publications to do so — the writer of the story was me.

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,587795,00.html

[Lord_of_the_Dense]

I actually do not like the Beatles, soon to be Beatle. They never did anything for me. I shudder at the idea of falling into the hype of their heyday. For the most part, I do not understand it all. But that must be due to my not being born at that time in history. Based on my musical perference, I most likely will never accept them as a great band, regardless of what history has shown. But I am also one who does not believe the hype, along with a lot of other things.

[DudeAsInCool]

It wasnt hype--it just happened. I think its a case of you had to be there