August 4, 2020 • 51 mins
Blunders, technology, tragedy and luck all played a role in America's embrace of Beatlemania. Join Steve Greenberg for a whirlwind breakdown on exactly how the Liverpool foursome went from unknowns to the biggest pop stars in the USA, in just six weeks.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Speed of Sound is a production of I Heart Radio.
We've all heard the story of how on February the
Beatles performed live on The Ed Sullivan Show in front
of seventy three million television viewers, the largest audience ever
up to that point for an entertainment broadcast. But perhaps
you didn't know that a mere six weeks earlier, on
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Christmas Day, the Beatles were virtually unknown in the United States.
How does a band go from total obscurity to the
largest TV audience ever in a month and a half. Well,
a lot of things had to go right, and also
a lot of things that had gone wrong needed to
go on to pay unexpected dividends. Welcome to Speed of Sound,
(00:48):
the show that breaks down the stories behind the pop
songs and sounds that topped the charts and shape the
soundtrack of generations. I'm Steve Greenberg, and I'll be exploring
the session of how Beatlemania conquered the USA so quickly
on this episode of Speed of Sound. Ah, to understand
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how Beatlemania conquered America so quickly, it's really important to
take a look at British Beatlemania, which was in full
bloom by late summer nine. Britain's obsession with the Beatles
built over the course of nearly a year, during which
the band released a series of singles, each one bigger
than the one before Love Love You Know, I Love You. First,
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there was love Me Do, which only got to number
seventeen on the chart, but that was followed by Please
Please Me Yeah, which was much much bigger. It got
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to number two or number one, depending on which chart
you look at, and then From Me to You, which
was a monster, spending seven weeks at number one. Now
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the Beatles were touring pretty relentlessly at this point, and
by late spring there were tales of mass hysteria at
Beatles concerts which started to spread from the North of England.
Teenage girls were fainting at shows. The screaming was so
loud you couldn't hear the music. Every time a Beatle
was cited. It became a frenzied chase scene and it
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all spread through the UK town by town. Then, in
late August, the Beatles released She Loves You, which pretty
quickly became the biggest selling single ever by a UK act.
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At that point, the British press started writing about the
Beatles frenzy and by doing so, they of course whipped
it up further. Previously, the British press didn't care very
much about pop music. In fact, it took John Lennon's
involvement in a fist fight at Paul McCartney's birthday party
in June of sixty three for the band to even
get its first press headline, Beatle in Brawl Sorry I
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Sucked You, which ran on the back page of the
Daily Mirror. But by late summer of sixty three, the
press were extremely eager for the story of these four
young outsiders from the hinterlands who somehow had the power
to arouse young British womanhood to heights of hysteria. Now,
as it happened in the summer of nineteen sixty three,
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the UK press were becoming quite fascinated by the kind
of sexually charged topics that previously had been considered taboo.
And this was due to what became known as the
Profumo sex scandal, which at that very moment was bringing
down the British government due to tales of outrageous sexual
escapades involving Britain's upper crust. It quickly became obvious that
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stories about sex sold newspapers, and so to feed that hunger,
the papers started running stories about the Beatles craze, a
phenomenon viewed in purely sexual terms, with absolutely no regard
for the music. There were all these pseudo psychological analyzes
of the anatomy of Beatlemania, all of which had to
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do with sex. It was summed up by this one
young girl who was asked by the BBC why she
screamed at the mere mention of the Beatles and confessed,
it's not something I can say on the radio. When
the Beatles came to London on October, things went into overdrive.
They were there to appear on the biggest TV variety
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show in the country, Val Parnell's Sunday Light the London Palladium,
and thousands of screaming fans descended on the venue. They
clogged entire streets and they actually engaged in clashes with
the London police. And it was on that same day
that the Daily Mirror newspaper coined the term Beatlemania to
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describe what was going on. In case you're curious, Beatlemania
was a play on list Domania, which was this eighteen
forties frenzy which accompanied the concerts of pianist Franz List
And while all this was going on in England, America
was oblivious. All through nineteen sixty three, Capitol Records, who
had the right of first refusal to Beatles music for
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the US, showed absolutely no interest in the band. Now,
this was mainly due to the taste of a man
named Dave Dexter, who was in charge of Capitol Records
International A and R, meaning he was the guy who
decided which international projects got picked up in the US.
Dave Dexter was actually pretty good at his job. That
year he picked up a Japanese record called Sukiyaki by
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Q Sakamoto and it became a number one record in
the US. Them Also he signed some great jazz artists
like Peggy Lee and Nat King Cole. But Dave Dexter
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just plain didn't like rock and roll, and so he
turned down the first two Beatles records offered by E
M I, which owned Capital and who had the worldwide
rights to the band. Thus, Please Please Me and for
Me to You, both big British number one records instead
got licensed to this Chicago indie label called VJ Records.
(07:08):
J could have been a good home for the Beatles. Actually,
they had Frankie Valley in the four Seasons, who were
having some very very big hits around that time. But
unfortunately in three the label was running out of money.
Seems vj's president, Youward Abner, was using the company's funds
to cover his Las Vegas gambling losses. That didn't leave
the label much money to spend on radio promotion. So
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when VJ released Please Please Me in February, the only
station they could get the song on was a local
top forty station in Chicago, w l S, where a
DJ named Dick Beyondy was Youward Abner's close friend. You
don't where here. Every night at nine o'clock, everybody have
to remind you that nutts here again. Hello there, this
is the world's ugly beyond. Dick Beyondi played Please Please
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Me a lot, and the song managed to make it
to number thirty five on the w LS chart, but
that was it, and by the time VJ released the
next Beatles single, From Me to You in May, Dick
Beyondi had been fired by w LS, but luckily the
next month he landed it kr l A in Los Angeles,
where he continued to be supportive of the Beatles. Even
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though no one else in the entire country was playing
the record, he actually convinced k r l A to
give it a try. The airplay on k r l
A was enough to get the song all the way
up to number A hundred and sixteen on the Billboard
Bubbling Under chart. And that's where it's stalled now. You
might ask why didn't for me do you do better?
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It was being played in Los Angeles, the second biggest
radio market in the whole country. Well, it might have
had a little something to do with this. That's Del
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Shannon's version for media. Del Shannon was a top American
rock and roller in the early sixties. He had a
big hit called Runaway, which got all the way to
number one. Early in the spring of sixty three, Del
Shannon performed on a show in London with the Beatles
and he heard them play from Me to You. He
recorded it when he got back to the States, almost
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as a favorite to the Beatles. He was hoping to
give them some exposure in America, and in June the
song got up to number seventy seven on the Billboard chart,
thus marking the first appearance of a Lennon McCartney song
on the Hot One. Now. Maybe if Dick Biondi had
arrived to k r l A a month earlier, the
Beatles version of the song would have gotten some traction
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before the Del Shannon record even came out, but as
it stood, Del Shannon's released probably eliminated that chance. Meanwhile,
VJ records financial problems were starting to catch up with them.
E m I accused VJ of not paying royalties on
the two Beatles singles that they'd put out, and revoked
vj's options for any future singles. This turns out to
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have been a really stupid mistake on v j's part,
since the records were flops. In total, royalties owed to
the Beatles at that point were less than a thousand dollars. So,
with the VJ deal canceled, am I once again approached
our friend Dave Dexter at Capitol Records, this time with
She Loves You And Incredibly, in spite of the amazing
success the song was having in England, Dave Dexter turned
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the band down yet again. In a memo, he described
the beatles us prospects to be quote dead in the water,
and so she Loves You was licensed to Swan Records
of Philadelphia, a label even tinier than VJ, and they
released it on September sixteen. Swan had even less success
with the Beatles than VJ did. A disc jockey named
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Murray the k AT radio station w i n S
in New York gave She Loves You a real shot
on September when he played it in a five way
battle of the hits, where it came in third. Murray
kept playing it every night for a week solid, but
he got absolutely no reaction. Swan Records then convinced the
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TV show American Bandstand, which was also based in Philadelphia,
to play she Loves You in its Radar Records segment,
and the results were horrifying. The song got a score
of seventy three out of a hundred, and what's much worse,
the kids on Bandstand laughed when Dick Clark held up
a photo of the Beatles with their long hair. Years later,
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recalling that incident, Dick Clark remembers thinking to himself, I
figured these guys were going nowhere. The complete lack of
success in the US allowed George Harrison the opportunity to
come over and visit his sister, Louise, who lived in Benton, Illinois.
While he was in Illinois, Louise took George over to
a radio station in West Frankfurt where they played a
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copy of She Loves You that George had brought over
with him to the States, and then the station owners
seventeen year old daughter interviewed George Harrison on the air,
but still no listener respond. Incidentally, while he was in Illinois,
George Harrison actually jammed on stage at a VFW dance
with this local band called the Four Vests, who played
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fifties rock songs, and he could just do that in
complete anonymity. Meanwhile, back in England, the fan frenzy and
the press hysteria kept building and building, and at this
point the American press finally began to take notice of
what was going on in England, starting with the Washington Post.
On October twenty nine, the Post published the very first
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US press story on the Beatles, written by their London correspondent,
Flora Lewis. It was entitled Thousands of Britain's Riot, and
it focused on the fact that riot squads had to
be brought in to calm the crowds in four different
British cities where the Beatles had played recently. Like the
journalists in the British press, Flora Lewis was completely dismissive
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of the Beatles music. She described them as four wide eyed,
wacky boys in their early twenties, and she could paired
them to quote lamp upside down dust mops. In late October,
the Beatles towards Sweden, and when they were turned home
to England on October one, they were met at a
very rainy London airport by more than a thousand screaming fans,
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thrilled to have their idols back. How long do you
think Beatlemania will last? As long as you all keep
coming now, his fate would have it. Ed Sullivan, who
was the host of the biggest weekly TV variety show
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on American television, was also at London Airport that day,
and he couldn't help but notice the commotion. Ed Sullivan's
looking at these crowds, and he's assuming that all the
ruck is must be for a member of the British
royal family. When someone tells them it's for the Beatles,
he asks, who the hell are the Beatles? But he
makes a mental note to maybe consider booking these Beatles someday,
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perhaps as a novelty act. Then something happened that completely
changed the way people looked at the Beatles in England.
The band suddenly morphed from being looked at as merely
objects of teenage girls sexual obsessions to being embraced as
those lovable off tops the pride of the British Empire.
Even this instant transformation happened due to their appearance at
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the Royal Variety Show on November four. This was a
big annual charity event where the acts appeared at the
invitation of Queen Elizabeth, although the Queen actually stayed home
that evening because she was pregnant with Prince Edward, but
the Queen Mother, who was in fact the most beloved
of the royals, was in attendance and she could be
seen clapping along as the Beatles performed, while Princess Margaret
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was snapping her fingers. Now Famously, John Lennon introduced the
band's finale that evening, which was Twist and Shout with
a cheeky quicker. I'd like to ask you how but
the people in the cheapest seats clap your hands, and
the rest of you if you're just routier jewelry. That
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was a display of cheekiness that one simply did not
exhibit before the royal family. And yet when John Lennon
did it, it worked. He managed to somehow narrow the
distance between the monarchy and his little working class quartet
that was on stage. In England. At that time, ideas
of knowing one's proper place in society were evolving pretty rapidly.
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Even the Queen Mother became a fan that night, calling
the Beatles so young, fresh and vital, and from then
on the Beatles were treated as pretty much national heroes.
But the path to start him in the U S
would prove pretty bumpy for the Fab four. Up next,
Capitol Record makes a colossal mistake and the Beatles take
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on America back in the USA. Despite everything that was
going on in England, Capitol Records at the beginning of
November again turned down the latest Beatles single, a little
number called I Want to Hold Your Hand, which by
the way, had advanced orders of over a million singles
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in England. The Beatles manager Brian Epstein was fed up.
The day after the Royal Command performance, he got on
a plane in New York to try and fix the situation. First,
he met with Ed Sullivan, who was finally ready to
book the band after he'd heard those reports about how
they wowed the Royal family. Ed Sullivan made a deal
with Epstein that the Beatles would appear on not one,
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not two, but three consecutive episodes of The Ed Sullivan
Show on February ninth, six and twenty third, nineteen sixty four.
That's similar to what he'd done with Elvis Presley back
in nineteen fifty six. He agreed to pay them a
grand total of ten thousand dollars for the three episodes,
which was a lot less than what stars usually got
for being on the show, But Brian Epstein didn't care
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about the money. He knew that booking The Ed Sullivan
Show would be a game changer, and it was. Epstein's
next stop was to Capitol Records in New York office,
where a man named Brown Meg's, who was the East
Coast head of Capitol Records, immediately gave him a release commitment.
Epstein thought to himself, that was really easy. I should
have come over here in person months ago. But what
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he didn't realize was that the decision had already been made.
A couple of weeks earlier, the managing director of E
M I. LG. Wood flew to the USA furious that
Dave Dexter was refusing to license the Beatles. He pretty
much ordered Dexter's boss, Capitol Records president Allan Livingston, to
put out the next Beatles record in America. Livingston grudgingly
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agreed to press up five thousand copies of the next
single and to release it in January. It was only
later on afterward came in that Epstein had to deal
with Ed Sullivan. The Capitol finally got on board in
a big way and agreed to a forty dollar marketing budget,
which is about three thousand dollars in today's dollars. That
was a massive amount for a new act. Now. Amazingly,
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Dave Dexter kept his job as head of International A
and R at Capitol Records in spite of having turned
down the Beatles four times, and by the way, he
also turned down a bunch of other gigantic British invasion
acts Jerry and the Pacemakers, the Hollies, the Animals, the
Dave Clark Five, Herman's Hermits, the Yardbirds, and not only
did he keep his job, but he remained in charge
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of a and ring the Beatles records for the American market,
and so he was the guy responsible for the reconfiguration
of all the Beatles UK albums on Capitol in the US.
While all this was happening, the American media started to
become really fascinated by British Beatlemania. Within the course of
a week in the middle of November, the band was
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featured in Time Magazine, Life Magazine and Newsweek. All the
articles focused mainly on the fan frenzy and gave a
lot of attention to the appearance before the Royal family,
which to the American press, added a certain air of
legitimacy to the whole thing. Then, on November eighteenth, NBC
ran the first TV news item on British Beatlemania. It
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was a four minute long story on the Huntly Brinkley
Evening News which was watched by about twelve million people.
The piece was mainly about the fans hysterical reaction to
the band, and it showed a clip of the Beatles
performing from Me to You in concert, nearly completely drowned
out by all the screaming fans. One reason for the
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Bootles popularity, maybe that it's almost impossible to hear them.
Four days later, on November twenty two, the CBS Evening
News with Walter Cronkite was set to run its own
four minute long piece on Beatlemania, but the CBS piece
didn't air that evening from Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently
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official President Kennedy died at one pm Central Standard Time
two o'clock Eastern Standard Time, some thirty eight minutes ago.
The assassination of JFK sent American society into a deep depression,
especially the country's youth, who really looked up to JFK
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as a hero. Young Americans were in shock, which gave
way to sadness and disillusionment. Even Top forty radio didn't
provide an escape from the somber mood that America found
itself in. By some strange coincidence, the number one song
in the country for the rest of that year after
the assassination of America's first Catholic president was this folk
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song about the founder of a Roman Catholic religious order,
sung in French. The truth is no song could have
captured the nation's mood at that moment better than Dominique
by the singing nun. She didn't. In the weeks after
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JFK's death, Walter Cronkite, the anchorman of the CBS Evening News,
began to feel really weighed down by the absence of joy,
with one heavy item after another on his program. He
told his staff, let's air something fun to break things up,
but really there was nothing fun to report on. Then
somebody remembered that story that they were supposed to air
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on the day of the assassination, the one about those
crazy kids in England and how they were going bonkers
over this bunch of long haired rock and rollers, and
so on December tenth, the CBS Evening News ran that
four minute piece on the Beatles. Yeah, yeah, yeah, those
are the Beatles. Those are and this is beatle Land,
formerly known as Britain, where an epidemic called Beatlemania has
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sees the teenage population, especially female. The CBS piece was
just another one of those reports about screaming teens and
the royal variety, with a lot of eye rolling on
the part of the correspondent, who made it clear that
he was really bewildered and kind of annoyed by the
whole Beatle thing, but the piece also contained two things
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that weren't in the NBC report. First, there was an
interview with the Beatles themselves, do you have any fears
that your public eventually will get tired of you and
move on when your favorite It's stupid to worry about
things like that, because I mean, it goes no. We
could have missing your sleep for it could have come
out and could you know, we could have quite a run.
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We just hope we are gonna have quite a run.
And then there was a live performance if She Loves
You from a concert in Bournemouth. Walter Cronkite's news show
pulled in about ten million viewers a night, mostly families
gathered around what was usually the only TV in the house,
and one person watching that evening was a fifteen year
old girl named Marcia Albert who lived in Silver Spring, Maryland.
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When she heard She Loves You, she found it to
be a very welcome breath of fresh air. Marcia Albert
thought that She Loves You with such a great song
that she sat down and wrote a letter to her
local DJ, Carol James from w w d C in Washington,
d C. She wrote, why can't we have music like
that here in America. Just wanting to make a young
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kid happy in a very dark time. Carol James called
a friend who worked at b O A C, the
airline that was the precursor to British Air, and his
friend arranged for a stewardess to bring over a copy
of the Beatles latest single from England two days later.
As it turned out, that single was not She Loves You,
but in fact it was I Want to Hold Your Hand.
As a special treat, Carol James invited Marcia Albert to
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come down to the studio on December sevent and introduced
the song herself on the air. So Marcia Albert of
Dublin Drive of Silver Spring. As the honor of introducing
something brand new and exclusive here at w w DC,
Marcia the microphone here on the Carol James Show is yours,
ladies and gentlemen. For the first time in the year
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in the United States, here are the Beatles singing I
Want to Hold Your Hand. That piece of audio is
so astonishing. It's this fifteen year old girl basically coming
on the air and announcing to everybody that the world
is about to change. And by the time the song
was finished, the station's switchboard was all lit up with
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calls from listeners who wanted to hear it again. W
w d C immediately put the song into heavy rotation,
and by the next day, record stores all over the
DC area were swamped with request for this record that
they never heard of and which wasn't even available. Carol
James started sending real to real tapes of the record
to a couple of his friends who dj on stations
in Chicago and St. Louis, and when they put it
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on the air, the song got the same crazy reaction. Now,
why was it that the Beatles connected so immediately when
Carol James gave them one spin on December. They've gotten
on the radio before in the United States and nothing.
You might be tempted to suggest that I Want to
Hold Your Hand was just a better record than the
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previous Beatle releases, But then again, it was She Loves
You that got Marcia Albert all worked up in the
first place. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that
if it was She Loves You that was played on
w w d C on December sevent the reaction would
have been exactly the same. In fact, within a few weeks,
She Loves You would turn out to be as big
a sensation in America as I want to hold your hand,
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so exactly what had changed. Journalist Lester Bangs famously wrote
of that moment in time, we needed a fling after
the weak. Turns out the Beatles provided the perfect remedy
for those extremely dark days after John Kennedy's death. The
assassination caused this deep wound to the national psyche, and
young people were just anxious for something new to help
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them get over it. And looking back, it's not surprising
that I would have to come from outside the US,
because over here it didn't seem like there was any
joy to be found. And remember, by the time of
that first spin on w w d C, kids in
America had read a lot about the Beatles and the
effect they were having on teens in England, even if
they hadn't heard the music. All that media coverage of
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British Beatlemania kind of primed the public for the hysteria here.
There was a cartoon that accompanied a New York Times
magazine piece on British Beatlemania, where this girl is playing
a Beatles record on her phonograph while explaining to her
completely bewildered father. But naturally they make you want to scream, daddy. Oh,
that's the whole idea of the Beatles sound. When teenage
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girls hear the Beatles, they scream. Fans in America had
been learning how to react to the Beatles before they'd
ever even heard the music, and then when it turned
out that the music was terrific, the choice between American
depression and British Beatlemania became a no brainer. The only
problem was that Capitol Records weren't quite ready just yet.
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They'd scheduled I Want to Hold Your Hand for release
on January and I teen sixty four, and the early
airplay given by Carol James and his friends with no
records in the stores was actually seen by Capital to
be harmful to the project. Radio airplay without records and
stores is kind of like uncapped gushers spewing wasted oil.
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And so what did Capitol Records do? They called in
their lawyers, who sent a cease and desist letter to
w w d C demanding that they pulled the record
off the air. The station responded with an emphatic no.
This was the hottest record in ages In fact, Carol
James started circulating tapes of the song to more and
more DJs all over the country, and every station got
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the same insane reaction. Finally, Capital stopped fighting. They realized
they were sitting on a monster, and they snapped to attention.
Capital moved the release up to the earliest possible date, December.
Moving up the release date for I Want to Hold
Your Hand was actually the one and only important proactive
decision made by Capitol Records in the entire campaign, and
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that never would have happened without fifteen year old Marcia Albert.
By the way, when the Beatles played the Washington Coliseum
a couple of months later, Marcia Albert got to meet
the band, and the Beatles showed their appreciation by saying
thank you Marsha on the air on w w d C.
Pretty cool. Well, I'd like you to meet the young lady.
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Right after we finished talking here, Marcia Albert is come
on in here very quickly, Marsha. Then we have to
come here because I know that Marcia Albert, this is
George Harrison, there is you know, everybody. Capital put into
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motion a really aggressive marketing plan. Although some of their
tactics feel shall we say quaint by today's standards. They
printed up millions of stickers reading the Beatles are Coming
below a picture of four beetle hair dues, and then
they sent a memo to their staff instruking them, we
literally want your salesman to be plastering these stickers on
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any friendly surface as they walked down the street. Make
arrangements with some local high school students to spread the
stickers around town. Involve your friends and relatives. But the
truth is the marketing plan was hardly needed. Capital never
even made it through the entire forty marketing budget. From
the moment I Want to Hold Your Hand was released
on December, It's sold itself. That morning Capitals promo Man
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Hand delivered I Want to Hold Your Hand to all
the key radio stations. By nine am. Before the morning
was over, every top forty station in the country was
hammering the record and record stores were immediately swamped by
teenagers rushing to spend their Christmas money on the single. Now,
moving up the release date of I Want to Hold
Your Hand had one more unexpected benefit. In nine sixty three,
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the average American teenager listened to the radio for slightly
more than three hours per day. Now, with kids out
of school for Christmas break, the number was certainly even higher.
And it was especially high because the most common Christmas
presents received that year were transistor radios, which had become
a lot cheaper just in time for the holiday season.
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Nineteen sixty three was the year that all these inexpensive
off brand transistor radios flooded the American market. To put
it in perspective, five million transistor radios were sold in
the US in nineteen sixty two. In nineteen sixty three,
that number had doubled to ten million. America is from
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Maine to the Grand Canyon with a portable radio as
a travel America. Cheap transistor radios were such a sensation
that holiday season that Alan Sherman, who was kind of
the weird owl of his generation, wrote a song about it.
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The first day of Christmas, my true love gave to
me a Japanese transistor radio. Now, the transistor radio was
an extremely versatile piece of hardware. You could take it
anywhere and share music with your friends, but you could
also listen through an ear plug while lying in your
bed at night under the covers so your parents wouldn't know.
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So Imagine you're an American teenager turning on your brand
new transistor radio during Christmas vacation in sixty three, listening
for hours at a time, everywhere, alone and with your friends,
and hearing over and over and over again this new
sound that was even more exciting than your new piece
of hardware. In its first three days in the stores,
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I Want to Hold Your Hands sold a quarter of
a million copies, and the Beatles were suddenly the most
talked about group in the country. If you were a
teenager and went to a New Year's Eve party to
Usher in nineteen sixty four, I Want to Hold Your
Hand was the floor filler of choice at the New
year Ze party, with the young people instantly smitten. The
backlash from adults was just as instant. A mere three
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days after the record hit the stores, the Baltimore Sun
was already condemning the Beatles in an editorial which warned
America had better take thought as to how it will
deal with the invasion. Indeed, a restrained Beatles Go Home
might be just the thing, And of course, the fact
that the adults hated it was just one more reason
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for teenagers to love the Beatles. Capitol Records understood this
and even included that Baltimore Sun editorial in its own
press materials. The king of the Beatles haters turned out
to be an NBCTV variety show host named Jack Parr.
Jack Parr was in attendance at the Royal Variety Show
in London in November, and he thought the whole hullabaloo
(32:50):
over the Beatles was ridiculous. Like a lot of adults
back then, he thought rock and roll was juvenile, and
he was proud to have never booked a rock and
roll act on his show. But Jack Parr was also
the arch rival of Ed Sullivan, and so once Ed
Sullivan announced that he booked the Beatles for February, Jack
Parr decided to get the jump on him. He licensed
(33:11):
some Beatles performance footage from the BBC, and then he
sent out a press release announcing that his show was
going to be the first to present the Beatles in
the USA. Radio disc jockeys across the country breathlessly conveyed
the news to their listeners that the Beatles would be
making their TV debut on The Jack par Show on Friday,
January three. Now, Jack Parr's goal in presenting the Beatles
(33:35):
was to mock the group. He admitted he was featuring
them as a joke, but instead he managed to send
Beatlemania into an even higher orbit. He started his piece
by showing footage of fan hysteria at a UK Beatles show,
and he kept making these snarky interjections like I understand
science is working on a cure for this, which got
(33:57):
big laughs from his studio audience, right to now that
England has finally allusion to our cultural level. Then, as promised,
he presented the first full song performance by the Beatles
on American TV. But the song was not I Want
to Hold Your Hand, but rather it was She Loves You,
the same song that had so enchanted fifteen year old
(34:18):
Marcia Albert, and it was an in studio performance shot
for a BBC documentary. So now, just a week after
I Want to Hold Your Hand had exploded in America,
millions of fans are now encountering She Loves You, and
with video to boot the Beatles. Jack Parr appearance is
generally considered a footnote at best to the Beatles story.
(34:38):
NBC definitely doesn't brag about the appearance, since Jack part
turned out to be on the wrong side of history.
But the truth is outside of radio airplay, the tape
performance on the Jack par Show on January three was
the single most important event leading to that complete frenzy
that surrounded the band's arrival in America the next month.
(34:59):
The Jack Parsh which aired a tenant night on Friday's,
tended to draw an average of seventeen million weekly viewers,
mostly an older crowd, but with the Beatles on the show,
his viewership that week swelled to thirty million. Let's put
those numbers in perspective. The Jack par Show typically was
not one of the top thirty shows in the country,
but the January third show had a viewership almost as
(35:22):
large as the highest rated show of the week, the
Beverly Hillbillies, which had thirty four million viewers. It's pretty
safe to assume that those thirteen million additional viewers were
tuning in to see the Beatles. Watching the Beatles on
the Jack par Shows a revelation for their new American fans,
and it was also a revelation for Swan Records. Remember them,
They're the Philadelphia label that held the US rights to
(35:44):
She Loves You Well. On Saturday morning, after the broadcast
requests for the record exploded, and by that Monday, Swan
Records rushed to rerelease it. If I Want to Hold
Your Hand took off in the marketplace solely based on
radio play. Swan's re release if She Loves You is
the first single ever to explode because of what was
basically a music video, and it immediately rivaled I Want
(36:06):
to Hold Your Hand as the most played song on
American radio. To add fuel to the fire, VJ Records
jumped on the bandwagon and rerelease Please Please Me and
for Me To You as a double a sided single,
and both of those songs instantly went into heavy radio rotation.
Up next, how Capitol Records are early missteps with the
Beatles actually proved to be marketing magic and catapulted them
(36:30):
to the realm of gold records and superstar status. Now,
the folks and Capitol Records were not amused by these developments.
They assumed that the rival releases would get in the
way of their campaign. But as it turned out, Capitals,
having passed on all those early Beatles singles, had the
(36:54):
effect of making that initial wave of Beatlemania a lot
more intense than it would have been if the Beatles
been marketed in the usual fashion one single at a time.
Having four Beatles singles saturating the radio all at once
in January four meant that it was the Beatles who
teenagers fell in love with, not just a Beatles single.
(37:14):
By the middle of January, Capitol Records released the debut
American album by the Beatles, Meet the Beatles, which was
joined a week later in the marketplace by Vj's album
Introducing the Beatles. So within a three and a half
week period, the market was delused with three singles featuring
four bona fide hit songs and two LPs, and all
(37:35):
of these Beatles releases were out selling everything else in
the marketplace. By the end of January, the Beatles had
already sold two and a half million records. It's pretty
clear that virtually upon its release on December, I Want
to Hold Your Hand was the biggest selling single in
the country, But if you look back at old record charts,
you won't see the song at number one nationally until
(37:56):
the January twenty four issue of cash Box. That's been
us Back in those days, chart data came in really slowly.
That cash Box chart actually reflected sales for the week
of January eleven, the record really became the most popular
song in the country, a lot quicker than cash Box reported.
By the first week of January, w ABC in New
(38:17):
York was already listing the song at number one, and
k r l A and Los Angeles followed suit the
next week. This instant rise to the top really was unprecedented.
In the UK, the Beatles had toured incessantly. They played
live in thirty four cities in the fall of ninety
three alone, and by the time Beatlemania erupted there, they
had released a few singles, they had hosted their own
(38:39):
weekly radio show, they'd been on TV a few times.
But in America they reached those same heights within a
week of the official release of their first Capitol single,
and then on February seven, the Beatles arrived in America.
(39:03):
The TV and print coverage of the band's arrival was
really intense. Ed Sullivan had been hyping the beatles appearance
on the air since early January right after the Jack
par Show aired, and Life magazine, which reached over forty
million liters a week, added to the hype by running
this seven page photo filled essay entitled here Come Those Beatles,
(39:24):
in which they reported, first England fell victim of a
million girlish screams, then last week Paris surrendered. Now the
US must brace itself. The Beatles are coming. Even the
Beatle haters felt they needed to acknowledge the band. A
well known DJ named William B. Williams on New York's
(39:45):
easy listening station w n e W, for instance, would
introduce the Beatles song as I Want to Hold My Nose,
and then he played just a few seconds of it
before tearing the needle off the record. Brian Epstein had
imagined that the b Les appearance on The Ed Sullivan
Show would be the launching pad for their conquering of America,
(40:05):
but by the time the Beatles arrived, America already lay
at their feet, and then their arrival took things to
a whole another level. In the hours leading up to
their arrival on February seven, New York top forty radio
stations broadcast regular updates on the progress of the Beatles
flight from London. Capitol Records actually provided specific information to
(40:26):
the DJs in advance, including the scheduled arrival time and
even the gate number, so that the fans who wanted
to greet the man with nowhere to go. At about
one twenty in the afternoon, the Beatles arrived at Kennedy
Airport on pan Am flight one oh one, and they
were greeted by over four thousand screening teenagers, plus about
two hundred reporters and photographers and a hundred police officers.
(40:49):
At the famous press conference that the band conducted inside
the airport, the Beatles immediately won over the press with
the same wit and charisma with which they had won
over the British press four months early. Here. Journalists back
then had very low expectations of rock and rollers, with
most assumed to be a bunch of ignorant hoods. Frank
Sinatra actually once referred to rock and rollers as creetan
(41:11):
as thugs. But if anything, it was the reporters who
appeared to be the Dullard's that day, asking banal questions
right especially as poems. After the press conference, the band
headed to Manhattan, chased by fans shouting at them from
the open windows of their moving cars on the Expressway.
(41:33):
When they got to the Plaza Hotel, they found thousands
more fans waiting for them, again tipped off to the
band's whereabouts by radio DJs who got their information straight
from Capital Broadway was shut down for eight blocks. The
top forty stations in New York all broadcasts live from
the Plaza. Any mentioned on the air of a Beatles
(41:53):
sighting elicited a collective shriek from the crowd outside, and
I got news. Everybody down there on Park Aven. We
were listening to W A B C W A Beetle
c ball and Ringo. Yeah all, and Ringo will be
(42:15):
with us in a few minutes. They're gonna be here
in r W A Beatles c suite and you'll be
hearing them. What's amazing about that clip is that the
DJs weren't speaking to the crowd outside through any loudspeaker system.
(42:39):
Everyone in the crowd was carrying, as always, their trustee
transistor radios and reacting in unison to the prompts of
the DJs over the air. The fans remained crowded in
front of the Plaza Hotel throughout the Beatles whole visit,
and any rumor of a Beetle coming or going would
lead the swarm to rush and mass down the street,
(42:59):
or down the block, or wherever it was that they
thought the band was about to emerge. Walter Cronkite's report
that night on the CBS Evening News was awe struck.
He was showing the band a lot more respect than
his program had the first time around. Meanwhile, Chat Huntley
on the NBC News went out of his way to
be demeaning to the group. By this point, NBC had
kind of positioned itself as the anti Beatles network. Maybe
(43:23):
it was because the Beatles were set to appear on
the Ed Sullivan Show, which was on CBS, But in
the spirit of that original November news piece and the
Jack par broadcast, Chat Huntley covered the group's arrival this way.
We sent three camera crows to stand among the shrieking
youngsters and record the sites and psalms were posterity. Someone
asked what the fuss was about, and we found we
(43:46):
had no answer. So good night for NBC News. Whether
it was with respect or with scorn, the Beatles visit
was covered in every media outlet in the country by
that Sunday. There was no one in America who had
acts us to a television, radio or a newspaper who
could have not known that the Beatles were going to
be on Ed Sullivan. That night, the rivalry among New
(44:08):
York radio stations to see who could be most identified
with the band reached an especially fevered pitch. On w
I N S d J. Murray the K managed to
wiggle himself into the Beatles orbit, getting exclusive interviews and
referring to himself as the fifth Beatle rival station. W
m c A got George Harrison's sister Louise to come
(44:28):
down and visit the station, where she called her brother
George and his sick bed at the plaza for an
exclusive on air conversation, and w ABC, the biggest station
in the market, went so far as to rebrand itself
as w A Beatles c. On the day of the
Ed Sullivan show, all three stations raised the level of
pandemonium in front of the theater fifty thousand fans that
(44:51):
applied for tickets to the broadcast in a theater that
only had seven d and twenty eight seats, Broadway was
shut down for eight blocks, with thousands of teenagers mobbing
the streets, everyone carrying as always their transistor radios and
reacting in unison to the prompts of the disc jockeys. Now,
as we've hinted, at before. It's doubtful whether the insanity
(45:13):
surrounding this moment could have ever materialized if the chain
of events started by Walter Cronkite and running through Marcia
Albert and Carol James hadn't occurred follow me here. Without
all of that, the release date of I Want to
Hold Your Hand would have remained January through Radio listeners
wouldn't have heard the record repeatedly over Christmas Break on
(45:33):
their transistor radios. Millions of teenagers wouldn't have tuned into
the Jack par Show to watch the Beatles perform on
January three. Swan Records wouldn't have rushed released She Loves You.
The air waves wouldn't have been jammed with Beatles records
in January. I Want to Hold Your Hand wouldn't have
been number one by the time of the band's arrival.
The media frenzy wouldn't have reached that fevered pitch before
(45:56):
February seven, and the band would have arrived a new
work to do the Ed Sullivan Show without the airport scene,
the press conference, or the screaming fans of the plaza.
But it all unfolded as if in a fairy tale.
The Beatles were slated to perform five songs on that
first Ed Sullivan broadcast, but they weren't the only guests
on the show. There were comedians, acrobats, an impressionist named
(46:21):
Frank Gorshon who later played the Riddler on the Batman
TV series. There was even a juggler, and with the
show about to start, every one of them was terrified
of having to perform in front of a theater full
of teenage girls who were already screaming NonStop before the
show even the game. Interestingly, among the other performers on
the show was the cast of the London stage production
(46:43):
of Oliver, which included a young man named Davy Jones,
who played the role of the artful Dodger. Davy Jones
looked out at the screaming girls in the audience and
decided to leave musical theater and pursue a career in
rock and roll instead. A couple of years later, he
became a rock stars self as part of the Monkeys
You We Own Street Now. During the nineteen sixty four
(47:18):
TV season, the Ed Sullivan Show typically drew about twenty
one million weekly viewers, making it the biggest variety show
on the air on the night of February nine, sixty four,
the audience for The Ed Sullivan Show jumped to seventy
three million, by far the largest television audience for an
entertainment program in history to that point. Now, that's seventy
(47:38):
three million viewers out of a total US population of
one and eighty million, so that means of the country
was watching. Now, I'd like to add one little wrinkle
with regard to that famous seventy three million number, which
has been touted by CBS for over fifty years. I
always wondered how CBS came up with it, since the
(47:59):
Niel Said ratings back then didn't report total number of
viewers for shows. They only reported the total number of
TV households who were watching, which was twenty three million households.
If you take that number and multiply it by three
point two, which was the average number of people in
the US household in nineteen sixty four, you wind up
with seventy three million. So CBS's number assumes that in
(48:22):
every household tuned into the Ed Sullivan Show, every single
person in the household was watching. Grandparents, babies, everybody, and
well maybe they were. I've certainly never met anyone who
remembers that night who claims they weren't watching. Most significantly,
in nineteen sixty four, about of all Americans were aged
(48:44):
eighteen or under prime baby boomers. Of those, thirty five
billion were between the ages of eight and eighteen, and
pretty much all of them were watching. In fact, the
Washington Post went so far as to joke that on
the night the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan Show quote,
there wasn't a single hubcap stolen in America. While that
(49:04):
may or may not have been true, what is definitely
not in dispute is the fact that virtually every young
person in America sat glued to the family TV set
that night just after eight o'clock Eastern time when Ed
Sullivan took to the stage to introduce the band. Now,
yesterday and today Art Theater has been jammed with newspatman
and hundreds of dark moti the nation, and these veterans
(49:24):
agree with me that the city never has witnessed the
excitement stirred by these juncters from Liverpool who called themselves
the Beatles. Now tonight, you're gonna twice be entertained by them.
Right now and again on the second half of our show,
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Beatles. Yeah that hm. Of course,
(50:14):
in hindsight, the Beatles rise to superstardom would seem to
have been inevitable, and maybe it was, given how talented
and charismatic they were. But there's no doubt that an
amazing confluence of historical cross winds needed to converge it
just the right time in order to enable the unprecedented
explosiveness of Beatlemania in early Some people say it's better
(50:38):
to have luck than talent. In the case of the Beatles,
there was an abundance of both. That wraps up this
episode of Speed of Sound. Please join us next time
on Speed of Sound, when will tell the surprising story
behind the unlikely group that introduced the world to hip hop.
(51:01):
If you want to take a deeper dive into the
artists and songs you just heard, check out our curated
playlist at the Speed of Sound page on the I
Heart app. Until next time, you can find me on
Twitter at Stevie g Pro. Speed of Sound is executive
(51:24):
produced by Lauren Bright Pacheco, Noel Brown and me. Taylor
shakogn is our supervising producer, editor and sound design. Additional
sound designed by Tristan McNeil. I'm Steve Greenberg. Until next time,
keep listening from music that moves you. Speed of Sound
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
(51:45):
from my heart Radio, check out the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speed of Sound is a production of I Heart Radio.
We've all heard the story of how on February the
Beatles performed live on The Ed Sullivan Show in front
of seventy three million television viewers, the largest audience ever
up to that point for an entertainment broadcast. But perhaps
you didn't know that a mere six weeks earlier, on
(00:21):
Christmas Day, the Beatles were virtually unknown in the United States.
How does a band go from total obscurity to the
largest TV audience ever in a month and a half. Well,
a lot of things had to go right, and also
a lot of things that had gone wrong needed to
go on to pay unexpected dividends. Welcome to Speed of Sound,
(00:48):
the show that breaks down the stories behind the pop
songs and sounds that topped the charts and shape the
soundtrack of generations. I'm Steve Greenberg, and I'll be exploring
the session of how Beatlemania conquered the USA so quickly
on this episode of Speed of Sound. Ah, to understand
(01:23):
how Beatlemania conquered America so quickly, it's really important to
take a look at British Beatlemania, which was in full
bloom by late summer nine. Britain's obsession with the Beatles
built over the course of nearly a year, during which
the band released a series of singles, each one bigger
than the one before Love Love You Know, I Love You. First,
(01:56):
there was love Me Do, which only got to number
seventeen on the chart, but that was followed by Please
Please Me Yeah, which was much much bigger. It got
(02:16):
to number two or number one, depending on which chart
you look at, and then From Me to You, which
was a monster, spending seven weeks at number one. Now
(02:40):
the Beatles were touring pretty relentlessly at this point, and
by late spring there were tales of mass hysteria at
Beatles concerts which started to spread from the North of England.
Teenage girls were fainting at shows. The screaming was so
loud you couldn't hear the music. Every time a Beatle
was cited. It became a frenzied chase scene and it
(03:00):
all spread through the UK town by town. Then, in
late August, the Beatles released She Loves You, which pretty
quickly became the biggest selling single ever by a UK act.
(03:21):
At that point, the British press started writing about the
Beatles frenzy and by doing so, they of course whipped
it up further. Previously, the British press didn't care very
much about pop music. In fact, it took John Lennon's
involvement in a fist fight at Paul McCartney's birthday party
in June of sixty three for the band to even
get its first press headline, Beatle in Brawl Sorry I
(03:45):
Sucked You, which ran on the back page of the
Daily Mirror. But by late summer of sixty three, the
press were extremely eager for the story of these four
young outsiders from the hinterlands who somehow had the power
to arouse young British womanhood to heights of hysteria. Now,
as it happened in the summer of nineteen sixty three,
(04:06):
the UK press were becoming quite fascinated by the kind
of sexually charged topics that previously had been considered taboo.
And this was due to what became known as the
Profumo sex scandal, which at that very moment was bringing
down the British government due to tales of outrageous sexual
escapades involving Britain's upper crust. It quickly became obvious that
(04:29):
stories about sex sold newspapers, and so to feed that hunger,
the papers started running stories about the Beatles craze, a
phenomenon viewed in purely sexual terms, with absolutely no regard
for the music. There were all these pseudo psychological analyzes
of the anatomy of Beatlemania, all of which had to
(04:50):
do with sex. It was summed up by this one
young girl who was asked by the BBC why she
screamed at the mere mention of the Beatles and confessed,
it's not something I can say on the radio. When
the Beatles came to London on October, things went into overdrive.
They were there to appear on the biggest TV variety
(05:10):
show in the country, Val Parnell's Sunday Light the London Palladium,
and thousands of screaming fans descended on the venue. They
clogged entire streets and they actually engaged in clashes with
the London police. And it was on that same day
that the Daily Mirror newspaper coined the term Beatlemania to
(05:30):
describe what was going on. In case you're curious, Beatlemania
was a play on list Domania, which was this eighteen
forties frenzy which accompanied the concerts of pianist Franz List
And while all this was going on in England, America
was oblivious. All through nineteen sixty three, Capitol Records, who
had the right of first refusal to Beatles music for
(05:53):
the US, showed absolutely no interest in the band. Now,
this was mainly due to the taste of a man
named Dave Dexter, who was in charge of Capitol Records
International A and R, meaning he was the guy who
decided which international projects got picked up in the US.
Dave Dexter was actually pretty good at his job. That
year he picked up a Japanese record called Sukiyaki by
(06:16):
Q Sakamoto and it became a number one record in
the US. Them Also he signed some great jazz artists
like Peggy Lee and Nat King Cole. But Dave Dexter
(06:38):
just plain didn't like rock and roll, and so he
turned down the first two Beatles records offered by E
M I, which owned Capital and who had the worldwide
rights to the band. Thus, Please Please Me and for
Me to You, both big British number one records instead
got licensed to this Chicago indie label called VJ Records.
(07:08):
J could have been a good home for the Beatles. Actually,
they had Frankie Valley in the four Seasons, who were
having some very very big hits around that time. But
unfortunately in three the label was running out of money.
Seems vj's president, Youward Abner, was using the company's funds
to cover his Las Vegas gambling losses. That didn't leave
the label much money to spend on radio promotion. So
(07:31):
when VJ released Please Please Me in February, the only
station they could get the song on was a local
top forty station in Chicago, w l S, where a
DJ named Dick Beyondy was Youward Abner's close friend. You
don't where here. Every night at nine o'clock, everybody have
to remind you that nutts here again. Hello there, this
is the world's ugly beyond. Dick Beyondi played Please Please
(07:53):
Me a lot, and the song managed to make it
to number thirty five on the w LS chart, but
that was it, and by the time VJ released the
next Beatles single, From Me to You in May, Dick
Beyondi had been fired by w LS, but luckily the
next month he landed it kr l A in Los Angeles,
where he continued to be supportive of the Beatles. Even
(08:15):
though no one else in the entire country was playing
the record, he actually convinced k r l A to
give it a try. The airplay on k r l
A was enough to get the song all the way
up to number A hundred and sixteen on the Billboard
Bubbling Under chart. And that's where it's stalled now. You
might ask why didn't for me do you do better?
(08:36):
It was being played in Los Angeles, the second biggest
radio market in the whole country. Well, it might have
had a little something to do with this. That's Del
(08:56):
Shannon's version for media. Del Shannon was a top American
rock and roller in the early sixties. He had a
big hit called Runaway, which got all the way to
number one. Early in the spring of sixty three, Del
Shannon performed on a show in London with the Beatles
and he heard them play from Me to You. He
recorded it when he got back to the States, almost
(09:16):
as a favorite to the Beatles. He was hoping to
give them some exposure in America, and in June the
song got up to number seventy seven on the Billboard chart,
thus marking the first appearance of a Lennon McCartney song
on the Hot One. Now. Maybe if Dick Biondi had
arrived to k r l A a month earlier, the
Beatles version of the song would have gotten some traction
(09:36):
before the Del Shannon record even came out, but as
it stood, Del Shannon's released probably eliminated that chance. Meanwhile,
VJ records financial problems were starting to catch up with them.
E m I accused VJ of not paying royalties on
the two Beatles singles that they'd put out, and revoked
vj's options for any future singles. This turns out to
(09:58):
have been a really stupid mistake on v j's part,
since the records were flops. In total, royalties owed to
the Beatles at that point were less than a thousand dollars. So,
with the VJ deal canceled, am I once again approached
our friend Dave Dexter at Capitol Records, this time with
She Loves You And Incredibly, in spite of the amazing
success the song was having in England, Dave Dexter turned
(10:21):
the band down yet again. In a memo, he described
the beatles us prospects to be quote dead in the water,
and so she Loves You was licensed to Swan Records
of Philadelphia, a label even tinier than VJ, and they
released it on September sixteen. Swan had even less success
with the Beatles than VJ did. A disc jockey named
(10:42):
Murray the k AT radio station w i n S
in New York gave She Loves You a real shot
on September when he played it in a five way
battle of the hits, where it came in third. Murray
kept playing it every night for a week solid, but
he got absolutely no reaction. Swan Records then convinced the
(11:03):
TV show American Bandstand, which was also based in Philadelphia,
to play she Loves You in its Radar Records segment,
and the results were horrifying. The song got a score
of seventy three out of a hundred, and what's much worse,
the kids on Bandstand laughed when Dick Clark held up
a photo of the Beatles with their long hair. Years later,
(11:25):
recalling that incident, Dick Clark remembers thinking to himself, I
figured these guys were going nowhere. The complete lack of
success in the US allowed George Harrison the opportunity to
come over and visit his sister, Louise, who lived in Benton, Illinois.
While he was in Illinois, Louise took George over to
a radio station in West Frankfurt where they played a
(11:48):
copy of She Loves You that George had brought over
with him to the States, and then the station owners
seventeen year old daughter interviewed George Harrison on the air,
but still no listener respond. Incidentally, while he was in Illinois,
George Harrison actually jammed on stage at a VFW dance
with this local band called the Four Vests, who played
(12:10):
fifties rock songs, and he could just do that in
complete anonymity. Meanwhile, back in England, the fan frenzy and
the press hysteria kept building and building, and at this
point the American press finally began to take notice of
what was going on in England, starting with the Washington Post.
On October twenty nine, the Post published the very first
(12:32):
US press story on the Beatles, written by their London correspondent,
Flora Lewis. It was entitled Thousands of Britain's Riot, and
it focused on the fact that riot squads had to
be brought in to calm the crowds in four different
British cities where the Beatles had played recently. Like the
journalists in the British press, Flora Lewis was completely dismissive
(12:53):
of the Beatles music. She described them as four wide eyed,
wacky boys in their early twenties, and she could paired
them to quote lamp upside down dust mops. In late October,
the Beatles towards Sweden, and when they were turned home
to England on October one, they were met at a
very rainy London airport by more than a thousand screaming fans,
(13:15):
thrilled to have their idols back. How long do you
think Beatlemania will last? As long as you all keep
coming now, his fate would have it. Ed Sullivan, who
was the host of the biggest weekly TV variety show
(13:36):
on American television, was also at London Airport that day,
and he couldn't help but notice the commotion. Ed Sullivan's
looking at these crowds, and he's assuming that all the
ruck is must be for a member of the British
royal family. When someone tells them it's for the Beatles,
he asks, who the hell are the Beatles? But he
makes a mental note to maybe consider booking these Beatles someday,
(14:01):
perhaps as a novelty act. Then something happened that completely
changed the way people looked at the Beatles in England.
The band suddenly morphed from being looked at as merely
objects of teenage girls sexual obsessions to being embraced as
those lovable off tops the pride of the British Empire.
Even this instant transformation happened due to their appearance at
(14:22):
the Royal Variety Show on November four. This was a
big annual charity event where the acts appeared at the
invitation of Queen Elizabeth, although the Queen actually stayed home
that evening because she was pregnant with Prince Edward, but
the Queen Mother, who was in fact the most beloved
of the royals, was in attendance and she could be
seen clapping along as the Beatles performed, while Princess Margaret
(14:46):
was snapping her fingers. Now Famously, John Lennon introduced the
band's finale that evening, which was Twist and Shout with
a cheeky quicker. I'd like to ask you how but
the people in the cheapest seats clap your hands, and
the rest of you if you're just routier jewelry. That
(15:10):
was a display of cheekiness that one simply did not
exhibit before the royal family. And yet when John Lennon
did it, it worked. He managed to somehow narrow the
distance between the monarchy and his little working class quartet
that was on stage. In England. At that time, ideas
of knowing one's proper place in society were evolving pretty rapidly.
(15:33):
Even the Queen Mother became a fan that night, calling
the Beatles so young, fresh and vital, and from then
on the Beatles were treated as pretty much national heroes.
But the path to start him in the U S
would prove pretty bumpy for the Fab four. Up next,
Capitol Record makes a colossal mistake and the Beatles take
(15:55):
on America back in the USA. Despite everything that was
going on in England, Capitol Records at the beginning of
November again turned down the latest Beatles single, a little
number called I Want to Hold Your Hand, which by
the way, had advanced orders of over a million singles
(16:17):
in England. The Beatles manager Brian Epstein was fed up.
The day after the Royal Command performance, he got on
a plane in New York to try and fix the situation. First,
he met with Ed Sullivan, who was finally ready to
book the band after he'd heard those reports about how
they wowed the Royal family. Ed Sullivan made a deal
with Epstein that the Beatles would appear on not one,
(16:40):
not two, but three consecutive episodes of The Ed Sullivan
Show on February ninth, six and twenty third, nineteen sixty four.
That's similar to what he'd done with Elvis Presley back
in nineteen fifty six. He agreed to pay them a
grand total of ten thousand dollars for the three episodes,
which was a lot less than what stars usually got
for being on the show, But Brian Epstein didn't care
(17:02):
about the money. He knew that booking The Ed Sullivan
Show would be a game changer, and it was. Epstein's
next stop was to Capitol Records in New York office,
where a man named Brown Meg's, who was the East
Coast head of Capitol Records, immediately gave him a release commitment.
Epstein thought to himself, that was really easy. I should
have come over here in person months ago. But what
(17:24):
he didn't realize was that the decision had already been made.
A couple of weeks earlier, the managing director of E
M I. LG. Wood flew to the USA furious that
Dave Dexter was refusing to license the Beatles. He pretty
much ordered Dexter's boss, Capitol Records president Allan Livingston, to
put out the next Beatles record in America. Livingston grudgingly
(17:46):
agreed to press up five thousand copies of the next
single and to release it in January. It was only
later on afterward came in that Epstein had to deal
with Ed Sullivan. The Capitol finally got on board in
a big way and agreed to a forty dollar marketing budget,
which is about three thousand dollars in today's dollars. That
was a massive amount for a new act. Now. Amazingly,
(18:07):
Dave Dexter kept his job as head of International A
and R at Capitol Records in spite of having turned
down the Beatles four times, and by the way, he
also turned down a bunch of other gigantic British invasion
acts Jerry and the Pacemakers, the Hollies, the Animals, the
Dave Clark Five, Herman's Hermits, the Yardbirds, and not only
did he keep his job, but he remained in charge
(18:28):
of a and ring the Beatles records for the American market,
and so he was the guy responsible for the reconfiguration
of all the Beatles UK albums on Capitol in the US.
While all this was happening, the American media started to
become really fascinated by British Beatlemania. Within the course of
a week in the middle of November, the band was
(18:48):
featured in Time Magazine, Life Magazine and Newsweek. All the
articles focused mainly on the fan frenzy and gave a
lot of attention to the appearance before the Royal family,
which to the American press, added a certain air of
legitimacy to the whole thing. Then, on November eighteenth, NBC
ran the first TV news item on British Beatlemania. It
(19:11):
was a four minute long story on the Huntly Brinkley
Evening News which was watched by about twelve million people.
The piece was mainly about the fans hysterical reaction to
the band, and it showed a clip of the Beatles
performing from Me to You in concert, nearly completely drowned
out by all the screaming fans. One reason for the
(19:32):
Bootles popularity, maybe that it's almost impossible to hear them.
Four days later, on November twenty two, the CBS Evening
News with Walter Cronkite was set to run its own
four minute long piece on Beatlemania, but the CBS piece
didn't air that evening from Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently
(19:53):
official President Kennedy died at one pm Central Standard Time
two o'clock Eastern Standard Time, some thirty eight minutes ago.
The assassination of JFK sent American society into a deep depression,
especially the country's youth, who really looked up to JFK
(20:15):
as a hero. Young Americans were in shock, which gave
way to sadness and disillusionment. Even Top forty radio didn't
provide an escape from the somber mood that America found
itself in. By some strange coincidence, the number one song
in the country for the rest of that year after
the assassination of America's first Catholic president was this folk
(20:38):
song about the founder of a Roman Catholic religious order,
sung in French. The truth is no song could have
captured the nation's mood at that moment better than Dominique
by the singing nun. She didn't. In the weeks after
(21:06):
JFK's death, Walter Cronkite, the anchorman of the CBS Evening News,
began to feel really weighed down by the absence of joy,
with one heavy item after another on his program. He
told his staff, let's air something fun to break things up,
but really there was nothing fun to report on. Then
somebody remembered that story that they were supposed to air
(21:28):
on the day of the assassination, the one about those
crazy kids in England and how they were going bonkers
over this bunch of long haired rock and rollers, and
so on December tenth, the CBS Evening News ran that
four minute piece on the Beatles. Yeah, yeah, yeah, those
are the Beatles. Those are and this is beatle Land,
formerly known as Britain, where an epidemic called Beatlemania has
(21:50):
sees the teenage population, especially female. The CBS piece was
just another one of those reports about screaming teens and
the royal variety, with a lot of eye rolling on
the part of the correspondent, who made it clear that
he was really bewildered and kind of annoyed by the
whole Beatle thing, but the piece also contained two things
(22:11):
that weren't in the NBC report. First, there was an
interview with the Beatles themselves, do you have any fears
that your public eventually will get tired of you and
move on when your favorite It's stupid to worry about
things like that, because I mean, it goes no. We
could have missing your sleep for it could have come
out and could you know, we could have quite a run.
(22:33):
We just hope we are gonna have quite a run.
And then there was a live performance if She Loves
You from a concert in Bournemouth. Walter Cronkite's news show
pulled in about ten million viewers a night, mostly families
gathered around what was usually the only TV in the house,
and one person watching that evening was a fifteen year
old girl named Marcia Albert who lived in Silver Spring, Maryland.
(22:55):
When she heard She Loves You, she found it to
be a very welcome breath of fresh air. Marcia Albert
thought that She Loves You with such a great song
that she sat down and wrote a letter to her
local DJ, Carol James from w w d C in Washington,
d C. She wrote, why can't we have music like
that here in America. Just wanting to make a young
(23:15):
kid happy in a very dark time. Carol James called
a friend who worked at b O A C, the
airline that was the precursor to British Air, and his
friend arranged for a stewardess to bring over a copy
of the Beatles latest single from England two days later.
As it turned out, that single was not She Loves You,
but in fact it was I Want to Hold Your Hand.
As a special treat, Carol James invited Marcia Albert to
(23:39):
come down to the studio on December sevent and introduced
the song herself on the air. So Marcia Albert of
Dublin Drive of Silver Spring. As the honor of introducing
something brand new and exclusive here at w w DC,
Marcia the microphone here on the Carol James Show is yours,
ladies and gentlemen. For the first time in the year
(23:59):
in the United States, here are the Beatles singing I
Want to Hold Your Hand. That piece of audio is
so astonishing. It's this fifteen year old girl basically coming
on the air and announcing to everybody that the world
is about to change. And by the time the song
was finished, the station's switchboard was all lit up with
(24:21):
calls from listeners who wanted to hear it again. W
w d C immediately put the song into heavy rotation,
and by the next day, record stores all over the
DC area were swamped with request for this record that
they never heard of and which wasn't even available. Carol
James started sending real to real tapes of the record
to a couple of his friends who dj on stations
in Chicago and St. Louis, and when they put it
(24:44):
on the air, the song got the same crazy reaction. Now,
why was it that the Beatles connected so immediately when
Carol James gave them one spin on December. They've gotten
on the radio before in the United States and nothing.
You might be tempted to suggest that I Want to
Hold Your Hand was just a better record than the
(25:04):
previous Beatle releases, But then again, it was She Loves
You that got Marcia Albert all worked up in the
first place. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that
if it was She Loves You that was played on
w w d C on December sevent the reaction would
have been exactly the same. In fact, within a few weeks,
She Loves You would turn out to be as big
a sensation in America as I want to hold your hand,
(25:26):
so exactly what had changed. Journalist Lester Bangs famously wrote
of that moment in time, we needed a fling after
the weak. Turns out the Beatles provided the perfect remedy
for those extremely dark days after John Kennedy's death. The
assassination caused this deep wound to the national psyche, and
young people were just anxious for something new to help
(25:50):
them get over it. And looking back, it's not surprising
that I would have to come from outside the US,
because over here it didn't seem like there was any
joy to be found. And remember, by the time of
that first spin on w w d C, kids in
America had read a lot about the Beatles and the
effect they were having on teens in England, even if
they hadn't heard the music. All that media coverage of
(26:12):
British Beatlemania kind of primed the public for the hysteria here.
There was a cartoon that accompanied a New York Times
magazine piece on British Beatlemania, where this girl is playing
a Beatles record on her phonograph while explaining to her
completely bewildered father. But naturally they make you want to scream, daddy. Oh,
that's the whole idea of the Beatles sound. When teenage
(26:34):
girls hear the Beatles, they scream. Fans in America had
been learning how to react to the Beatles before they'd
ever even heard the music, and then when it turned
out that the music was terrific, the choice between American
depression and British Beatlemania became a no brainer. The only
problem was that Capitol Records weren't quite ready just yet.
(26:55):
They'd scheduled I Want to Hold Your Hand for release
on January and I teen sixty four, and the early
airplay given by Carol James and his friends with no
records in the stores was actually seen by Capital to
be harmful to the project. Radio airplay without records and
stores is kind of like uncapped gushers spewing wasted oil.
(27:17):
And so what did Capitol Records do? They called in
their lawyers, who sent a cease and desist letter to
w w d C demanding that they pulled the record
off the air. The station responded with an emphatic no.
This was the hottest record in ages In fact, Carol
James started circulating tapes of the song to more and
more DJs all over the country, and every station got
(27:39):
the same insane reaction. Finally, Capital stopped fighting. They realized
they were sitting on a monster, and they snapped to attention.
Capital moved the release up to the earliest possible date, December.
Moving up the release date for I Want to Hold
Your Hand was actually the one and only important proactive
decision made by Capitol Records in the entire campaign, and
(28:03):
that never would have happened without fifteen year old Marcia Albert.
By the way, when the Beatles played the Washington Coliseum
a couple of months later, Marcia Albert got to meet
the band, and the Beatles showed their appreciation by saying
thank you Marsha on the air on w w d C.
Pretty cool. Well, I'd like you to meet the young lady.
(28:24):
Right after we finished talking here, Marcia Albert is come
on in here very quickly, Marsha. Then we have to
come here because I know that Marcia Albert, this is
George Harrison, there is you know, everybody. Capital put into
(28:47):
motion a really aggressive marketing plan. Although some of their
tactics feel shall we say quaint by today's standards. They
printed up millions of stickers reading the Beatles are Coming
below a picture of four beetle hair dues, and then
they sent a memo to their staff instruking them, we
literally want your salesman to be plastering these stickers on
(29:08):
any friendly surface as they walked down the street. Make
arrangements with some local high school students to spread the
stickers around town. Involve your friends and relatives. But the
truth is the marketing plan was hardly needed. Capital never
even made it through the entire forty marketing budget. From
the moment I Want to Hold Your Hand was released
on December, It's sold itself. That morning Capitals promo Man
(29:32):
Hand delivered I Want to Hold Your Hand to all
the key radio stations. By nine am. Before the morning
was over, every top forty station in the country was
hammering the record and record stores were immediately swamped by
teenagers rushing to spend their Christmas money on the single. Now,
moving up the release date of I Want to Hold
Your Hand had one more unexpected benefit. In nine sixty three,
(29:55):
the average American teenager listened to the radio for slightly
more than three hours per day. Now, with kids out
of school for Christmas break, the number was certainly even higher.
And it was especially high because the most common Christmas
presents received that year were transistor radios, which had become
a lot cheaper just in time for the holiday season.
(30:17):
Nineteen sixty three was the year that all these inexpensive
off brand transistor radios flooded the American market. To put
it in perspective, five million transistor radios were sold in
the US in nineteen sixty two. In nineteen sixty three,
that number had doubled to ten million. America is from
(30:38):
Maine to the Grand Canyon with a portable radio as
a travel America. Cheap transistor radios were such a sensation
that holiday season that Alan Sherman, who was kind of
the weird owl of his generation, wrote a song about it.
(31:00):
The first day of Christmas, my true love gave to
me a Japanese transistor radio. Now, the transistor radio was
an extremely versatile piece of hardware. You could take it
anywhere and share music with your friends, but you could
also listen through an ear plug while lying in your
bed at night under the covers so your parents wouldn't know.
(31:22):
So Imagine you're an American teenager turning on your brand
new transistor radio during Christmas vacation in sixty three, listening
for hours at a time, everywhere, alone and with your friends,
and hearing over and over and over again this new
sound that was even more exciting than your new piece
of hardware. In its first three days in the stores,
(31:44):
I Want to Hold Your Hands sold a quarter of
a million copies, and the Beatles were suddenly the most
talked about group in the country. If you were a
teenager and went to a New Year's Eve party to
Usher in nineteen sixty four, I Want to Hold Your
Hand was the floor filler of choice at the New
year Ze party, with the young people instantly smitten. The
backlash from adults was just as instant. A mere three
(32:08):
days after the record hit the stores, the Baltimore Sun
was already condemning the Beatles in an editorial which warned
America had better take thought as to how it will
deal with the invasion. Indeed, a restrained Beatles Go Home
might be just the thing, And of course, the fact
that the adults hated it was just one more reason
(32:29):
for teenagers to love the Beatles. Capitol Records understood this
and even included that Baltimore Sun editorial in its own
press materials. The king of the Beatles haters turned out
to be an NBCTV variety show host named Jack Parr.
Jack Parr was in attendance at the Royal Variety Show
in London in November, and he thought the whole hullabaloo
(32:50):
over the Beatles was ridiculous. Like a lot of adults
back then, he thought rock and roll was juvenile, and
he was proud to have never booked a rock and
roll act on his show. But Jack Parr was also
the arch rival of Ed Sullivan, and so once Ed
Sullivan announced that he booked the Beatles for February, Jack
Parr decided to get the jump on him. He licensed
(33:11):
some Beatles performance footage from the BBC, and then he
sent out a press release announcing that his show was
going to be the first to present the Beatles in
the USA. Radio disc jockeys across the country breathlessly conveyed
the news to their listeners that the Beatles would be
making their TV debut on The Jack par Show on Friday,
January three. Now, Jack Parr's goal in presenting the Beatles
(33:35):
was to mock the group. He admitted he was featuring
them as a joke, but instead he managed to send
Beatlemania into an even higher orbit. He started his piece
by showing footage of fan hysteria at a UK Beatles show,
and he kept making these snarky interjections like I understand
science is working on a cure for this, which got
(33:57):
big laughs from his studio audience, right to now that
England has finally allusion to our cultural level. Then, as promised,
he presented the first full song performance by the Beatles
on American TV. But the song was not I Want
to Hold Your Hand, but rather it was She Loves You,
the same song that had so enchanted fifteen year old
(34:18):
Marcia Albert, and it was an in studio performance shot
for a BBC documentary. So now, just a week after
I Want to Hold Your Hand had exploded in America,
millions of fans are now encountering She Loves You, and
with video to boot the Beatles. Jack Parr appearance is
generally considered a footnote at best to the Beatles story.
(34:38):
NBC definitely doesn't brag about the appearance, since Jack part
turned out to be on the wrong side of history.
But the truth is outside of radio airplay, the tape
performance on the Jack par Show on January three was
the single most important event leading to that complete frenzy
that surrounded the band's arrival in America the next month.
(34:59):
The Jack Parsh which aired a tenant night on Friday's,
tended to draw an average of seventeen million weekly viewers,
mostly an older crowd, but with the Beatles on the show,
his viewership that week swelled to thirty million. Let's put
those numbers in perspective. The Jack par Show typically was
not one of the top thirty shows in the country,
but the January third show had a viewership almost as
(35:22):
large as the highest rated show of the week, the
Beverly Hillbillies, which had thirty four million viewers. It's pretty
safe to assume that those thirteen million additional viewers were
tuning in to see the Beatles. Watching the Beatles on
the Jack par Shows a revelation for their new American fans,
and it was also a revelation for Swan Records. Remember them,
They're the Philadelphia label that held the US rights to
(35:44):
She Loves You Well. On Saturday morning, after the broadcast
requests for the record exploded, and by that Monday, Swan
Records rushed to rerelease it. If I Want to Hold
Your Hand took off in the marketplace solely based on
radio play. Swan's re release if She Loves You is
the first single ever to explode because of what was
basically a music video, and it immediately rivaled I Want
(36:06):
to Hold Your Hand as the most played song on
American radio. To add fuel to the fire, VJ Records
jumped on the bandwagon and rerelease Please Please Me and
for Me To You as a double a sided single,
and both of those songs instantly went into heavy radio rotation.
Up next, how Capitol Records are early missteps with the
Beatles actually proved to be marketing magic and catapulted them
(36:30):
to the realm of gold records and superstar status. Now,
the folks and Capitol Records were not amused by these developments.
They assumed that the rival releases would get in the
way of their campaign. But as it turned out, Capitals,
having passed on all those early Beatles singles, had the
(36:54):
effect of making that initial wave of Beatlemania a lot
more intense than it would have been if the Beatles
been marketed in the usual fashion one single at a time.
Having four Beatles singles saturating the radio all at once
in January four meant that it was the Beatles who
teenagers fell in love with, not just a Beatles single.
(37:14):
By the middle of January, Capitol Records released the debut
American album by the Beatles, Meet the Beatles, which was
joined a week later in the marketplace by Vj's album
Introducing the Beatles. So within a three and a half
week period, the market was delused with three singles featuring
four bona fide hit songs and two LPs, and all
(37:35):
of these Beatles releases were out selling everything else in
the marketplace. By the end of January, the Beatles had
already sold two and a half million records. It's pretty
clear that virtually upon its release on December, I Want
to Hold Your Hand was the biggest selling single in
the country, But if you look back at old record charts,
you won't see the song at number one nationally until
(37:56):
the January twenty four issue of cash Box. That's been
us Back in those days, chart data came in really slowly.
That cash Box chart actually reflected sales for the week
of January eleven, the record really became the most popular
song in the country, a lot quicker than cash Box reported.
By the first week of January, w ABC in New
(38:17):
York was already listing the song at number one, and
k r l A and Los Angeles followed suit the
next week. This instant rise to the top really was unprecedented.
In the UK, the Beatles had toured incessantly. They played
live in thirty four cities in the fall of ninety
three alone, and by the time Beatlemania erupted there, they
had released a few singles, they had hosted their own
(38:39):
weekly radio show, they'd been on TV a few times.
But in America they reached those same heights within a
week of the official release of their first Capitol single,
and then on February seven, the Beatles arrived in America.
(39:03):
The TV and print coverage of the band's arrival was
really intense. Ed Sullivan had been hyping the beatles appearance
on the air since early January right after the Jack
par Show aired, and Life magazine, which reached over forty
million liters a week, added to the hype by running
this seven page photo filled essay entitled here Come Those Beatles,
(39:24):
in which they reported, first England fell victim of a
million girlish screams, then last week Paris surrendered. Now the
US must brace itself. The Beatles are coming. Even the
Beatle haters felt they needed to acknowledge the band. A
well known DJ named William B. Williams on New York's
(39:45):
easy listening station w n e W, for instance, would
introduce the Beatles song as I Want to Hold My Nose,
and then he played just a few seconds of it
before tearing the needle off the record. Brian Epstein had
imagined that the b Les appearance on The Ed Sullivan
Show would be the launching pad for their conquering of America,
(40:05):
but by the time the Beatles arrived, America already lay
at their feet, and then their arrival took things to
a whole another level. In the hours leading up to
their arrival on February seven, New York top forty radio
stations broadcast regular updates on the progress of the Beatles
flight from London. Capitol Records actually provided specific information to
(40:26):
the DJs in advance, including the scheduled arrival time and
even the gate number, so that the fans who wanted
to greet the man with nowhere to go. At about
one twenty in the afternoon, the Beatles arrived at Kennedy
Airport on pan Am flight one oh one, and they
were greeted by over four thousand screening teenagers, plus about
two hundred reporters and photographers and a hundred police officers.
(40:49):
At the famous press conference that the band conducted inside
the airport, the Beatles immediately won over the press with
the same wit and charisma with which they had won
over the British press four months early. Here. Journalists back
then had very low expectations of rock and rollers, with
most assumed to be a bunch of ignorant hoods. Frank
Sinatra actually once referred to rock and rollers as creetan
(41:11):
as thugs. But if anything, it was the reporters who
appeared to be the Dullard's that day, asking banal questions
right especially as poems. After the press conference, the band
headed to Manhattan, chased by fans shouting at them from
the open windows of their moving cars on the Expressway.
(41:33):
When they got to the Plaza Hotel, they found thousands
more fans waiting for them, again tipped off to the
band's whereabouts by radio DJs who got their information straight
from Capital Broadway was shut down for eight blocks. The
top forty stations in New York all broadcasts live from
the Plaza. Any mentioned on the air of a Beatles
(41:53):
sighting elicited a collective shriek from the crowd outside, and
I got news. Everybody down there on Park Aven. We
were listening to W A B C W A Beetle
c ball and Ringo. Yeah all, and Ringo will be
(42:15):
with us in a few minutes. They're gonna be here
in r W A Beatles c suite and you'll be
hearing them. What's amazing about that clip is that the
DJs weren't speaking to the crowd outside through any loudspeaker system.
(42:39):
Everyone in the crowd was carrying, as always, their trustee
transistor radios and reacting in unison to the prompts of
the DJs over the air. The fans remained crowded in
front of the Plaza Hotel throughout the Beatles whole visit,
and any rumor of a Beetle coming or going would
lead the swarm to rush and mass down the street,
(42:59):
or down the block, or wherever it was that they
thought the band was about to emerge. Walter Cronkite's report
that night on the CBS Evening News was awe struck.
He was showing the band a lot more respect than
his program had the first time around. Meanwhile, Chat Huntley
on the NBC News went out of his way to
be demeaning to the group. By this point, NBC had
kind of positioned itself as the anti Beatles network. Maybe
(43:23):
it was because the Beatles were set to appear on
the Ed Sullivan Show, which was on CBS, But in
the spirit of that original November news piece and the
Jack par broadcast, Chat Huntley covered the group's arrival this way.
We sent three camera crows to stand among the shrieking
youngsters and record the sites and psalms were posterity. Someone
asked what the fuss was about, and we found we
(43:46):
had no answer. So good night for NBC News. Whether
it was with respect or with scorn, the Beatles visit
was covered in every media outlet in the country by
that Sunday. There was no one in America who had
acts us to a television, radio or a newspaper who
could have not known that the Beatles were going to
be on Ed Sullivan. That night, the rivalry among New
(44:08):
York radio stations to see who could be most identified
with the band reached an especially fevered pitch. On w
I N S d J. Murray the K managed to
wiggle himself into the Beatles orbit, getting exclusive interviews and
referring to himself as the fifth Beatle rival station. W
m c A got George Harrison's sister Louise to come
(44:28):
down and visit the station, where she called her brother
George and his sick bed at the plaza for an
exclusive on air conversation, and w ABC, the biggest station
in the market, went so far as to rebrand itself
as w A Beatles c. On the day of the
Ed Sullivan show, all three stations raised the level of
pandemonium in front of the theater fifty thousand fans that
(44:51):
applied for tickets to the broadcast in a theater that
only had seven d and twenty eight seats, Broadway was
shut down for eight blocks, with thousands of teenagers mobbing
the streets, everyone carrying as always their transistor radios and
reacting in unison to the prompts of the disc jockeys. Now,
as we've hinted, at before. It's doubtful whether the insanity
(45:13):
surrounding this moment could have ever materialized if the chain
of events started by Walter Cronkite and running through Marcia
Albert and Carol James hadn't occurred follow me here. Without
all of that, the release date of I Want to
Hold Your Hand would have remained January through Radio listeners
wouldn't have heard the record repeatedly over Christmas Break on
(45:33):
their transistor radios. Millions of teenagers wouldn't have tuned into
the Jack par Show to watch the Beatles perform on
January three. Swan Records wouldn't have rushed released She Loves You.
The air waves wouldn't have been jammed with Beatles records
in January. I Want to Hold Your Hand wouldn't have
been number one by the time of the band's arrival.
The media frenzy wouldn't have reached that fevered pitch before
(45:56):
February seven, and the band would have arrived a new
work to do the Ed Sullivan Show without the airport scene,
the press conference, or the screaming fans of the plaza.
But it all unfolded as if in a fairy tale.
The Beatles were slated to perform five songs on that
first Ed Sullivan broadcast, but they weren't the only guests
on the show. There were comedians, acrobats, an impressionist named
(46:21):
Frank Gorshon who later played the Riddler on the Batman
TV series. There was even a juggler, and with the
show about to start, every one of them was terrified
of having to perform in front of a theater full
of teenage girls who were already screaming NonStop before the
show even the game. Interestingly, among the other performers on
the show was the cast of the London stage production
(46:43):
of Oliver, which included a young man named Davy Jones,
who played the role of the artful Dodger. Davy Jones
looked out at the screaming girls in the audience and
decided to leave musical theater and pursue a career in
rock and roll instead. A couple of years later, he
became a rock stars self as part of the Monkeys
You We Own Street Now. During the nineteen sixty four
(47:18):
TV season, the Ed Sullivan Show typically drew about twenty
one million weekly viewers, making it the biggest variety show
on the air on the night of February nine, sixty four,
the audience for The Ed Sullivan Show jumped to seventy
three million, by far the largest television audience for an
entertainment program in history to that point. Now, that's seventy
(47:38):
three million viewers out of a total US population of
one and eighty million, so that means of the country
was watching. Now, I'd like to add one little wrinkle
with regard to that famous seventy three million number, which
has been touted by CBS for over fifty years. I
always wondered how CBS came up with it, since the
(47:59):
Niel Said ratings back then didn't report total number of
viewers for shows. They only reported the total number of
TV households who were watching, which was twenty three million households.
If you take that number and multiply it by three
point two, which was the average number of people in
the US household in nineteen sixty four, you wind up
with seventy three million. So CBS's number assumes that in
(48:22):
every household tuned into the Ed Sullivan Show, every single
person in the household was watching. Grandparents, babies, everybody, and
well maybe they were. I've certainly never met anyone who
remembers that night who claims they weren't watching. Most significantly,
in nineteen sixty four, about of all Americans were aged
(48:44):
eighteen or under prime baby boomers. Of those, thirty five
billion were between the ages of eight and eighteen, and
pretty much all of them were watching. In fact, the
Washington Post went so far as to joke that on
the night the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan Show quote,
there wasn't a single hubcap stolen in America. While that
(49:04):
may or may not have been true, what is definitely
not in dispute is the fact that virtually every young
person in America sat glued to the family TV set
that night just after eight o'clock Eastern time when Ed
Sullivan took to the stage to introduce the band. Now,
yesterday and today Art Theater has been jammed with newspatman
and hundreds of dark moti the nation, and these veterans
(49:24):
agree with me that the city never has witnessed the
excitement stirred by these juncters from Liverpool who called themselves
the Beatles. Now tonight, you're gonna twice be entertained by them.
Right now and again on the second half of our show,
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Beatles. Yeah that hm. Of course,
(50:14):
in hindsight, the Beatles rise to superstardom would seem to
have been inevitable, and maybe it was, given how talented
and charismatic they were. But there's no doubt that an
amazing confluence of historical cross winds needed to converge it
just the right time in order to enable the unprecedented
explosiveness of Beatlemania in early Some people say it's better
(50:38):
to have luck than talent. In the case of the Beatles,
there was an abundance of both. That wraps up this
episode of Speed of Sound. Please join us next time
on Speed of Sound, when will tell the surprising story
behind the unlikely group that introduced the world to hip hop.
(51:01):
If you want to take a deeper dive into the
artists and songs you just heard, check out our curated
playlist at the Speed of Sound page on the I
Heart app. Until next time, you can find me on
Twitter at Stevie g Pro. Speed of Sound is executive
(51:24):
produced by Lauren Bright Pacheco, Noel Brown and me. Taylor
shakogn is our supervising producer, editor and sound design. Additional
sound designed by Tristan McNeil. I'm Steve Greenberg. Until next time,
keep listening from music that moves you. Speed of Sound
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
(51:45):
from my heart Radio, check out the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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