It Was Sixty Years Ago Today

Do you remember where you were on Feb. 9, 1964?

(No paywall on this one)

I was almost six years old, and my brother Addison was going to turn eight years-old at midnight. The date was February 9, 1964. Our brother, David, was not to be born until a little over one year later. That Sunday evening, at 7:00 pm, the big event for Addison and me was the first ever airing of The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, starring Patrick McGoohan on Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, which we watched in black and white. Our parents sent us to bed at the late hour of 8:00 pm that night. We had no idea of what had been happening in New York since Friday. In the weeks that followed our parents joined in describing the horror of an invasion by four young men with, of all things, long hair. To hear them describe the shock of seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, along with almost everyone else in their generation, you might think that the foundations of the great deep had opened, and that soon we must all perish. But it was just that generation, in their thirties and forties at the time, that seemed to react so negatively - to put it mildly. I remember that my grandmother finally heard a Beatles recording in 1968 at our home, and said, “I like that.”

Looking back at videos of that first American performance by the Beatles, the reaction of my parents’ generation is difficult to understand. The music was tame compared to the sounds of such Big Bands as were led by the likes of Benny Goodman (especially Benny Goodman, with the wildest jazz imaginable). The first song the Beatles performed on the Ed Sullivan Show was All My Loving, and the second song was Til There Was You from The Music Man. Their hair was long by the standards of 1964, standards that were not standard at all until after American G.I.s returned home from World War I. If millennials could hear our parents’ generation talk about it, they might assume that the Beatles must have come out looking like they did in 1968 and must have opened with Helter Skelter. Well, of course it was all a Communist plot. There was nothing Kruschev wanted more, no doubt, than for American kids to grow their hair long and listen to music that was almost as startling as Big Band Jazz had been for the past three decades - but don’t get me started.

It was quite a night in New York. The show was broadcast live, and the audience was estimated to have been seventy-three million viewers. Also in the show that night was Frank Gorshin, later of Batman fame as the Riddler, doing impersonations of movie stars, Cab Calloway, and the cast of Oliver with Davy Jones, later to be one of the Monkees, in his Tony award winning role as the Artful Dodger. The Beatles performed two sets, one at the beginning and another as the penultimate performance of the show (which closed with a very boring spectacle that was part puppet show, part ballet or something). In their first set they opened, as I said above, with All My Loving, followed by Til There Was You, and She Loves You. In their second set near the end of the show they performed I Saw Her Standing There, and then the biggest hit in America, that had been number one since the previous November, I Want to Hold Your Hand. Of course, it was all accompanied by the screams of excited fans. Nonetheless, the sound engineers caught everything well, and you can hear it in the videos to this day.

For the next two Sunday nights they were on the Ed Sullivan Show. They would reappear about one year later for a fourth performance during their 1965 tour. Their first American concert was in Washington D.C. on Tuesday February 11, two nights after their Amercian debut, playing on a stage set up on a boxing ring in what would be a security nightmare by later standards. During the concert they kept having to put up with the stage being rotated every now and then because they were literally in the middle of a crowd, and were thus facing four different directions every two or three songs. That concert is proof that Murphy’s Law cannot be a true scientific law, and/or of Divine intervention. Everything that could go wrong seems to have been an essential part of the planning, as in addition to the constant rotating of the stage, they had to walk through the crowd to and from the ring and would have been unable to escape to safety had the crowd (as happened on other occasions) rushed the stage.

Looking back, one of the great distractions at the time was the whole business of fame and celebrity. No wonder John Lennon, especially, expressed his dislike of “the price of fame.” Sadly, it was probably his shunning of confinement and constant security that put him in deadly peril that tragic night all those years later in 1980. To a lot of people in 1964 it must have seemed to have been all about hair and fashionable clothes. A very funny satire of the celebrity hubbub, Beatlemania, is Steven Spielberg’s 1977 comedy I Wanna Hold Your Hand (as opposed to the actual song title I Want to Hold Your Hand), about the madness and silliness of what went on in New York City between Feb. 7 and Feb. 9 that year. But during that first ever broadcast on the Ed Sullivan Show, something very significant was stated early on by Ed Sullivan. He passed on to them the congratulations of both Richard Rodgers and Leonard Bernstein for their musical creations. Despite that very impressive lauding from two of America’s finest composers, and in highbrow terms, especially from Leonard Bernstein, the critics passed almost nothing but the usual savage reviews that I wrote about last week, the kind that all of the greats of both classical music and jazz had always endured.

The praise from Rodgers and Bernstein was, however, indicative of what would become the legacy of the Beatles. It is safe to say, after six decades, that their music is now classical in the Dictionary sense. And it shows no sign of losing its appeal. In a hundred years people will still be listening to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and the Beatles, and so many others who were both loved and hated in their own time.

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“Now yesterday and today our theater’s been jammed with newspapermen and hundreds of photographers from all over the nation, and these veterans agreed with me that this city never has witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool who call themselves The Beatles. Now tonight, you’re gonna twice be entertained by them. Right now, and again in the second half of our show. Ladies and gentlemen, The Beatles!” - Ed Sullivan, Sunday February 9, 1964.