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Posted on 01/31/2004 2:53:10 AM PST by ejdrapes
"Yesterday and today, our theater's been jammed with newspapermen and hundreds of photographers from all over the nation," Sullivan said in a nasally chuckling voice. "And these veterans agreed with me that the city never has witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool." He droned on for a few more seconds. Then the sixty-two-year-old Sullivan uttered the nine most important words in the history of rock & roll TV: "Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles! Let's bring them on!" No one in Studio 50, the 728-seat home of The Ed Sullivan Show, at 53rd Street and Broadway, heard anything else for the next eight minutes, except a monsoon of teenage-female screaming. The Beatles -- guitarist John Lennon, 23; bass guitarist Paul McCartney, 21; drummer Ringo Starr, 23; and lead guitarist George Harrison, two weeks shy of twenty-one -- opened their U.S. debut performance with a machine-gun bouquet of twin-guitar clang and jubilant vocal harmonies: "All My Loving," "Till There Was You" and "She Loves You." Forty minutes later -- after songs and routines by Frank Gorshin, British music-hall star Tessie O'Shea and the Broadway cast of Oliver! -- the Beatles returned to tear through both sides of their first U.S. Number One single, "I Saw Her Standing There" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand." "But you could not hear them playing anything," says John Moffitt, associate director of The Ed Sullivan Show, who was vainly calling out cues to the cameramen shooting the band. "The noise was incredible. Nobody could hear a thing except the kids in the audience, screaming. They overpowered the amplifiers. The cameramen couldn't hear. Even the kids couldn't hear anything, except each other screaming." Production assistant Vince Calandra had been a cue-card boy for Sullivan back in 1957, when Elvis Presley made the last of his three appearances on the show. "The reaction from the kids then," Calandra claims, "was nothing close to what it was for the Beatles. I remember the producer, Bob Precht, who was an audio freak, just going, 'Jesus Christ!' " "It was deafening," says Harrison's older sister Louise, now seventy-two, who sat in the seventh row, surrounded by shrieking. Lennon's then-wife, Cynthia, stood at the back of the studio, stunned by the reaction. "They're more enthusiastic here than at home," she raved to Beatles roadie Mal Evans. Lennon himself couldn't believe the din and devotion, even after playing to hysterical crowds and being chased by ecstatic mobs in Britain throughout 1963. "They're wild, they're all wild," he said of the Americans. "They just all seem out of their minds. I've never seen anything like it in my life." Meanwhile, more than 73 million people were watching the Beatles' Sullivan performance on television -- then the biggest audience ever glued to a single program and, forty years later, still one of the largest ever. And they got the whole show, including the music. On TV, the snap and sizzle of Starr's drumming and the crisp electric attack of Harrison's and Lennon's guitars cut through the female squall. Also, Moffitt notes, the group's two vocal mikes were wired directly into the control room's mixing desk, "so we didn't lose that much singing on the air." Viewers heard every "Yeah, yeah, yeah!" in "She Loves You" and high, wild "Woooo!" in "I Saw Her Standing There," while Sullivan's cameras cut back and forth between the Beatles' magnetic poise -- the cocky smiles and deep bows after each song -- and kinetic shots of young women leaping in their seats and sobbing with delight. Rock & roll was, by 1964, an established, sanitized presence on network television: on Dick Clark's afternoon dance party American Bandstand; in Ricky Nelson's singing cameos on the sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. But Sullivan delivered the nation's first blast of Beatlemania in extreme close-up, an unprecedented display of the liberating, openly sexual ferocity of live, loud rock & roll. In one hour and five songs, the hottest rock act in Britain became the biggest pop group in America, immediately transforming the character and future of a generation. In Studio 50, at one point in the broadcast, a musician in Sullivan's house orchestra turned to a colleague in grim shock. "These are the people," he asked, "who are going to be running the country twenty years from now?" The answer, of course, was: Yes. "We knew we could wipe you out -- we were new," Lennon crowed years later, in his famous 1970 Rolling Stone interview. "When we got here, you were all walking around in fuckin' Bermuda shorts, with Boston crew cuts and stuff in your teeth." "John and I knew we were writing good songs," McCartney told the magazine in 1987. "You had to be an idiot to listen to what we were writing and not say, 'Hey, man, this is good. . . . We could even do well in America.' "One of the cheekiest things we ever did," McCartney added, "we said to [manager] Brian Epstein, 'We're not going to America till we've got a Number One record,' because we knew it would make all the difference." Yet the Beatles could not have achieved so much, so fast, without Sullivan's Sunday-night might. The Beatles actually appeared on American television for the first time in November 1963 -- to little avail -- in NBC and CBS news reports about the group's British success. (The CBS segment aired on the morning of November 22nd, a few hours before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.) On January 3rd, 1964, Jack Paar featured on his NBC talk show a BBC clip of the Beatles playing "She Loves You." Sullivan, however, had been a prime-time institution since 1948. A former sports reporter and Broadway gossip columnist, he combined a catholic booking policy -- opera singers, ventriloquists, stand-up comics, acrobats, rock & roll pioneers such as Bo Diddley and LaVern Baker -- with a golden gut for ratings. He was in London, at the airport with his wife, Sylvia, on October 31st, 1963, when the Beatles returned from a Swedish tour to a tumultuous reception. At first, Sullivan thought everyone had turned out to greet the queen mother. But by November 11th, he was back in New York, negotiating with Epstein. Technically, Sullivan refused the Beatles top billing. He reserved that honor for himself every week. But he granted the Beatles an extraordinary amount of airtime: opening and closing segments on February 9th and 16th -- the latter on location from the Deauville Hotel in Miami -- plus an appearance to be taped early on the 9th for broadcast on February 23rd. It was headlining status in all but name for a group without a U.S. hit. (Previous Beatles singles on Vee-Jay, Swan and Tollie had stiffed; Capitol would not issue "I Want to Hold Your Hand" until late December.) In return, Epstein accepted a total fee of $10,000, far less than the $7,500 Sullivan often paid big acts for a single show. "I remember the reaction in the audience," says Calandra, "when Ed started promoting the Beatles on the show, telling people they were coming. The first two weeks in January -- nothing much. The third week, that's when you heard the reaction from the kids." By the weekend of February 9th, he says, "We were told not to drive our cars into the city: 'We're going to barricade the streets.' And normally Sullivan never came to rehearsals on Saturday. He would show up on Sunday for the rundown. But he came to rehearsal that Saturday for the Beatles. That was a sign: This was special."
Beatlemania!
40 years ago today, the Beatles changed America forever
By David Fricke
Cover photo by John Dominis
Shortly after 8 p.m. on Sunday, February 9th, 1964, a short, stiff man with rubbery bloodhound features -- Ed Sullivan, the host of the highest-rated variety hour on American television -- addressed his New York studio audience and the folks tuned in at home over the CBS network.
By Chris Morris, Emmanuel Legrand and Paul Sexton
LOS ANGELES/LONDON (Billboard) - In late 1963, Alan Livingston, then-president of Capitol Records, brought home a single by a newly signed act and played it for his wife, Nancy.
"I had great respect for her, because she had a good ear," Livingston recalls. "She looked at me and said, "'I want to hold your hand?" Are you kidding?' I said, 'God, maybe I made a mistake!"'
The Beatles were by no means a commercial slam-dunk.
Yet the group's "invasion" was met with an unprecedented wave of fan and media frenzy that stunned almost everyone, including the Fab Four.
Today, the best-known TV journalist of the '60s is still baffled by the explosion.
"I remained, and remain today, dumbfounded at that kind of hysterical reaction to this music," says Walter Cronkite, the former "CBS Evening News" anchor, who reported the onset of Beatlemania.
What is certain is that the event launched the modern era of popular music. During their relatively short career -- the Beatles broke up in 1970 -- the group set standards by which almost every other rock group has been measured.
Now, on the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' landing in New York on Feb. 7, 1964, it's easy to forget that hardly anyone in the U.S. knew what a Beatle was only weeks before their arrival.
" Christmas of 1963, the Beatles are virtually unknown in America," says Bruce Spizer, author of the comprehensive new book "The Beatles Are Coming! The Birth of Beatlemania in America" (498 Productions).
"The next thing you know, six weeks later, 73 million people are watching them on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' It's just phenomenal how quick it happened."
FROM FLOP TO SMASH
It seems unbelievable today, but Capitol's signing of the Beatles was not announced until Dec. 4, 1963 -- a mere two months before the group's Feb. 9, 1964, U.S. TV debut on Ed Sullivan's CBS show.
Capitol had right of first refusal on the Beatles in the U.S.; EMI, its major stockholder, released the group's music in the U.K. on its Parlophone imprint.
Despite the Beatles' run of hits in England, Capitol repeatedly passed on the band. Livingston had sought the advice of Dave Dexter, Capitol's international A&R rep.
"He said, 'Alan, forget it,"' Livingston recalls. "'They're a bunch of long-haired kids. They're nothing.' I said, 'OK,' and I had no reason to be concerned, because nothing from England was selling here."
EMI had licensed some of the Beatles' singles to U.S. indies Vee Jay and Swan. All of them flopped; the biggest, "From Me to You," had peaked at No. 116 on the Billboard Bubbling Under the Hot 100 chart in August 1963.
But the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, persevered. Tony Barrow, Epstein's U.K. press officer, remembers, "He realized that big money was in America."
In November 1963, Epstein persuaded Sullivan, host of the top-rated U.S. variety show of the day, to book the Beatles. Armed with that commitment, he convinced Livingston to sign the group and lay out $40,000 to promote the first Capitol single, "I Want to Hold Your Hand."
The single was scheduled for a Jan. 13, 1964, release. But events altered Capitol's game plan.
"The whole thing that broke the Beatles was just one of those quirks where things fell into place," author Spizer says. "You couldn't have written the script if you had tried."
Spizer says "the first domino fell" Dec. 10, 1963, when "The CBS Evening News" aired a story by U.K. correspondent Alexander Kendrick about the excitement the Beatles were generating in England. An abbreviated version of the report had been telecast on the CBS morning news show Nov. 22, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Cronkite decided to air the complete story in early December.
Cronkite recalls, "In the wake of the assassination story, nothing else was happening in the world, at least in the United States -- stuff that was important, that is. So we actually had an opportunity to use it.
"I was not entirely thrilled with it myself, to tell you the truth," he adds. "It was not a musical phenomenon to me. The phenomenon was a social one, of these rather tawdry-looking guys, we thought at the time, with their long hair and this crazy singing of theirs, this meaningless 'wah-wah-wah, wee-wee-wee' stuff they were doing."
One viewer of the broadcast, however -- a 15-year-old Silver Spring, Md., girl named Marsha Albert -- had a different point of view.
"She liked what she saw and heard," Spizer says, "and wrote a letter to her radio station, WWDC, referring to the broadcast and saying how great it was, and why can't we have music like that in America.
"Carroll James, who was a DJ with WWDC, obtained the British 45 of 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' and aired it on Dec. 17 and got immediate favorable response in the Washington area."
Jocks in Chicago and St. Louis quickly procured copies of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" from James and began spinning them heavily.
RADIO PLAY
Alarmed by the early airplay on its as-yet-unreleased single, Capitol initially sought a cease-and-desist order.
But, Beatles authority Martin Lewis says, " said, 'Hold on a moment. We spend all our lives hustling DJs to play our records. Now we're threatening to sue 'em. This is insane. Maybe we should change our plans.' And they hustled up the release."
Capitol moved the single's release date to Dec. 26 -- an unusual act of timing that paid off.
High schools were still on Christmas break. Lewis says, "Kids who normally would have heard the record only in the early morning or late evening when they got home from school are hearing it all the way through the daytime ... In that period, the kids go wild, and it takes off on its own volition."
"I Want to Hold Your Hand" entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 45 on Jan. 18, 1964, and hit No. 1 a mere two weeks later, on Feb. 1.
In New York, pandemonium ensued. Thousands of shrieking teens mobbed Kennedy International Airport when the Beatles arrived Feb. 7 on Pan Am flight 101 from London. Thousands more laid siege to the Plaza Hotel, where the group was staying.
"There was bedlam at 59th and Fifth Avenue," Livingston says. "Nobody could move, the traffic was so held up. It was practically a riot scene. The hotel said to me, 'Don't ever book those boys in here again."'
Reuters/Billboard
It's been 14 years now since I saw Paul McCartney in concert (I caught in Boxborough, Massachusetts on the 26th anniversary of the first Sullivan appearance).
Frank had fallen from greatness and recovered his career. He shuttled money for the mob and hob nobbed with the (deceased) President.
The Beatles wrote some of their own songs (certainly the hits, even though they padded albums with covers/standards).
It's like people saying that "hip hop is the new rock". Why isn't "hip hop" the new "disco", "blues", or "jazz"? Or why isn't it it's own thing? Rock and roll is still rock and roll even if few stations that consider themselves to be "rock stations" play it anymore.
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