It Was Sixty Years Ago Today When "The Sixties" Arrived
The First Wave of the British Invasion wasn't Blue
“Did you hear that? Fuck! Man, that was fuckin’ great! Oh man—fuck!”
– Bob Dylan on first hearing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (1964)
NOTE: This is the first in a series of essays I plan to write on what was happening in 1964, “The Year ‘The Sixties’ Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn,” as I put it in the subtitle of my most recent book, The Times They Were a-Changin’. Portions of them will be taken straight from the book, but other parts of the essays will be new commentary.
“It was twenty years ago today / When Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play,” the Beatles would sing in 1967. It was sixty years ago today that American culture experienced an earthquake.
“Where were you in '62?”, the famous tagline from the 1973 movie American Graffiti is less significant than “Where were you in ’64—particularly on the evening of February 9, 1964.
Cultural historian Steven Stark said of February 9, 1964, when the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show: “The sixties as an era began that night.”[i] It’s a defensible claim. That Sunday evening was one of those moments that marked the “sixties,” as memorable in its own way as the decade’s three assassination dates and the moon landing. Roughly 74 million people (almost half the population of the United States) watched as an estimated 75 percent of the nation’s televisions that were on were tuned to the show. It was the largest audience up until that time for a television program. In introducing the Beatles, Sullivan said “the city has never witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool who call themselves the Beatles.”[ii]
In a New York Times piece for the fortieth anniversary of the appearance, critic Allan Kozinn classified it as “one of those moments when everything changed, or at least, a point to which one can trace changes in everything from style in its broadest sense (in music, art and fashion, for example) to the way rock ’n’ roll was marketed and perceived,” and notes that “it was one of the few such moments in recent American history that did not involve an assassination or a surprise attack.”[iii]
Americans experienced together a nationwide television communion—at least in terms of numbers—like that which they had shared in the days following the Kennedy assassination a little over eleven weeks before. In this common experience, though, reactions were more divided on the basis of age and sex. Older people were mostly unimpressed, and young females were generally more excited than young males.
The Beatles had arrived at New York’s newly renamed John F. Kennedy Airport two days before, met by some 4,000 screaming fans.[iv] Their 45 “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had already sold over 3 million copies, making it the fastest-selling single in pop music history. It was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for nine weeks, finally displaced by another Beatles record, “She Loves You.” By the end of March, the Beatles would have the top five records in America—a feat never remotely matched by any other artists before or since. The Beatles would hold the number one spot with a variety of songs until Louis Armstrong reclaimed the top spot for the United States with “Hello Dolly” in May. By mid-March, an estimated 60 percent of all singles being sold in the United States were by the Beatles.[v] They had six number one hits during 1964 and an amazing total of twenty-eight different songs on the Billboard Hot 100 during the year.[vi] In August, their first movie, A Hard Day’s Night, held the top spot in box office ratings for two weeks.
No other single entertainer or group has ever so completely dominated a year as the Beatles did in 1964. Why? Frank Rich was probably close to the mark when he said that kids had “an instinct that the Beatles were avatars of some change in our lives that we couldn’t define but knew was on the way.”[vii]
The Beatles’ February arrival was the beginning of the “British Invasion,” one of the major developments of 1964. That phenomenon is usually described as the bringing back to America of African American blues. That’s true, but somewhat misleading. Contrary to popular usage, the “invasion” was not a singular event. It came in two different waves. The second one was “black,” but the perhaps appropriate color to describe the first one is “pink.” The first British Invasion, started by the Beatles early in the year, had almost nothing to do with the blues or the “race music” that had become rock ’n’ roll in the fifties. The Beatles, along with many of the other musicians in the first phase of the 1964 British Invasion, came from Liverpool, and, as one of John Lennon’s friends in art school recalled, “There was no such thing, really, as the blues in Liverpool. I’m sure John had no idea who Muddy Waters was.”[viii]
These early Beatles sounded anything but blue. Their music in 1964 was just what the doctor ordered for America’s youth in the post-assassination period. The basic message was the same as that of Bobby McFerrin’s song a quarter century later: “Don’t Worry; Be Happy.”[ix] The Beatles, their producer George Martin said, “had that quality that makes you feel good when you are with them.”[x] And “with them” clearly extended to being with them through records or radio.
The happy sound continued through the first wave of the British Invasion with, among others, such artists as the Dave Clark Five (who were “Glad All Over”) in February, the Searchers (who sounded happy even though they were on “Needle and Pins” over losing their love) in March, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas (who would never be “sad and blue,” because he knew his love would never be bad to him) in April, Peter and Gordon (who could not tolerate a “World Without Love”), Gerry and the Pacemakers (who advised never to “let the sun catch you crying”), and the folksy Chad and Jeremy (who were “laughing all their cares away”) all in May, and toward the end of the year, the particularly cheerful and harmless-sounding Herman’s Hermits. None of these musicians—almost all dressed in matching suits in their 1964 appearances—can reasonably be classified as carriers of the bacterium of “black freedom” back to America, as the Invasion’s second wave, which began in May with the Rolling Stones, would.
[My answer to the question of where I was that night: I was a senior in high school. That evening I watched Ed Sullivan sitting on the side of my bed with my copy of the Meet the Beatles album nearby.]
[i] Steven D. Stark, Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band that Shook Youth, Gender, and the World (New York: HarperEntertainment, 2005), p. 27.
[ii] Ed Sullivan, as quoted in Sercombe, “‘Ladies and Gentlemen …’ The Beatles,” p. 6.
[iii] Allan Kozinn, “They Came, They Sang, They Conquered,” New York Times, February 6, 2004.
[iv] Jonathan Gould, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (New York: Three Rivers, 2007), p. 1.
[v] Stark, Meet the Beatles, p. 154.
[vi] Joel Whitburn, The Billboard Hot 100 Charts: The Sixties (Menonomee Falls, WI: Record Research, 1990), February 1 - May 9, 1964.
[vii] Rich, “Ticket to Ride.”
[viii] Tony Carricker, as quoted in Stark, Meet the Beatles, p. 27.
[ix] “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” (1988, lyrics by Bobby McFerrin).
[x] George Martin, as quoted in Stark, Meet the Beatles, p. 128.
I was at my grandparents' house. I had to convince my racist grandfather to let me watch. He refused to watch Ed Sullivan because Sammy Davis, Jr. was a frequent guest, and Sammy combined all my grandfather's prejudices in one easy to hate persona. (After all, he was black, Jewish, and married to a white woman.) I was enthralled at what I saw and heard that night. It's true that I "grew up" with the Beatles. Their own growth as human beings and artists opened my mind, raised as I was in deep, dark rural Mississippi.