The Beatles Diaries: Celebrating 60 Years and The Feb 9, 1964 Appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show"
If you weren't alive then, you can't possibly know. A YouTube video seen last week? No. What was that Sunday night like in suburban America that drew a whopping 73 million viewers to their TV sets?
Excitement wasn’t in the air, it was the air.-Greil Marcus
Dateline—the same exact space: The Ed Sullivan Theatre (aka CBS Studio 50), New York City: The hottest young musical act in the world, 55 years into the future:
We just hope we’re gonna have quite a run.-Paul
The Beatles’ first American TV appearance actually happened via film on a couple of brief national network news broadcasts in November and December, plus film clips on NBC’s The Jack Paar Show in January.
Here’s their first “appearance” on American TV, NBC’s nightly Huntley-Brinkley Report news broadcast, November 18, 1963 (ignore the dreaded blank YouTube screen…this should play OK👍):
Now, a short informational video hosted by David Bedford, a British YouTube content creator. It features an historical run-up to the February Sullivan appearance on CBS-TV, which provides helpful context, including the state of not only America in the wake of the JFK assassination, but of the world of music.
Another historical POV, including details of the negotiations between Brian Epstein and Sullivan, himself, and how NBC rival Jack Paar pulled the rug out from under the CBS star’s exclusive February get:
Road manager/personal assistant, Neil Aspinall (school chum of both Paul and George, later to head up Apple Corps.), stood in for George Harrison (holding a guitar in between Paul and John…shown above) during the February 8, 1964 in-studio rehearsals for The Ed Sullivan Show while George was recovering from a 102-degree fever. No real playing occurred during this Saturday studio gathering; it was basically for the crew to run through lighting cues and camera blocking.
Did you see The Beatles on the 2/9/64 “Ed Sullivan Show” live on TV? Feel free to leave a comment in the comment section below, and tell us about it!
Then…..Sunday, February 9:
During dress rehearsals, according to CBS News, January 21, 2014, “The Beatles surprised the studio crew by requesting playback of their performance and adjusting microphone levels, marking the control board dials with chalk. After returning from break, the group discovered maintenance staff had cleaned all the chalk marks off the control board.”
Air Time: “5 MINUTES, BOYS!” “Thank you, 5!”
The blue button below will open in a new window, and take you to a Facebook page which features Ed’s introducing The Beatles (in both halves of the show), and all 5 of their songs. Complete clips of that Sullivan show (with just the 5 Beatles songs) are rare online.
Before Sullivan introduced The Beatles for their final two songs, however, there was a 35-minute break for other performers, including tumbling acrobats, Wells & The Four Fays, and the 1963 Broadway musical cast of Lionel Bart’s Oliver (featuring Monkee-to-be in just a couple years, the 18-year-old Davy Jones; video below), and then The Beatles came back with “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
“It Was Sixty Years Ago Today…”
In his song “I Saw It on T.V.,” John Fogerty (who was age 19 in 1964, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area) would sing, “We gathered round to hear the sound comin’ on the little screen / The grief had passed, the old men laughed, and all the girls screamed / ’Cause four guys from England took us all by the hand / It was time to laugh, time to sing, time to join the band.”
Tom Petty (age 13, Gainesville, FL): “I remember earlier that day, in fact, a kid on a bike passed me and said, ‘Hey, the Beatles are on TV tonight.’ I didn’t know him, he didn’t know me, and I thought to myself, ‘This means something.’ [The Beatles] came out and just flattened me. To hear them on the radio was amazing enough, but to finally see them play, it was electrifying.”
Gene Simmons, Kiss (age 15, New York City): “There is no way I’d be doing what I do now if it wasn’t for The Beatles. Those skinny little boys, kind of androgynous, with long hair like girls. It blew me away that these four boys [from] the middle of nowhere could make that music. Then they spoke and I thought ‘What are they talking like?’ We had never heard the Liverpool accent before. I thought that all British people spoke like the Queen.”
Billy Joel (age 15, Long Island, NY): “The Beatles really synthesized what I wanted to do. The single biggest moment that I can remember being galvanized into wanting to be a musician for life was seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Joe Perry, Aerosmith (age 13, suburban Boston, MA): “I never saw guys looking so cool. I had already heard some of their songs on the radio, but I wasn’t prepared by how powerful and totally mesmerizing they were to watch. It changed me completely. I knew something was different in the world that night. Next day at school, The Beatles were all anybody could talk about. Us guys had to play it kind of cool, because the girls were so excited and were drawing little hearts on their notebooks: ‘I love Paul,’ that kind of thing. But I think there was an unspoken thing with the guys that we all dug The Beatles, too. We just couldn’t come right out and say it.”
Nancy Wilson, Heart (age 9, California): “The lightning bolt came out of the heavens and struck Ann (age 13) and me the first time we saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show: That was the moment Ann and I heard the call to become rock musicians. I was seven or eight at the time. They were really pushing hard against the morality of the times. That might seem funny to say now, since it was in their early days and they were still wearing suits. But the sexuality was bursting out of the seams. But, we didn’t want to marry them or anything. We wanted to be them! Right away we started doing air guitar shows in the living room, faking English accents, and studying all the fanzines. Ann always got to be Paul, and I was mostly George or John.”
Greg Kihn (age 14, Baltimore, MD) on CBS News: “Just about every rock and roll musician my age can point to one cultural event that inspired him to take up music in the first place: The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. If you were a shy, 14-year-old kid who already had a guitar, it was a life-altering event. In a single weekend, everything had changed: I’d come home from school the previous Friday looking like Dion. I went back to class on Monday morning with my hair dry and brushed forward. That’s how quickly it happened.”
Chrissie Hynde, Pretenders (age 12, Akron, OH): “I remember exactly where I was sitting. It was amazing. It was like the axis shifted. I remember the first time I saw the 45 in the record bin in the discount house where my parents shopped, and held it in my hand. It was kind of like an alien invasion. [The day after, the boys] all combed their hair down and made bangs! Me too! I could never set my hair in rollers again. I combed it out straight and cut my bangs. Oh yeah, it was a whole other thing!”
Steven Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (age 13, Middle Township, NJ): “This was the main event of my life. For me, it was no less dramatic than aliens landing on the planet. There’s no equivalent of that today, TV shows that literally everybody watched. All ages, all ethnic groups, all in black and white on a 14-inch screen. It was their sound, their looks, their attitudes. It was so many things. A time to look at things differently, question things a little bit. All kinds of things were new.” Van Zandt once told US Weekly that when he was 13, George Harrison was his favorite Beatle, and he later became friends with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.
Bruce Springsteen (age 14, Freehold, NJ): “This was different, shifted the lay of the land. Four guys, playing and singing, writing their own material. Rock ‘n’ roll came to my house where there seemed to be no way out, and opened up a whole world of possibilities.” Inspired, he bought his first guitar for $18.95 at the nearby Western Auto appliance store, according to CBS News. Later that year, his mother took out a loan to buy him a $60 Kent guitar, which he later memorialized in his 1992 song, “The Wish.”
Words of Love
Will Lee (above), longtime bassist for the CBS Orchestra on Late Night With David Letterman (and who played in the same CBS studio The Beatles performed in), also leads the Beatles tribute band, the Fab Faux. They know 211 Beatles songs out of a possible 219, and pride themselves on album-quality versions of tunes the Beatles never got to play live. “Lee was bitten by the Beatles bug when he was a kid,” according to the January 21, 2014 U.S. News and World Report; he was 11 when the Beatles played Ed Sullivan:
“They had all this positivity, and it was something completely out of the realm of what we’d seen before,” Lee continued. “Their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show changed everything – fashion, attitudes, music writing and lyric writing. We didn’t know it was happening at the time, but they were about to go in and alter the course of the river of pop music and change it forever.”
Songwriter/composer/musician/performer,
(above): “I was 15 at the time. I remember watching The Ed Sullivan Show with my parents and being just mesmerized by them while my dad, a drummer from the big band era, was bewildered at what I liked about them so much.”I also remember, even though I knew nothing about mixing and had never set foot in a studio, being annoyed at the imbalance between Paul and John’s vocal levels, how they had little relationship to who was singing lead at any given point.”
You were right, Jay! According to Time Magazine on the show’s 50th Anniversary: “That evening, when The Beatles returned to Studio 50 for the live broadcast of The Ed Sullivan Show [following that afternoon’s two complete dress rehearsals], George lit into Bob Precht, Sullivan’s son-in-law, who produced the show. The sound quality, he argued, was unacceptable.
“If the audience left the dress rehearsals in ecstasy, the Beatles were anything but satisfied. ‘We weren’t happy with the … appearance,’ said Paul, ‘because one of the mikes weren’t [sic] working.’ John’s vocals were muffled and often lost in the mix.”
Jay, a longtime FRONT ROW & BACKSTAGE subscriber, contributed this informative personal reflection recently:
Visit Jay’s website by clicking here.
Substack’s
, veteran rock journalist (above), from Rolling Stone History of Rock’n’Roll: “On Feb. 9, 1964, I was in college in California…Rock n’ roll - the radio - felt dull and stupid, a dead end. There had been an item in the paper that day about a British rock n’ roll group that was to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show that night: ‘The Beatles’ ( a photo, too - were those wigs, or what?). I was curious - I didn’t know they had rock n’ roll in England - so I went down to the commons room where there was a TV set, expecting an argument from whomever was there about which channel to watch.“Four hundred people sat transfixed as the Beatles sang, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ and when the song was over, the crowd exploded. People looked at the faces (and hair) of John, Paul, George and Ringo and said Yes (and who would have predicted that a few extra inches of hair would suddenly seem so right, so necessary? Brian Epstein?). They heard the Beatles’ sound and said Yes to that, too. What was going on? And where had all these people come from?
“Back at the radio I caught ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and was instantly convinced it was the most exciting rock n’ roll I’d ever heard. Someone from down the hall appeared with a copy of the actual record - you could just go out and buy this stuff? - and announced with great fake solemnity that this was the first 45 he’d purchased since ‘All Shook Up.’ Someone else began to muse that ‘even as a generation had been brought together by the Five Satins’ ‘In the Still of the Night,’ it could be that it would be brought together again - by the Beatles.’ He really talked like that; what was more amazing, he talked like that when a few hours before he had never heard of the Beatles.
“The next weeks went by in a blur. People began to grow their hair…some affected British accents. A friend got his hand on a British Beatles’ album unavailable in the U.S. and made a considerable amount of money charging people for the chance to hear John Lennon sing - ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ at two bucks a shot. Excitement wasn’t in the air, it was the air.”
Singer/songwriter/guitarist/actor, Stephen Michael Schwartz (above): “February 9th, 1964 is a date that launched millions of future musicians like myself to want to play an instrument. The Fab Four spoke a language that my parents’ generation could not interpret, but went right to my little 11-year-old heart and soul. Lennon and McCartney are at the top of the list for pure and total musical inspiration.
“After that show I asked for and received my first guitar,” Stephen reflected. “I was 11 years old. I took a few guitar lessons but didn’t take well to the structure. It felt too much like school work. I was better off on my own with a Beatles Easy Guitar book. I was never without a guitar from that day forward.” It was later on when he took up the piano. “I started discovering my voice and singing right about the same time that I picked up the guitar. How do you know you can really sing unless you start to sing?”
Stephen, who recorded his debut album (for RCA Records) at age 20 in 1974, has contributed 20 articles to FR&B (click here for all 20), chronicling, in his own words, his ‘70s escapades in Hollywood’s record biz!
In this one, Stephen unveils his touring band that opened for songwriter/recording artist Paul Williams, while also telling the story of racing down a Hollywood freeway to be the first to score a rare, classic guitar (with a 1965 photo of a 12-year-old Stephen winning a talent contest!):
of FRONT ROW & BACKSTAGE: “I was 6 weeks away from my 9th birthday, and had been playing accordion for a good year or two, and had won ribbons and a trophy at recitals in both Louisville, KY and Enid, OK (“touring” before ten!). We were visiting good family friends across the street from our southwest Houston home that Sunday evening.
“I knew to expect something special, as Ed had been promoting these musical ‘Beatles’ for a couple weeks, and both my family and their friends were regular watchers. Like many of us, I, too sat cross-legged about a foot from the screen. The parents couldn’t care less, but the friends’ two girls (me and my brother’s ages; Clint was a year older) were everything from bemused (them) to absolutely riveted (me)!
“Not moved to switch from accordion to guitar, I said something like this to Mom: ‘None of The Beatles are playing accordion! It must not be a cool instrument. Do I have to keep playing it?’ Dad’s radio job meant a glorious spate of Capitol Records promo Beatles albums made their way, one by one, into my bedroom the next few years! Like Stephen in California, I discovered I could sing, enjoyed it, and at 9 years old, I discovered what harmonies were (not that I knew the word), when I noticed there was ‘a whole other song’ behind what I learned to sing when each new song came out!
‘She Loves You’ easily became my favorite Beatles song, and today, joins The Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’ and The Beach Boys’ ‘I Get Around’ as my 3 favorite all-time songs!”
Joanne Miller, Hilliard, OH: “I remember I loved the Beatles so much that my dad filmed part of their performance with his 16 mm camera from the television. Three of my girlfriends would come to my house after school so we could watch the five-minute tape over and over again — and scream. We were 13, and life was great!”
“There’s so much there in that Ed Sullivan appearance it’s almost overwhelming to me,” Lennon and Beatles biographer and NPR critic Tim Riley told U.S. News and World Report’s Jim Sullivan. “But, there is this thought that they articulated later: ‘We are a rock ‘n’ roll band, we know where we’re situated in rock ‘n’ roll history and we do not want to make the mistake that Elvis made.’ It’s almost articulated in that Sullivan appearance: They’re very defiant. They have a very strong, secure, cocky sense of who they are and where they might be going, of their own potential.”
Impressive work, from every single point of view. I love how you, early in the piece, included the recollections of established artists whose names are instantly recognisable. As I was reading, I was sitting there thinking… of course we all know the Beatles had a tremendous impact in music history, but to see it all laid out like this? It just brings the whole “transcendence” element to a whole new level (literally and metaphorically). At least from my perspective, it just made me comprehend, not just understand or acknowledge, the tremendous influence they had/have, across all genres.
I also loved how you focused not only on the brilliant music, but also the image, the attitude, the sub-text, so to speak: all those elements which perhaps were, still early in their career, more subtle or less pronounced than they later became.
After reading this article, I have no doubt that the Beatles were not just “part” of the swinging sixties: they WERE the swinging sixties.
Thank you, Brad. And thank you also for including my statement (and, again, great choice of pic 😉). As someone who wasn’t even remotely a “project” in the 60s, this has been thoroughly enjoyable.
Thanks for re-posting this Brad! It's a very enjoyable piece, especially the memories from the great musicians who were teenagers at the time.
There's a wonderful DVD out there with all 4 of the Fab's Ed Sullivan show appearances in the settings of the complete original shows, including commercials. You can watch just their performances via the DVD menu, but it's kinda fun to see them in the complete context, at least once or twice. Worth hanging on to your DVD player for!