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We just completed a month full of anniversaries. Sixty years ago, in February of 1964, the Beatles’ arrival in America produced one historic moment after another. The most famous of these, of course, were the back-to-back earthquakes of the Beatles’ arrival at New York’s Kennedy Airport on February 7 and their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show two days later. But these were buffeted by other momentous occasions which have passed into lore. A rundown:
February 1: “I Want To Hold Your Hand” hits #1 on the Billboard charts, making the Beatles the first British group to top the charts in the US and kicking off American Beatlemania.
February 7: The Beatles land at John F. Kennedy Airport to a scene of hysteria and mass press coverage.
February 9: The Beatles make their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show to the largest viewing audience in American history.
February 11: The Beatles play their first full concert on American soil at the Washington Coliseum. It is filmed for subsequent closed-circuit transmission at movie theaters across the country.
February 12: The Beatles perform two shows at Carnegie Hall (which included extra seating on the stage itself to accommodate the overflow crowds). They are the first rock act to play Carnegie.
February 16 and 23: Two more appearances on Ed Sullivan, to equivalent audiences as the first (confirmed by the Nielsen ratings system), cementing the Beatles’ dominance over American youth culture.
To mark February 7, I posted on social media a recollection by Tom Wolfe of the bedlam at JFK the day the Beatles landed. Wolfe, already a notable reporter who would become one of the most significant literary figures of the 1960s and ‘70s, recognized the implications of what he observed that day.
I was there at Kennedy Airport when the Beatles arrived. I’ll never forget the sight of hundreds of boys, high school students, running down a hallway at the international arrivals building with their combs out, converting their ducktail hairdos into bangs. They’d just seen the Beatles. They were packed on this balcony watching the Beatles arrive. They saw these haircuts, and they started combing their hair forward so it would fall over their foreheads like the Beatles. I never will forget that scene. That was symbolic of a big change; the last semblance of adult control of music vanished at that moment.
What strikes me upon reading this is not so much Wolfe’s main point — that the Beatles’ arrival ushered in a cultural sea-change almost overnight — but a small detail in his description of the crowd.
Hundreds of boys.
To judge from the way early Beatlemania is usually described, 95% of the group’s fans were young girls. Like any good stereotype, there is some basis for it. It was certainly mostly girls who created headlines and bewildered anyone not young and female with their ear-splitting screams and fainting spells. In films of the period — of crowds gathered outside of hotels or inside concert arenas — teen girls often seem to predominate. And the Beatles themselves knew that the female portion of their audience was crucial — it had been their bread and butter from the beginning of their local popularity in Liverpool — and deliberately addressed them by emphasizing personal pronouns in their early lyrics and song titles.
In fact, for those who resisted the Beatles bandwagon in the first flush of their American invasion, this perceived appeal to young girls was the primary objection. It didn’t help that Beatlemania triggered a tidal wave of merchandising — probably the most massive commercial exploitation of an entertainment phenomenon in American history1 — which flooded every conceivable adolescent product: dolls, jewelry, clothing, toys, wigs, trading cards, bedsheets, pillowcases, chewing gum, perfume, lunchboxes, buttons, board games, shampoo, etc.
Though the term didn’t exist, all these trappings conferred a boy-band element2 to the female frenzy around the Beatles. Don Brewer, the drummer of hard rock stalwarts Grand Funk Railroad, was part of the anti-Beatles brigade that couldn’t see past the mania and dismissed the Fab Four accordingly.
At first I was not a Beatles fan. I was looking at the hair and the girls screaming and going, “What’s up with that?” We were more into the Motown stuff and R&B and all that kind of stuff, and here was this poppy band out of England the girls were screaming about.
He had company; the collective shriek of Beatlemania alienated others as well.
Bob Geldof: I wasn’t a big Beatles fan. It was too girly. It was like One Direction, or the Bay City Rollers or something, to me.
Ian Anderson: I was never a Beatles “fan” – the Beatles fan was, literally, the screaming girl, the teenybopper.
Jim Keltner: My wife Cynthia called me into the room and said, “Hey come and watch this. Look at this!” I came in, took one look, and ran out of the room again. I thought they were just four white guys playing rock and roll to girls and that’s all I needed to know to stay away from them.
Another issue was that the Beatles didn’t just appeal to girls; to some, they looked like girls. They certainly looked nothing like the early rock and rollers, or the pop stars that preceded them. In an America still culturally stuck in the 1950s, some inevitably felt uncomfortable, even threatened, by what at the time seemed the Beatles’ radically androgynous style.
Carl Perkins: Them little boys look like girls, man.
Jimmy Webb: I remember guys saying, “Oh man, did you see these guys on Ed Sullivan last night? They had long hair like girls!” They were all hung up that they had hair like girls.
Gene Simmons: They were skinny little boys, kind of androgynous, with long hair. They looked like girls.
Billy Joel: All of a sudden there’s this band, with hair like girls.
Of course, the vast majority of America’s male youth were not only unfazed by the feminine aspects of Beatlemania, they were further seduced by them. Whether mesmerized by the band’s effect on girls en masse and wishing to exert the same appeal, or fascinated and drawn to the alien, brand-new hipness of the Beatles’ exotic look, most guys fell even harder for a band whose exciting, joyous music had already captured their ears. Wolfe’s vivid description of “hundreds of boys” running through Kennedy Airport — not to mention voluminous filmic and photographic evidence, and, most persuasively, the countless personal recollections of famous male artists — demonstrates that the all-girl caricature of the Beatles’ early appeal was always a fiction. Even the majority of the dissenting minority — whether their initial rebellion was to the screaming, the look, the merchandising, or the suffocating saturation of Beatles airplay — tended to find their defenses crumbling before long. The flip side of the quotes above:
Brewer: But then you realized that when you played their music at a sock hop or a dance everybody would go crazy. So you started playing their stuff just to stay with the trend and then you realized, my God, this is great music.
Geldof: But of course what the Beatles did was move way beyond the narrow confines of what was possible with rock music, and make music for infinity. My world wouldn’t have been possible without the Beatles. I seriously doubt if I’d have been able to conduct my life as I’ve conducted it without them.
Anderson: But we used to play the music of the Beatles ‘cause it was such great music. They were the best songwriters, and the songs were so great to play. They were just brilliant.
Keltner: But that changed — obviously that changed. I began to realize all the amazing things about them. Their groove was just so compelling and they were beautiful to watch.
Perkins: But them little girls turned my life around.
Webb: I don’t think a lot of their audience understood what they were doing musically. I really don’t. The things they were doing musically were much more important than the things they were doing in terms of mass appeal. They became a seminal influence of mine.
Simmons: They had talent, more than all of us put together. Seeing them changed my sense of being. I mean, it was close to a religious experience.
Joel: I tell you, if it wasn’t for me seeing them, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing right now. I might not even be alive.
It must be said here that for some of the rapturous majority, the specter of the female mania around them did make them a little self-conscious of their own excitement.
For example, even though Aerosmith’s Joe Perry had a prototypical American reaction to the Beatles’ February 9 debut on Ed Sullivan . . .
That was akin to a national holiday. Talk about an event. I never saw guys looking so cool. 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.
. . . and even though at school the next day, the Beatles were all anybody could talk about, Perry also said the girls’ wild enthusiasm over the Fab Four gave him and his friends pause — at least outwardly:
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 the guys all dug the Beatles, too. We just couldn’t come right out and say it.
But what about the mania? Near-universal fandom aside, there’s an assumption — again, entirely understandable — that actual Beatlemania was indeed a teenybopper phenomenon; that as radically popular as the Beatles were among American youth, those screaming crowds at concerts and personal appearances had to have been the exclusive domain of the teen-aged girl.
Listen to this:
An entire book can be compiled from the testimonies of those who experienced the unrelenting jetscream of the crowd at Beatles concerts. There was no precedent for it; there has been no repeat of it. The deafening din of what Geldof has called “the banshee wailing of abandoned femininity”3 rendered all other sound in its vicinity inaudible, and it had the effect of focusing media — and psychologists — on the way adolescent girls, to the practical exclusion of everyone else, reacted to the Beatles, and why. Boys were never part of this sociological (or tabloid) coverage; those screams clearly defined the crowds as overwhelmingly female.
But were they?
In fact, guys attended those Beatles concerts too . . .
. . . and in large numbers, and across multiple age groups. Emmy-winning director Paul Saltzman, who has been involved in more than 300 films, recalls what those Beatles crowds were like.
What I remember is that there were all the screaming teenagers, but there was also lots of guys like me and my friends, people in their 20s, so I didn’t feel like I was at a concert where everyone was 12 or 13. I didn’t feel any kind of them-and-me kind of thing.
Greil Marcus, the legendary dean of American rock critics, has the same recollection. “People dove headlong into the Beatles. It wasn't just thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girls that were part of the audience — it was also college students and other people.”
Any thoughts? Leave a comment!
Of course, it’s not exactly news that the Beatles’ conquest of young America sixty years ago was almost total. Each February we are treated to commemorations of the Beatles first visit to the States, replete with still-awestruck testimony from practically every future public figure who saw it in real time. At this point, any claim that the Beatles’ popularity in 1964 was a phenomenon driven by and limited mainly to adolescent puppy love is borne of historical ignorance — the Beatles army was male as well as female from the moment “I Want To Hold Your Hand” began to climb the charts, to the touchdown of their Pan Am flight at Kennedy Airport, and through the Sullivan appearances and first U.S. concerts.
But here’s what may be news to a lot of people: the guys were often just as out of control as the girls.
We heard Joe Perry recall that he and his friends tried to play it cool when listening to the Beatles on the radio or hanging with their friends at school. But apparently when it came to actually seeing the Beatles, playing it cool went out the window. Listen again to that audio collage above: hard as it may be to imagine, those high-pitched screams included the guys.
Joe Walsh: I memorized every Beatles song and went to Shea Stadium and screamed along with all those chicks. I was a senior in high school . . . and I was screaming and crying.
Adrian Belew: I was one of the 21,000 screaming teenagers standing there just overflowing with love and passion for these guys. It was a glorious experience, it was so fantastic.
Rick Springfield: The Beatles walked on stage and they looked like they were from the future. I screamed like a girl from the moment they walked on stage to the moment they left. It was like aliens had landed on the planet – they just looked so modern, with the hair and the clothes and the guitars. And then they opened their mouths and started to sing . . . [laughs] I just started screaming. It changed everything for me. It was the highlight of my youth.
Alice Cooper: I was right there in Beatlemania. Screaming my head off. [Years later] I went to see Paul in Las Vegas. I sat there and they started out with “I Saw Her Standing There” . . . I was on my feet! I was 16 years old and I was screaming! [laughs] And I’m Alice Cooper, the shock rocker. I couldn’t help myself. It just brought you to your feet.
Lou Gramm: What I remember was that I couldn’t sit still, that I was dying with anticipation, and totally euphoric when they took the stage. I was shouting, I know that. It was a world-changer for me.
Timothy B. Schmit: My bandmates and I went to see them at The Cow Palace. You couldn’t hear a thing; it was indoors and there was so much screaming. And [quietly, embarrassed] I screamed too . . .
Dan Scardino: I said I'm not going to scream like a teenage girl. And then I was standing and shouting at the top of my lungs. The Beatles, and that night, shaped me totally. There's been nothing like it since.
Ronnie Burns: I was 17 or 18 when I saw the Beatles in 1964. It was such a huge phenomenon. Ian Meldrum and I camped outside for a couple of nights to get tickets. We booked a whole row for all our friends, so about 25 seats. When they came onstage everyone stood up, and Ian was screaming like a girl at the Beatles. When they went into the next song he was even more hysterical. But we all shared in the whole experience. It really was genuine hysteria.
Greg Lake: They were just unbelievable live. The Beatles had this property which was almost spiritual: they would push you to a point where you couldn’t stand it emotionally; you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. You’ve heard the term “Beatlemania” — and that is exactly what that is. I saw it with my own eyes. They could drive an audience beyond the point where they just . . . lost it, really, and you started to scream.
Phil Collins: We were all ushered into the theatre.4 Suddenly four guys came out on stage and started to play . . . we couldn’t believe it. We were all screaming. No one was told to scream during the filming—they just knew that it would happen. Totally spontaneous.
Mikal Gilmore: It was the gestalt of an experience that genuinely felt like living revelation. At one point, I realized my own voice was screaming along with all the others. But I couldn't stop it — I felt so full of exhilaration and faith. Nothing has ever matched how overwhelming those moments were.
Mark Hudson, who first gained fame in the 1970s as one of the Hudson Brothers and went on to become one of rock’s most successful producers and songwriters in the ‘90s and ‘00s, put it this way about being in the audience at a Beatles concert: “It was probably my first and only homosexual experience. It was my lust for loving what they were doing — and wanting to be a part of it.”
For Hudson and others of his generation, that lust never really went away. Countless numbers of them pursued careers in music — or any other of the creative arts — as a direct result, so that they might find themselves “a part of it” in some way, however small for the many, however more successful for the lucky fewer. To any dismissal of the Beatlemania of February ‘64 as being a boy band’s appeal to squealing young girls, the ultimate rebuttal is simply in the endless list of the male stars and public figures who recall being part of that mania — and who could have been part of that horde Tom Wolfe saw running through Kennedy Airport all those years ago.
This tsunami of Beatle-themed merchandising was almost completely outside of the control of the Beatles or anyone associated with them; Brian Epstein, their manager, had, in a moment of incalculably expensive carelessness, signed away the American merchandising rights (and 90% of the profits) to a man named Nicky Byrne and the licensing company he set up, Seltaeb (Beatles spelled backwards).
Screaming girls and overt commercialization notwithstanding, the modern tendency among some to refer to the Beatles as the first boy band is of course one of the more unfortunate absurdities of rock revisionism. We’ve touched on this in previous Let Us Now Praise installments (“No One In Their Tree,” 9/25/2022; “Aliens From Another Planet,” 10/31/22) but will examine it more thoroughly in a future post.
Bob Geldof saw the Beatles in Dublin in 1963, before they ever came to America. He is still incredulous at what he saw amongst the girls at that performance.
Phil Collins — yes, that Phil Collins — was in the audience for the concert sequence that climaxes the movie “A Hard Day’s Night.”
photo sources used in this article: stills from Beatles concerts (The Coliseum in Washington D.C., Shea Stadium in New York and Festival Hall in Melbourne), and from Ron Howard’s documentary of the Beatles touring years, “Eight Days A Week”
crowd audio is sourced from The Coliseum, Shea Stadium and The Hollywood Bowl in L.A, respectively
OMG! Perry, how did you come up with this topic, and (as always) so complete and in depth! Out of all of your posts, this was the one has given me more information that I hadn't heard before and the quotes, as always phenomenal!! Thank you for the time and effort you must be putting in to make this what it is!
Brilliant as usual Perry. Your insights are spot on and wonderful. Being a "survivor" of that turbulent time I can assure you that, indeed, it wasn't just the girls. My sister Donna knew about them (through telepathy?) shortly before I did but I can aver that I became a fan immediately upon listening to her records. And when the entire family tuned in to that first Sullivan broadcast, it was a new world. They came from another universe bringing peace, joy and harmony. Alas humans (as a species do not listen well to our hearts and minds) being what we are.......................But as my friend Peter and I aver, The Beatles are beyond great and continue to get better every year. Keep up the fantastic work.