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by Mike Blagg

Sgt. Pepper taught our land to play.

February 9, 1964.  A day which lives in indelible memory to us Baby Boomers.  The day the world changed.

The Beatles came to America.

The Beatles.  A four-piece rock-and-roll band from Liverpool, England that had struggled for five years, released their first records in late 1962, and by the end of 1963 had completely conquered their home country.  Then it was time to take their act to the United States.

The Beatles had released several songs as singles in the U.S. in 1963, including “Please Please Me,” “From Me to You,” and “She Loves You,” but none of them went very high on the charts.  But they started gaining some traction late in the year, and CBS News produced a story about the Beatles that they planned to air on November 22.  But a bigger story pushed it off the air.  President John F. Kennedy was assassinated that day.

Nonetheless, when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was released in December, it received lots of airplay, and then totally dominated American radio in January.  Perfect timing for the Beatles television debut in America on The Ed Sullivan Show.

That was a live variety show on Sunday nights, which typically featured tidy little acts like comedians, magicians, jugglers, etc.  But when the Beatles played on the show, complete bedlam ensued.  The theater was filled with 700 screaming teenagers (mostly girls).  CBS had received 50,000 ticket requests for that show.  The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964 had 73 million viewers, more than one-third of the U.S. population.  (I was one of them!)  The 73 million was more than triple the normal TV audience for the show.  The crime rate across the country fell to almost zero during the hour of the show.  Even the crooks stayed home to watch the Beatles.

I remember that night well.  I loved it!  The Beatles had their own sound, a style of music we were not hearing in the United States at that time, and it was much, much better.  They played light pop songs like “All My Loving” and “She Loves You”, heavier rock like their cover version of the Isley Brothers song “Twist and Shout”, and even a Broadway show tune “Till There Was You.”  They could play anything, and play it well.

And they looked different.  Collarless Beatle suits, semi-high heel Beatle boots, and That Long Hair!  Mop Tops, they were called.  We didn’t care.  They were great and we loved everything about them.

The world changed that day.  At least our world did.  The next day at school it was all anyone could talk about.  Not too long after that I wore a Beatle wig to school.  My fourth-grade teacher loved it.  Everybody got a guitar and started learning how to play.  Several future rock stars said they were inspired that night:  Tom Petty, Billy Joel, John Fogerty, Kenny Loggins, Roger McGuinn, Ann and Nancy Wilson.

The Beatles appearance on the Ed Sullivan show has been called “the most important event in rock music history.”  It led to many other musical groups from England coming to America:  the Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Searchers (second best band from Liverpool, in my opinion), the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Who, Herman’s Hermits (the second most successful English band in America, in terms of record sales), etc.  The British Invasion had begun.

The Beatles sold 2.5 million records in the U.S. in March.  In April the top five songs on American radio charts were all Beatles songs (Can’t Buy Me Love, She Loves You, Twist and Shout, I Want to Hold Your Hand, and Please Please Me).  They exploded like a super nova.  No one had ever seen anything like it.  It couldn’t last.  The experts gave them a year.  Oh, how the experts were wrong.

The Beatles stayed together as a group until 1970.  Even today, they are still one of the best-selling bands in the world.  By 2014 they had sold over 600 million records.  And they all had successful solo careers, selling many millions of records more.  To this day the Beatles are popular among young folks:  my teenage granddaughter and her friends LOVE The Beatles (although they may not scream like the girls did sixty years ago!).

Their impact in the world of popular music went far beyond record sales.  They changed how popular music works.  Most bands had one leader, and the other guys supported him.  The Beatles were led by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but George Harrison and Ringo Starr weren’t far behind.  They performed as a cohesive group.  They wrote their own songs, which was almost unheard of in those days, and they wrote great songs.  The London Sunday Times called Lennon and McCartney “the greatest composers since Beethoven.”  That’s pretty good company!  Their song “Yesterday” is the most recorded song in history, with over 3,000 cover versions recorded.  It is the most-played song in radio history.

The Beatles played the first rock concert in a stadium:  Shae Stadium in New York on August 15, 1965.  Fifty-five thousand fans in attendance, a record at the time, by a long shot.  In the audience was a young Barbara Bach, who would later marry Ringo.  Also a teenage girl named Meryl Streep.  They grossed over $300,000 that night, an unheard-of figure in those days.  Of course, none of the fans could hear the Beatles, because they were drowned out by the screaming girls. That happened everywhere.

And the Beatles were mobbed by thousands of fans everywhere they went.  Beatles merchandise sales were everywhere and on anything:  clothing, pencils, belts and badges and buttons, aprons, chewing gum, jig saw puzzles, purses, pillows, shampoo and bubble bath even.

The press coined the term “Beatlemania.”  We knew it was Beatle Sense.

After a couple of years of rapid-fire release of singles and non-stop touring, the Beatles knew they had to slow down.  Their last concert was in August 1966 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

Now the Beatles had more time to spend in the studio, and boy howdy did it ever pay off.  Rather than cranking out single-after-single, which would be collected together as an album, the Beatles re-defined albums. They recorded albums as a complete body of work, and in the process raised the quality of their music even higher.  “Rubber Soul” came first, then a better album “Revolver,” and then an even better album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”  A complete revolution in rock music, and still considered to this day to be the best album in rock music history.  Other bands like the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, the Who, the Kinks, also began producing albums as a whole work.  Led by the Beatles, top rock musicians were being taken seriously as artists.

I recall, about that time, we were playing a Beatles record at home, and I heard my mother say “I don’t like this new rock-and-roll music, but I can tell those boys are good.”  Let me tell you, that was HIGH PRAISE indeed!

The Beatles influence went far beyond music.  Long hair.  More colorful fashions in clothing.  Movies.  Their first movie “A Hard Day’s Night” was far different from previous music star movies, such as Elvis Presley’s “Blue Hawaii,” and very influential on later movies and TV shows.  By 1966 the Beatles were too busy to appear on TV shows anymore, so they filmed short videos to accompany four new songs: “Rain,” “Paperback Writer,” “Penny Lane,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.”  Thus music videos were born, leading to MTV.  On June 25, 1967 the Beatles performed their newest song “All You Need Is Love” on the first world-wide satellite telecast.  The show had an audience of over 400 million persons in 25 countries.  Un-heard of!

And the Beatles had influence in the world of religion.  They became followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, learning about yoga and meditation, which gained popularity around the world.  And George Harrison subscribed to Hinduism, bringing more attention to that religion.

And then there was politics.  The Beatles did not get deep into politics, but they did campaign for peace, not war.  Their biggest political effect, ironically, may have been in an area in which they had no presence:  the Soviet Union.  The Beatles music was banned there, but it was smuggled in, and was very popular among the young Russians.  Many surreptitiously learned English just so they could understand the Beatles songs.  Even electric guitars were illegal in the U.S.S.R., but clever young Russians learned how to build them, robbing parts from pay phones, etc.  Many historians assert that the Beatles music gave hope and inspiration to young Russians to overthrow the Communist regime in their country.  Even the former U.S.S.R. General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev said “the single most important reason for the diffusion of the Cold War was the Beatles.”

John Lennon once tried to downplay their influence, saying: “We were just a band that made it very, very big.  That’s all.”  Well, maybe the Beatles did not set out to change the world, but they did.  Other bands came along which were excellent and very popular, such as the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and the Eagles.  But they were not the Beatles, in terms of music and influence.  Not even close.

John Lennon was murdered in New York on December 8, 1980.  George Harrison died of cancer on November 29, 2001.  Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are still with us, now in their eighties, and still performing.

The decade in which the Beatles performed, the 1960’s, was eventful, to say the least.  There were some bright spots, like the Apollo 11 first manned landing on the moon, and progress in civil rights, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  The decade was also marked by political turmoil, social unrest, and the Vietnam war.  But the Beatles stayed above all that, for the most part.  While the music of other bands got angry and rebellious, the Beatles sang about love, peace, and hope.

They taught us that in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

The Beatles never went out of style, and they are still guaranteed to raise a smile.

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!