50 Years Ago Today: The Beatles

Noah wrote this piece for the 50th anniversary, on December 26, of Capitol Records' release of their first Beatles record. But of course the date most people remember is the Fab Foursome's tumultuous U.S. TV debut on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964 -- by coincidence also a Sunday. It would seem a shame not to take advantage of that 50th anniversary to revisit this special reminiscence.


On December 26, 1963, hastily pushed up in response to public demand, Capitol Records released their first Beatles record, a single of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" backed with "I Saw Her Standing There." It wasn't the first Beatles release in the U.S., but it was the first by the group's official label (or any major one), and the first properly promoted and distributed. The rest, as they say, is history.

by Noah

As a youngster in the early 1960s, I had a portable radio. You’ve heard of "a boy and his dog" going everywhere together. Well, for me it was a boy and his radio. And it was always tuned to one of the three mainstream rock-and-roll radio stations we had in NYC in those days. Fifty years ago this week that radio never left my side, because I heard something new and exciting and I wanted to hear it every time it was played.

Radio wasn’t entirely segregated by a bunch of Clear Channel wingnuts in Texas in those days, either.



New York’s WMCA (the smallest of the three and the first to play The Beatles in New York City), WINS, and WABC played a real mix of music that kids of various backgrounds would like. If you didn't particularly favor a blatant corporately contrived, deliberately safe, teener pop song, chances were the next song would be more real and very much to your liking. You might hear an instrumental, followed by a soul song, followed by one of Phil Spector's genius "3-minute pop symphonies," as he called them, followed by some classic street-corner harmony group from either a white Italian neighborhood or a black neighborhood.

There'd be The Drifters, Elvis, Gene Pitney, Brenda Lee, a Buddy Holly already-then-"oldie," the Isley Brothers, even the stray Johnny Cash or more obscure country crossover hit, oddball comedic novelty hits too -- all mixed together in one enjoyable pastiche.

Not everything was ideal, to say the least, but we had diversity back then, if only on the radio (and on some sports teams). The term "niche marketing" was, thankfully, unknown. The mix of styles may have been scary to the conservatives of the day, but not to the kids. "Shout" by the Isley Brothers was a celebration, not a cause for fear. Even the small R&B stations at the upper end of the dial would play a record by a white artist if it was big enough and good enough: audio race-mixing, the stuff of conservative nightmares.

Believe it or not, however, there were many parts of this country in those days where the adult world had sought to ban rock-and-roll, and not just in the South. Conservatives saw the music as subversive. and to some extent they were right. Tough shit. Once an open-minded white kid heard James Brown, it was all over. The horse left the barn. Same thing with a black kid hearing Carl Perkins singing "Blue Suede Shoes."

The Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly types of the day were apoplectic. Even the old tradition of having the teenage audiences in concert auditoriums and gymnasiums divided by, ironically, a rope, with white kids on one side and "coloreds" on the other side was breaking down. While some white kids, egged on by their idiot parents, were protesting about their schools being integrated, the music scene was having a profound effect, and, of course, Washington was slow to notice.

THE BRITISH INVASION REVISITED

By 1963, something of immense importance was really brewing about 3500 miles east of New York. For years, white English kids had been seeking out American music of all kinds, particularly white rockabilly and black deep soul and blues. Sailors made a little money on the side by bringing back the American records to the U.K. port cities, especially Liverpool.

The English kids formed their own bands and played this music. Many of the original versions of such songs were not even heard on big-city stations like the New York ones I mentioned. They weren't even heard on most of the smaller stations. It never occurred to the U.K. kids that there was anything odd about performing this music themselves. Why should it? But it would have been more than a bit odd in most places in America. It would have scared the bejesus out of the so-called "grown-up" world.

During 1963, The Beatles were getting bigger and bigger in England, with a string of number-one hits and endless sold-out live shows in front of ecstatic audiences. In the U.S., we knew none of this. By then, The Beatles weren’t just covering American artists such as Arthur Alexander or The Shirelles, they were writing their own songs. That fact would have a tremendous impact on the American music industry. The Beatles showed that, if you could write good songs of your own, and be successful with them, you could cut out the Tin Pan Alley-style song-writing houses of the day. That was resented.

It was not all that The Beatles would change in mainstream pop music -- or the world, for that matter.

Before The Beatles hit the American airwaves, there were only rare appearances by U.K. artists on the charts. The 1962 instrumental hit "Telstar" by The Tornados was one example. At the end of 1963, The Beatles were about to kick the wall down and lead what seemed to be a takeover of the U.S. airwaves and charts by British artists. It was called the British Invasion. It was a sea change, but, interestingly, it didn't quite happen as overnight as it seemed back then, and is usually thought to have been even now.

By December of 1963, The Beatles had had four huge hits in England. They were "Love Me Do," "Please Please Me," "From Me to You," and "She Loves You." Hindsight is 20/20, but, incredibly, Los Angeles-based Capitol Records, who had the release rights to all four records, opted not to release them here. The American music industry had a lot invested, monetarily and taste-wise, in safer home-grown talent. It's hard to imagine now, but in 1963 and 1964 The Beatles were a bit unsettling to many. It was as if something about John Lennon's eyes and Paul McCartney's cuteness subconsciously threatened them and their precious status quo. To some, the sheer energy, enthusiasm, and exuberance that leaped off The Beatles' records was off-putting; don't want to wake up the kiddies, you know.

The band that would not only change pop culture, but change fashion, change the music industry, throw off the oppression of the prevailing conservative Pleasantville mindset, and simply change how so many of us think about things would have to wait.

THE AMERICAN MUSIC INDUSTRY LIKED HAVING CONTROL

The industry would determine what we would hear. They would determine what was good. They would determine what was safe for a country that was paranoid about foreign influence. These were conservative times. When Elvis had scared America, the industry responded with safe, sanitized, manufactured teen idols. Still, there was a lot of good stuff that got through. The radio stations had to play something, and it couldn't all be adult-approved crap.

All was not lost, however. Those first four Beatles singles did get released here, on small labels. The first three were released by Chicago-based Vee Jay Records, a record company that mostly featured an astoundingly brilliant array of American R&B and jazz, but also had one of the biggest white groups of the time in The Four Seasons. Unfortunately, Vee Jay was hugely overextended, and, although they recognized the talent of The Beatles, they didn't have the financial resources to promote them. Even so, "From Me to You" actually did get significant radio play in the Los Angeles market. The folks at KRLA got it. They saw that the song wasn't all that different from an Everly Brothers song. It just had a third harmony vocal. What was not to like? "From Me to You" reached number 32 on their chart. Too bad Vee Jay couldn't react fast enough. It might have saved their company.

One station on the East Coast was also aware of The Beatles: WORC, in Worcester, Massachusetts. For the week of December 6, 1963, both sides of the "She Loves You" single -- on Philadelphia-based Swan Records -- made their Top 10, with the B-side, the inventive minor-key "I'll Get You" being their number 1, the first number-one record by The Beatles on any chart in America! "She Loves You" was number 9. It was a portent of things to come.

Interestingly, none other than Dick Clark called the shots at Swan. They were smart enough to put out the record and even had the rights to future releases, but when Clark asked his promo people what they thought, he was literally told, "They're just a bunch of long-haired kids. Forget them." That answer alone goes a long way toward explaining the state of the American music industry in 1963. They even had the evidence at WORC, which based its charts just on listener requests. They just couldn't grasp the meaning. If you think things have changed all that much in today's music industry, guess again. As Jim Morrison once said, "The men don't know, but the little girls, they understand."

I had seen a clip of The Beatles on the Jack Paar TV show.


(I know the clip has a glitch in the beginning, but it's too meaningful not to include, warts and all.)

Paar was somewhat amused and bewildered by what was happening in England, but he thought it was of interest, so he showed it. Before that there was the old and staid CBS News with an idiotic and contempt-filled but informative report by their London correspondent, Alexander Kendrick. Walter Cronkite ran the Kendrick piece on 11/21/63, the day before the JFK murder in Dallas. Mike Wallace ran it on the morning of 11/22/63. To his credit, Cronkite reran the piece on 12/10/63, correctly thinking that events had overshadowed the report and that Americans could use a bit of lighter news.



To this day I generally feel that the corporate news people shouldn't even bother when it comes to reporting on popular culture. They incessantly prove that they are doomed to never get it. They live and operate in a parallel universe. Paar, who was an entertainer and not a news guy, despite his snark is honest and knows that something is going on. Kendrick would fit in just fine on Fox and Friends or any of the other network morning-show atrocities. Call him the Steve Doocy or Ron Burgundy of his day.

"WHY CAN'T WE HAVE THIS MUSIC IN AMERICA?"

Ed Sullivan, on the other hand, ran his famous Sunday-night variety show not proclaiming to be an authority on art, but just knowing that if something was popular, it should be on his show. He considered that his job. So when he saw thousands of screaming kids as he walked through London's Heathrow Airport one day, he had the good sense to ask what was going on, and after meeting with Beatles manager Brian Epstein booked the band for three appearances starting on February 9, 1964. The Sullivan bookings convinced Capitol that maybe they had something. They scheduled The Beatles' fifth single, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," backed with "I Saw Her Standing There," for release on January 13th. They thought they were in control of the situation. They had no idea.

In Silver Spring, Maryland, a 15-year-old girl named Marsha Albert had seen the CBS report. She was so impressed by The Beatles that she wrote an impassioned letter to her favorite local station, WWDC. She asked, "Why can’t we have this music in America?" Why, indeed? Well, you see, Marsha, when corporate bozos put on their expensive suits and enter the hallowed halls of corporate bozoland, they lose all common sense. As Morrison said . . . .

Back in those days, however, radio stations were not only locally programmed, they actually did things like respond to the mail. There was even an FCC that felt that local radio stations should reflect the needs and wants of the local community. Not every station using the same format played exactly the same pre-approved songs from some right-wing turd in Texas. Not only that, but local DJs had at least a bit of freedom to decide if they wanted to play a record that they thought their listeners might like.

Enter WWDC disc jockey Carroll James. James had a stewardess friend who worked for BOAC, the predecessor to British Airways. He asked her to get some Beatles records for him. A few days later, she brought him an English pressing of "I Want to Hold Your Hand." He played it, and the request lines almost literally exploded. Other stations heard what was going on at WWDC and acted accordingly. No one had to get approval from some yahoo whose idea of a good time is lunch with Karl Rove. Capitol was forced to move up its release date to December 26th, 50 years ago today. Unlike Vee Jay and Swan, they had the wherewithal to properly promote the record and -- more importantly, in this case -- had enough pressing-plant capability and a large enough distribution arm set up to meet the demands of millions of U.S. kids who wanted what they wanted. By April, The Beatles would have the top five records in the country, a feat not matched before or since.

That’s the way it was, 50 years ago today.


By April 1964, The Beatles had the top five records in the U.S.

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DWT exclusive! Now it can be told: David S. Broder has been mounted and stuffed for decades. You won't believe who's writing "his" columns!

McCranky -- a reformer in the mold of T.R., says David S.

"So, at 72 and with a history of cancer, how could McCain choose a vice presidential nominee who has, let's face it, zero experience in foreign affairs? Being the nominal commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard doesn't count, unless you think Vladimir Putin is about to order an invasion across the Bering Strait.

"At a time when the nation also confronts enormous challenges at home, Palin has, um, slightly more than zero experience in domestic affairs. The reason most people move to Alaska is that it's different from the rest of the country. Salmon fishing and snowmobile racing are not front-page news in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Florida."

-- Eugene Robinson, in his Washington Post column today, The Cynicism Express

"Palin is, if anything, less qualified for the vice presidency (and the presidency) than [Harriet] Miers was for the [Supreme C]ourt. But there is one big difference: Palin passes all the right-wing litmus tests, which means she is unlikely to suffer Miers's fate. . . .

"That only a handful of conservatives have so far expressed doubts about Palin demonstrates that ideology is what drove them during the Miers fight, and drives them still. Miers's lack of experience was, for many conservatives, a convenient rationale for opposing someone they worried might become another David Souter. Palin's lack of experience is irrelevant because she is right -- actually, quite far right -- on the conservatives' issues."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washinton Post column yesterday, Northern Underexposure

"How Palin Could Help"

-- title of the column attributed to "David S. Broder" in yesterday's Washington Post

by Ken
EXCLUSIVE TO DOWN WITH TYRANNY

To the extent that the media do their job, there is one basic take on the choice of Governor Who??? to be Young Johnny McCranky's running mate, and that is that the Crankyman has chosen to take a flying leap into history as a laughingstock, as the least-fit-to-serve candidate ever to make it onto the presidential ballots of all the states in the history of the republic, including minor as well as major party nutsos.

Really, now, while there are hundreds if not thousands of questions to be asked, and the number balloons every day, and many of those questions are pretty darned important, it all boils down to one question, really:

How would anyone in his or her right mind DARE to vote for a McCranky-Who??? ticket?

This is after all, a presidential candidate who appears on a host of medical grounds to be at death's door, or on some of his feebler days to have slipped inside the door for a quick liedown. And the person he has chosen to step in for him is someone who, apart from being a babe of sorts, has no qualifications of any kind for the presidency except loudly proclaimed commitment to a few ultra-right-wing (in particular Christian Right) talking points. She doesn't even qualify as an "ultra-right-winger," since on most of the issues confronting the president of the U.S. -- including the whole realm of foreign policy, but hardly limited to that -- she has, as far as we can tell, no views at all.

But the Crankyman was desperate, and knew he needed to roll the dice. So he apparently gambled that, since he couldn't have his buddy Holy Joe Lieberman at his side, he'd go the other way: to a complete stranger, known only for (a) being a former beauty near-queen (hey, people like good-looking people) and (b) espousing a few Hard Right crazinesses that might solidify his support among the crazies and stoopids who make up the Republican Base, whose trust he is incredibly still trying to win at this late date.

And so as we scan yesterday and today's op-ed pages in the hometown newspaper of Our Nation's Village, that tiny enclave that sometimes seems to exist in the mind and nowhere else (unless it's Our Nation's Lobbyists' money-shoveling operations), we find sensible people like Eugene Robinson and E. J. Dionne Jr. writing sensibly, and even the likes of Richard Cohen sort of getting it. And then there's "David S. Broder" [left], taking the side of, well the crazies and the stoopids, the people our Johnny is forging into a coalition he dares to dream will propel him into the White House.

Which is why it seems to me long past time to rip the cover off the charade. People, there is no David S. Broder.

Oh, there once was a David S. He was a harmless drone who churned out dull but inoffensive platitudes about American politics.

David S.'s most famous innovation, of course, was his cherished Field Trips into the Real America -- for the purpose of communing with his belly button. He was rarely given proper credit for his courage in undertaking these field trips, which carried with them the risk of running into Real People, who might actually say Real Stuff.

Of course our David S. was tough enough for that. He had been to zoos, after all, and so had experience observing native fauna in their not-quite-natural habitat. Sometimes he would, in flagrant violation of the posted warnings not to feed the animals, toss them the odd peanut.

What's more, it's not as if David S. was at risk of hearing something from those natives that might disturb the stone-engraved "wisdom" drawn from all that belly-button watching. After all, the last time he was known to have listened to anyone who wasn't a certified elder of his Village-by-the-Potomac was sometime in the early 1970s when his mother reproached him for not calling more often and he shot back, "Jeez Louise, Ma, I'm due at Sally Quinn's. Her cook is trying a new recipe for Quiche Villageoise."

What's more, encountering these rough Real Persons in the wild (as it were), in their luncheonettes and bars, relieved him of the lurking fear that one of those ruffians might someday show up at his very own Village doorstep with a view toward actually setting foot inside! (Oh, the horror!)

So yes, there once was a David S., but surely it has been obvious that he no longer exists, and surely hasn't for decades. Although it appears impossible to ascertain when exactly David S. moved on to the Great Punditorium in the Beyond, there really isn't room for doubt that he has passed.

"Are you going to tell me," said Milton S. Tumblewit, professor emeritus of punditology at the Outside the Village University School of Journalism, "that these last several decades' worth of mindlessly repetitive and predictable pseudo-'centrist' drivel were written by an actual living, breathing human being?"

Many of those who were once close to David S. acknowledge that the Master, as he liked to be called, is no longer with them. One longtime intimate, who was granted anonymity on account of he's a really famous Village columnist who lacks the common sense or decency or simple shame to be mortified by this remembrance, nevertheless recalls:

I remember once I went into a phase where I became really preoccupied with finding the True Political Center -- not some close approximation, but the real, exact center. I knew as long as I was even millimeters away from True Center, I couldn't give my readers the real American punditry they deserve. So my desk filled up with protractors and compasses and T-squares and slide rules and stuff.

Until one day David S. (he liked to be called"David S." -- either that or 'Master') said to me in that special authoritative way he had, where you knew he was telling you God's Own Truth, he said, 'You don't need all that fancy paraphernalia, boychik. If you want to find the Real Center, just keep moving right until you feel your head spinning like a hula hoop on crack.'

I love to tell that story at Village soirees. I swear every time I tell it it brings a tear to Ben Bradlee's eye."

There is, it should be noted, a dissenting school, which acknowledges that the writing of David S.'s columns passed into other hands at some point, probably in the '70s, but insists that he didn't die.

THE REVISIONIST THEORY: DAVID S., CHANTEUSE

Instead he is said to have let his hair and nails grow, and after several seasons of summer stock rolled out his one-man show, Mary Martin, Mary Martin, in which he attempted to recapture the spirit of America's favorite singing gamine. Adherents of this theory point out that David S. had already achieved great acclaim playing two of the beloved Mary's most famous roles with the Village Light Opera Company (admission by invitation only): the title role of Peter Pan and the irrepressible young governess Maria in The Sound of Music, where he was especially admired for his yodeling in the song "The Lonely Goatherd."

Upon his passing, the real David S. was mounted and stuffed, and an amazing number of people appear to have been fooled. The result bears an uncanny likeness to Phineas T. Bluster of the old Howdy Doody show. How then, you ask, has the Washington Post continued to publish a never-ending stream of mindless blather under the David S. byline?

A now-retired but formerly highly placed source at the paper agreed to spill the beans to Down With Tyranny, on condition of anonymity ("I wouldn't dare show my face at Sally's house," he -- or she -- said).

A lot of people think we just had that crap written by an intern, maybe one who had once had to retype several of his columns when the spam filter on our e-mail system deleted them. Or more likely a succession of interns, on the theory that no one person could keep churning out that dim-witted crap.

The truth is actually more exotic.

You've probably heard of the theory that a whole bunch of monkeys -- you know, a really, really lot of them -- put at typewriters would eventually type the works of Shakespeare. This is usually thought of as a mere theoretical comment on randomness. It's not well known that a project to test the theory was actually funded in the late '60s and early '70s by the National Endowment for the Humanities, using 500 monkeys working on early IBM PCs (and not as is sometimes maliciously reported, PC Jr.'s).

In fact, the project achieved some surprising successes. Most notably, two of the simians in collaboration produced a version of Julius Caesar that was surprisingly similar to the one we know, at least up to the point where the stabbed Caesar turns to his erstwhile friend Brutus and says, "Et tu, Bongo?" At this point the whole thing deteriorated quickly into farce, in the form of scampering, howling antics that closely resembled a routine once done by a pair of trained chimpanzees named Biffy and Miffy on The Ed Sullivan Show. Or at least that was the claim advanced by Biffy and Miffy's trainer, Col. Beeson M. Mifflin, in legal papers that were filed as a prelude to a possible lawsuit.

Some people claim that the threatened lawsuit spelled doom for the Simian Shakespeare project. In fact, it was shut down when the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) [right], alarmed by reports of the project's successes, succeeded in cutting off funding, insisting: "It's bad enough that filth was written once. We're certainly not going to having it written again on the taxpayers' dime, and especially not by a bunch of monkeys who are no smarter than me!"

With the monkeys thrown out of work, and re-employment prospects bleak (the Sullivan show was off the air by then), we at the Post knew we could probably get them to work cheap. What we weren't prepared for was how quickly and how successfully some of the monkeys -- the more pedantic ones, it has to b said, who were usually derided by their more creative peers -- developed a remarkable imitation of David S.'s "voice." When the first "Broder" book written entirely by the monkeys was published and several Washington reviewers declared, "Rejoice, Real Americans! The Master has never been in more iconic form," we ordered extra bananas for all of the team.

And so here we are, in September 2008, and yesterday we had E. J. Dionne writing:

By all rights, there should be a revolt at this week's (now-delayed) Republican convention against John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate -- for the same reasons so many Republicans opposed President Bush's selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.

And today Eugene Robinson noting:

Has anyone noticed that Sarah Palin's central claim to political fame is a fraud? She represents herself as a fiscal conservative who abhors pork-barrel projects and said no thanks to the "Bridge to Nowhere" -- a $398 million span that would have linked Ketchikan, Alaska, to its airport across the Tongass Narrows. But as mayor of Wasilla (pop. 9,780), she hired a Washington lobbyist to bring home the bacon. And as a candidate for governor just two years ago, she supported both the Ketchikan bridge and the congressional earmark that would have paid most of its cost.

But then there was David S., or rather the David S. Monkey Collective, writing "How Palin Could Help."

By picking Palin, McCain has strengthened his reputation not as an ideologue, not as a partisan, but as a reformer -- ready to shake up Washington as his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, once did. My guess is that cleansing Washington of its poisonous partisanship, its wasteful spending and its incompetence will become McCain's major theme.

Now, this is -- and I wish there were a more polite way of saying it -- so fucking stupid, in every particular, that if it had been written by an actual pundit, you'd have to say it would be a simple act of human kindness to take him out to the meadow and put him out of his misery.

Of course we know who really wrote it. And I for one refuse to attempt to engage a bunch of monkeys in political dialogue. It's likely to be more stimulating and productive than dialoguing with, say, the Crazies and Stoopids for McCranky. Still, there are limits.

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