WATERSHED: The Fab Four with
Sullivan at a rehearsal for the big show
Feb. 9, 1964
"Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!"
By Christopher Porterfield
They had first set foot in the U.S. only two days before. But their
records—and their publicity—had preceded them: the Beatles,
Britain's Fab Four, the sensation of Europe. Their single I Want to
Hold Your Hand had just hit No. 1. That afternoon in Manhattan,
hordes of fans—mostly adolescent, mostly female—surged in the
street outside CBS's Studio 50, where the lads were rehearsing for their
debut on the closest thing that era had to a national entertainment
forum: Ed Sullivan's Sunday-night TV variety show. Later, a lucky few
hundred of the faithful were seated in the theater. Well, sort of
seated. They squirmed and thrashed and leaped up and down. They screamed
and squealed and wept and shrieked.
To the reporters who were there,
of whom I was one, covering the event for TIME, the noise was what
seemed new. Surely these kids were louder, more frenzied, than Frank
Sinatra's fans had ever been, or even Elvis Presley's. Sullivan made a
pact with them before the show: Keep it down while other acts are on;
otherwise you can do what you like. So when the Beatles performed their
five songs in two sets, the treble din engulfed the theater. You could
hardly hear the music, but what did that matter? The Beatles' sheer
presence was the point—their air of wholesome charm and cheeky wit,
their instinctive connection with their audience. (It would be another
year or two before albums like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper
showed that they were a musical phenomenon too.)
Sullivan, standing
in front of his false curtain at stage right, peered out warily at the
hysteria. You could almost see him thinking, What is this? What's going
on? Many of us in the press were equally bemused, as probably were most
of the estimated 73 million viewers who tuned in that night.
But
Elvis knew. Earlier in the day he had wished the Beatles well in a
telegram that couldn't help being symbolic. Elvis spoke as a product of
the '50s. After the watershed Sullivan show, '60s pop culture, and all
that it portended, both exhilarating and tragic, was in full cry.
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