FEATURE:
We Wanna Hold Your Hands
ALL PHOTOS: The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, 9th February, 1964
Sixty Years of The Beatles’ First Appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show
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I have done one or two…
features about The Beatles recently. I wanted to mark an important anniversary that I cannot really let slide. It is soon sixty years since The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. On 9th February, 1964, the legendary band made their debut on the show. It was the first live performance on U.S. soil. A seismic moment that started this tsunami of love and obsession that the country had with The Beatles! I can imagine it would have been intimidating and nerve-wracking appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show back in 1964. With two albums already out in the U.K. – 1963’s Please Please Me and With The Beatles -, they would release A Hard Day’s Night in July 1964. It was a busy and interesting time for the band. On 1st February, 1964, The Beatles had their first U.S. number one with I Want to Hold Your Hand. With different releases and careers in the U.S. and U.K., there was this divide in terms of what they were promoted and their success. Maybe being taken to the bosom commercially by the U.S. at this point, the fandom there was fervent and different to here in the U.K. Even though the native and homegrown love was very strong and passionate, there was something almost biblical about the U.S. reaction to the band! It is hard to imagine how their U.S. career would have panned out if the first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show did not go well. Instead, The Beatles stormed it and, with it, won the heart of a nation! I am going to source a couple of features around that iconic and historic appearance. Beatlemania would very much explode soon after. A country already gripped by their music, seeing them on T.V. live took things to a new level.
The website for The Ed Sullivan Show takes us back to 9th February, 1964 and a televisual moment that commanded an enormous audience. Once again, the fact that The Beatles were remarkable and so professional with so many eyes on them is a big reason why they were instantly embraced. Such a slick and tight band at that point, their career would blow up after this performance. Their lives would change forever:
“At 8 o’clock on February 9th 1964, America tuned in to CBS and The Ed Sullivan Show. But this night was different. 73 million people gathered in front their TV sets to see The Beatles’ first live performance on U.S. soil. The television rating was a record-setting 45.3, meaning that 45.3% of households with televisions were watching. That figure reflected a total of 23,240,000 American homes. The show garnered a 60 share, meaning 60% of the television’s turned on were tuned in to Ed Sullivan and The Beatles.
Ed opened the show by briefly mentioning a congratulatory telegram to The Beatles from Elvis and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker and then threw to advertisements for Aero Shave and Griffin Shoe Polish. After the brief commercial interruption, Ed began his memorable introduction:
“Now yesterday and today our theater’s been jammed with newspapermen and hundreds of photographers from all over the nation, and these veterans agreed with me that this city never has witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool who call themselves The Beatles. Now tonight, you’re gonna twice be entertained by them. Right now, and again in the second half of our show. Ladies and gentlemen, The Beatles! Let’s bring them on.”
At last, John, Paul, George and Ringo came onto the stage, opening with “All My Loving” to ear-splitting screeches from teenaged girls in the audience. The Beatles followed that hit with Paul McCartney taking the spotlight to sing, “Till There Was You.” During the song, a camera cut to each member of the band and introduced him to the audience by displaying his first name on screen. When the camera cut to John Lennon, the caption below his name also read “SORRY GIRLS, HE’S MARRIED.” The Beatles then wrapped up the first set with “She Loves You,” and the show went to commercial. Upon return, magician Fred Kaps took the stage to perform a set of sleight-of-hand tricks.
Concerned that The Beatles’ shrieking fans would steal attention from the other acts that evening, Ed Sullivan admonished his audience, “If you don’t keep quiet, I’m going to send for a barber.”
As hard as Ed tried to protect them, the other acts that night suffered from the excitement surrounding The Beatles. Numbered among those performers were impressionist Frank Gorshin, acrobats Wells & the Four Fays, the comedy team of McCall & Brill and Broadway star Georgia Brown joined by the cast of “Oliver!”
The hour-long broadcast concluded with The Beatles singing two more of their hits, “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to the delight of the fans in attendance and those watching at home.
The show was a huge television success. As hard as it is to imagine, over 40% of every man, woman and child living in America had watched The Beatles on Sullivan.
A week later, the February 24th issue of Newsweek magazine’s cover featured a picture of The Beatles with the title, “Bugs About Beatles.” Inside, the review of The Beatles debut on The Ed Sullivan Show began, “Visually, they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian/Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically, they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of “yeah, yeah, yeah!”) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.” The article ended with the following prediction, “…the odds are they will fade away, as most adults confidently predict.”
So much for adult odds makers. But even at that, it was impossible to imagine what a lasting impression the night would leave”.
I wonder whether there has been a documentary made about the lead-up and aftermath of that debut appearance by The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was a moment that will forever live in music history. I was interested knowing more about that lead-up and schedule on 9th February, 1964. The Beatles Bible gives us a complete timeline and insight into one of the all-time most important music moments. The fever that greeted The Beatles after that T.V. performance. Maybe more conservative viewers switched off and were offended by this band they felt were unkempt and unruly. It is clear that the energy and sheer electricity around The Beatles seduced and wowed millions:
“9 February 1964 was the date of The Beatles’ record-breaking first live appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, at Studio 50 in New York City.
Seventy-three million people were reported to have watched the first show. It is still supposed to be one of the largest viewing audiences ever in the States.
It was very important. We came out of nowhere with funny hair, looking like marionettes or something. That was very influential. I think that was really one of the big things that broke us – the hairdo more than the music, originally. A lot of people’s fathers had wanted to turn us off. They told their kids, ‘Don’t be fooled, they’re wearing wigs.’
A lot of fathers did turn it off, but a lot of mothers and children made them keep it on. All these kids are now grown-up, and telling us they remember it. It’s like, ‘Where were you when Kennedy was shot?’ I get people like Dan Aykroyd saying, ‘Oh man, I remember that Sunday night; we didn’t know what had hit us – just sitting there watching Ed Sullivan’s show.’ Up until then there were jugglers and comedians like Jerry Lewis, and then, suddenly, The Beatles!
As with the previous day, in the morning the group rehearsed for the studio cameras. Again, George Harrison was feeling ill, and so his place on stage was taken by road manager Neil Aspinall.
George had tonsillitis and didn’t go to rehearsals for The Ed Sullivan Show. I stood in for him so that they could mark where everyone would stand, and I had a guitar strapped round me. It wasn’t plugged in – nobody was playing anything – and it was amazing to read in a major American magazine a few days later that I ‘played a mean guitar’.
Neil Aspinall
Anthology
That afternoon The Beatles recorded ‘Twist And Shout’, ‘Please Please Me’, and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, in front of a different audience from the one that saw their live debut that evening. This set was broadcast on 23 February as the group’s third Ed Sullivan appearance, after they had left the US. Before the recording, Sullivan introduced the group thus:
All of us on the show are so darned sorry, and sincerely sorry, that this is the third and thus our last current show with The Beatles, because these youngsters from Liverpool, England, and their conduct over here, not only as fine professional singers but as a group of fine youngsters, will leave an imprint of everyone over here who’s met them.
Ed Sullivan
Other guests on this third-show recording were Gordon and Sheila MacRae, and The Cab Calloway Orchestra.
The main thing I was aware of when we did the first Ed Sullivan Show was that we rehearsed all afternoon. TV had such bad sound equipment – it still has today, usually, but then it was really bad – that we would tape our rehearsals and then go up and mess with the dials in the control booth. We got it all set with the engineer there, and then we went off for a break.
The story has it that while we were out, the cleaner came in to clean the room and the console, thought, ‘What are all these chalk marks?’ and wiped them all off. So our plans just went out the window. We had a real hasty time trying to get the sound right.
THE LIVE SHOW
The Beatles’ record-breaking live debut, broadcast from 8-9pm, was witnessed by just 728 people in Studio 50, but seen by an estimated 73,700,000 viewers in 23,240,000 homes in the United States. It comfortably smashed the record for television viewing figures up until that point.
We were aware that Ed Sullivan was the big one because we got a telegram from Elvis and the Colonel. And I’ve heard that while the show was on there were no reported crimes, or very few. When The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, even the criminals had a rest for ten minutes.
George Harrison
Anthology
At the start of the hour-long programme, Sullivan announced that a telegram had been received from Elvis Presley and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, wishing the group luck. It read:
Congratulations on your appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and your visit to America. We hope your engagement will be a successful one and your visit pleasant. Give our best to Mr Sullivan. Sincerely, Elvis & The Colonel.
The Beatles had been given the telegram half an hour before their stage appearance. After reading it, George Harrison deadpanned: “Elvis who?”
The Beatles performed five songs on their Ed Sullivan Show live debut. They sang ‘All My Loving’, ‘Till There Was You’, and ‘She Loves You’, in the first half of the programme, followed by an advertisement for Anadin. Ed Sullivan’s other guests – Georgia Brown & Oliver Kidds, Frank Gorshin, Tessie O’Shea – followed, after which The Beatles performed ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and I Want To Hold Your Hand.
While Paul McCartney sang the ballad ‘Till There Was You’, the cameras panned to each of the Beatles in turn, with their names captioned on the screen. When they got to John Lennon, an additional caption appeared, saying: “Sorry Girls, He’s Married.”
After the show radio DJ Murray The K took John, Paul and Ringo to the Playboy Club. With a police escort they walked several blocks to 59th Street where they were ushered into the club’s Penthouse lounge for dinner.
They later went on to the Peppermint Lounge, where they danced the twist until 4am”.
I am going to end with a feature from GRAMMY. They talked about this Big Bang. A moment that cannot be understated in terms of its impact on popular culture. Sixty years later, we are still feeling the effects of The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. I hope that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr share their memories of that day when the sixtieth anniversary arrives. It is spine-tingling watching them perform:
“Fifty-eight years after that debut appearance on Feb. 9, 1964, it's difficult to quantify (especially if you weren't born yet) how consequential this moment was. We've all heard the clichés about the hair, the suits, the bows, the "Sorry Girls, He's Married" caption above John Lennon's head. We're familiar with the refrain that the Beatles’ performance healed the nation after JFK’s assassination, and read the opening pages of a million rock bios comparing it to a lightning storm, a hurricane, an earthquake.
But watching the clip today, one notices the little details. A squinting Lennon, blind as a bat without his glasses, letting loose an approving "Yeah!"; Paul McCartney lapping up the female attention; Ringo Starr in his goofy, loveable glory; George Harrison, the youngest, looking a touch removed. Their individual personalities are immediately apparent — as magnetic as Buddy Holly was on "Ed Sullivan" back in 1957, few were compelled to ponder the inner lives of the Crickets.
No, each Beatle was as memorable as any other, telegraphing the role they'd play in our lives forevermore. Paul fully inhabits Meredith Wilson's The Music Man show tune "'Til There Was You," which both foreshadows his music-hall-style gems from "When I'm Sixty-Four" to "Your Mother Should Know" and Lennon's future, withering putdowns of McCartney's "granny-music”
"She Loves You" follows. If you're among those who never need to hear that song again, consider how its all-hook barrage invented entire power-pop, indie rock and boy band lineages — including everyone from the Hollies to Teenage Fanclub and BTS.
And then — good God — imagine being magician Fred Kaps, who had to follow that act with playing card and salt shaker tricks. This isn't the forum to roast him (after all, his performance was pre-taped) but the juxtaposition between the two acts — and the world of kids and adults — is almost unbearable to watch.
The cast of Oliver then arrives to gallivant around and sing "As Long As He Needs Me." Bowtied impressionist Frank Gorshin shows up with over-the-top impersonations of Dean Martin and Anthony Quinn. A feather-boaed Tessie O'Shea tickles banjo strings and chirps a selection from the musical The Girl Who Came to Supper. Mitski McCall and Charli Brill chew the scenery in a dorky comedy skit.
The magic barrels back into the last half of the show, as the Fabs bang out "I Saw Her Standing There" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Despite the shoddy video quality — how did this look like it was taped on the moon a mere five years before the events of Get Back? — the lads leap out of your YouTube browser.
"You've been a fine audience," Sullivan says testily at the show's end. "Despite severe provocation." Fifty-eight years later, we are all that audience — and so will our kids, and our kids' kids, and so on.
Whether or not you're a Beatles fan, take their debut Ed Sullivan appearance out of the closet of history and really sit with it — in all its characterizations and juxtapositions and moments of bliss and awkwardness. Try to envisage a world where it never happened. Spoiler alert: it'd be as dull as salt. This Beatles performance kicked off everything”.
On 9th February, it is sixty years since The Beatles debuted on The Ed Sullivan Show. They would appear on the show several times more. It is that debut appearance that stands out. This awakening and explosion! The Beatlemania hysteria of 1964 much have been dizzying for the band. The ecstasy that met them in their live performances. Thousands of fans waiting wherever they went. It was insane! Little did they know that, on 9th February, 1964, they would ignite this fuse. Already loved in the U.S., the appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show took them over the edge. This brilliant Beatles truly…
STORMED America.