Feb 7, 2014
When Pan Am flight 101 left London’s Heathrow bound for New York on February 7, 1964, the pilot would have had a pretty good idea of the local value of four of his passengers. With Beatlemania at a hysterical crescendo in Britain, hundreds of over-excited teenage girls had turned up at the airport to wave goodbye to John, Paul, George and Ringo as the four set off to, hopefully, conquer America.
What none of the airline crew could possibly have measured, however, was the goodwill and hopes of millions of young Britons that the Beatles were carrying with them. Because, flying with the Beatles on that voyage to America fifty years ago next weekend, was a new found youthful pride in simply being British.
After dozens of radio and TV appearances, two massive hit albums, four number one singles, a Royal Command performance, months of sell-out tours and daily items in the newspapers, virtually the entire country had become enchanted by the wit and cheek, not to mention the songs, of the boys from Liverpool.
But for the Beatles’ own generation, of which I was a member, there was something more than that. I might not have known them personally then, but I felt as though I did. Just about everyone I knew identified with them. And if America fell for them, their success would, by some strange alchemy, be perceived by us to be our success, too.
But would America like them? A few weeks earlier, at the end of 1963 when the trip had been planned, that had been by no means certain. In this country the Beatles’ post war generation had grown up cowed by American culture, with its flashy cars and glamorous Hollywood depictions of teenage cool and the Great American Lifestyle.
When it came to films, West End shows and popular music, America had always done it first and done it better – most of all in rock and roll, which in its British form had seemed such a watered down version of the real thing. ‘Why would Americans want us,’ the Beatles nervously asked themselves before they took on their biggest challenge, ‘when they already have everything?’ How likely were they to succeed when even Cliff Richard, Britain’s biggest ever pop star, hadn’t made it in the States?
For a year Capitol Records, the US offshoot of EMI, the Beatles’ British recording giant, hadn’t been any help at all. So little impressed had been their snooty, jazz-loving executives with the group’s first four singles, Love Me Do, Please Please Me, From Me To You and She Loves You, that, despite millions of sales in Britain, they’d refused to release them in the States. Instead they’d casually leased the recordings to various tiny labels who’d then largely failed to get them played on American radio.
Only with the staggering success in Britain of I Want To Hold Your Hand and the album With the Beatles in December 1963 had Capitol taken the cotton wool out of their collective ears. After demands by the now angry Sir Edward Lockwood, overall head of EMI, pleas by Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, pleas by producer George Martin, clamourings by US disc jockeys and reports from London in American newspapers and TV, they’d finally noticed that something sensational was happening on this side of the Atlantic.
Just after Christmas, Capitol released I Want To Hold Your Hand to a whirlwind of publicity. The result? A million copies sold in eleven days. That in itself was unparalleled success, but there were still nerves. “Well, if they don’t like us, we can always buy a few albums and come home,” John Lennon would joke uneasily.
But when, on Saturday, February 8, news reached Britain that Flight 101 had been welcomed by 4000 screaming American fans, that a transistor radio in the shape of a Pepsi Cola machine had been given to every Beatle, and that Beatle records were playing constantly on every pop radio station as the group were ferried by limousine into New York City, we found ourselves smiling for them.
They’d done the impossible. They’d taken on America at its own musical speciality and won. The next fortnight would decide their careers – in a global sense.
But as they gazed out of the windows of New York’s Plaza Hotel at the besieging American teenagers – and found a lot of the girls less fanciable than they’d expected because so many wore braces on their teeth – a new reality might have been distantly dawning. They were in a foreign country but already prisoners of their own fame.
There would be no possibility of going shopping for albums. America would be seen through the reinforced glass windows of hotels, trains and limousines.
In the meantime they were enjoying being at the epicentre of the storm. A couple of hours before their plane had touched down a couple of young American film makers, Albert and David Maysles, had got a long distance call from Granada TV asking them to meet the Beatles and follow them around.
Now the four found themselves being observed, fly-on-the-wall style, as they chatted on hotel phones to any disc jockeys who could get through to them. Many did, particularly Murray the K at WINS, who’d won their favour by playing their records non-stop since dawn all day as their plane had been crossing the Atlantic.
The main purpose of the visit had been to appear on the nationwide Ed Sullivan TV show on the Sunday night, and even before they sang, Sullivan was welcome the new generation with a telegram from Elvis Presley wishing them well. After that it was straight into Paul McCartney looking bouncy and cute as he sang All My Loving and the transfer of crowns from Elvis to the Beatles was complete and bloodless, as Elvis, badly managed, retired into Hollywood mediocrity for five years without even putting up a fight
To Americans, the Beatles must have looked like nothing they’d previously encountered. In Britain we’d had a year to grow used to their moptops and sassy Sixties clothes, right down to the stylish, expensive leather cap John Lennon bought for the New York journey. Taking their cue from Mary Quant and Carnaby Street, the Beatles had become fashion leaders.
American men, however, were still stuck in the mid-Fifties, leading to endless tired jokes by US reporters and comedians about long hair – and, just a few days later, to a row when nail scissors snipped away at Ringo’s locks at a British Embassy reception in Washington. Characteristically John Lennon walked out.
As it turned out, that was the only disagreeable moment of the trip. As over 74 million Americans watched the Beatles US television debut on the nationwide Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday, February 9, (around 40 per cent of the entire US population then), America simply fell at the Beatles feet and kept on falling.
And this weekend as Apple Records releases a new 13 CD collection of all the Beatles US albums, CBS will broadcast, fifty years to the hour since that show, a two hour memory of the Beatles triumph under the title The Night That Changed America.
In some ways it probably did. But it also changed aspects of Britain. Growing up here we’d always looked west for the next big thing. Now American youth was looking east to us. It’s been suggested that the excitement of the US welcome may have been the result of young America coming out of mourning and needing to release built-up tensions, following the national trauma after the murder of President Kennedy the previous November 22. And there’s probably something in that.
But there is never one explanation for anything. Perhaps of equal importance in the speed of the Beatles’ US walkover victory was an unintended result of Capitol Records’ initial lack of interest. Because no sooner had I Want To Hold Your Hand reached number one, than the little labels to whom Capitol had leased the Beatles first hits began to cash in on their good fortune, by quickly re-releasing the records to which they had the rights.
By the beginning of April the only competition the group had in America was themselves, with the top five positions in the US charts all being Beatle records. It was unprecedented. A week later they had fourteen singles in the top hundred. Even Elvis at his peak had never had more than nine.
No marketing manager would have planned it that way, the general rule being that no new single was released until sales of the current hit were fading. But this accidental coast to coast blanketing of America with terrific Beatles records did in one week what had taken a year to achieve in Britain.
There was, however, yet another factor. The Beatles weren’t just lucky in their timing, and witty and disarming. They were also brilliant. Reared on American rock and roll, they were now redefining it, seeing it through a British prism. And all of a sudden American guitar groups began to sound old fashioned and uninspired.
After an astonishing two weeks in New York, Washington and Miami, the Beatles arrived back on British soil one Saturday morning, an occasion so important that the late David Coleman, the Grandstand presenter, was sent off to Heathrow to welcome them home live on TV.
In those days only the Queen, the FA Cup and Test cricket were honoured with live coverage. The Beatles were that big. And as I watched on TV their emergence at Heathrow through the now customary mob of excitement, it was, I thought, like seeing old friends again, so familiar had they become.
Those two weeks had been a turning point in their careers. From then on they became a lasting global attraction, to the extent that half a century later they are probably remembered more fondly in the US than in the UK.
But it wasn’t just the Beatles who were to profit from their foray across the Atlantic. They’d opened the way, and quickly other British groups and singers followed in what became known as the British invasion. By the summer of 1964 the Rolling Stones were on tour and recording there.
While the Beatles had charmed all age groups, the Stones did the exact opposite, refusing to wear natty little uniforms when they went on TV (even when they were given money to go and buy them), and quite openly taking a dim view of their host Dean Martin’s jokes about their appearance. Good for them. He was drunk and rude.
As songwriters, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards weren’t as original as Lennon and McCartney, but with much of their early repertoire based on the songs of Chuck Berry and blues stars like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, they were introducing white American youth to the music of black America. They, too, were a great band, and hysteria followed wherever they played as well, vanquishing for ever America’s view of staid old Britain.
The British charts had up to then always been two thirds filled by American artists, but soon the reverse was true, with Dusty Springfield, and the Beatles’ old Cavern Club pal Gerry Marsden having hits in the American charts, while the Animals beat all the other covers of House Of The Rising Sun to number one there.
Then in May 1965 the entire American top five records were by British stars other than the Beatles – Herman’s Hermits, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Petula Clark, Freddie and the Dreamers and the Seekers – not that we were quite as proud of some of their efforts.
Nor was it only in music that British talent was excelling. The first James Bond film, Dr No, had been premiered on the day the Beatles released Love Me Do, and, as the Beatles repainted the image of Britain from a dull place of post war austerity to the most exciting colourful place in the world, so, too, did the Bond movies.
Then there was Alfie, Darling, Lionel Bart’s Oliver and David Lean’s Dr Zhivago, all big British films in America, as well as the Beatles’ own movies A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Even some of our television programmes, such as The Avengers, The Prisoner, David Frost and later Monty Python’s Flying Circus found American followings.
It’s sometimes seemed to me that in terms of popular culture we in Britain started the Sixties on the outer edge of the world. By the end of that decade we were at its very centre.
No matter what your views of the Beatles’ music are, one thing is certain, that trip to American fifty years ago, changed attitudes. Not only did the world in general, and America in particular, cease to think of us as old fashioned and having to pedal hard to keep up with the times, it showed us to be ahead of the times.
Suddenly it was cool to be British. And, +to be young, well, as the poet said, it was very heaven.
