Beatle Mania!
SHORTLY AFTER 8 P.M. ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9th, 1964, a short, stiff man with rubbery bloodhound features — Ed Sullivan, the host of the highest-rated variety hour on American television — addressed his New York studio audience and the folks tuned in at home over the CBS network.
“Yesterday and today, our theater’s been jammed with newspapermen and hundreds of photographers from all over the nation,” Sullivan said in a nasally chuckling voice. “And these veterans agreed with me that the city never has witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool.” He droned on for a few more seconds. Then the sixty-two-year-old Sullivan uttered the nine most important words in the history of rock & roll TV:
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles! Let’s bring them on!”
No one in Studio 50, the 728-seat home of The Ed Sullivan Show, at 53rd Street and Broadway, heard anything else for the next eight minutes, excepat a monsoon of teenage-female screaming. The Beatles — guitarist John Lennon, 23; bass guitarist Paul McCartney, 21; drummer Ringo Starr, 23; and lead guitarist George Harrison, two weeks shy of twenty-one — opened their U.S. debut performance with a machine-gun bouquet of twin-guitar clang and jubilant vocal harmonies: “All My Loving,” “Till There Was You” and “She Loves You.” Forty minutes later — after songs and routines by Frank Gorshin, British music-hall star Tessie O’Shea and the Broadway cast of Oliver! — the Beatles returned to tear through both sides of their first U.S. Number One single, “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
“But you could not hear them playing anything,” says John Moffitt, associate director of The Ed Sullivan Show, who was vainly calling out cues to the cameramen shooting the band. “The noise was incredible. Nobody could hear a thing except the kids in the audience, screaming. They overpowered the amplifiers. The cameramen couldn’t hear. Even the kids couldn’t hear anything, except each other screaming.”
Production assistant Vince Calandra had been a cue-card boy for Sullivan back in 1957, when Elvis Presley made the last of his three appearances on the show. “The reaction from the kids then,” Calandra claims, “was nothing close to what it was for the Beatles. I remember the producer, Bob Precht, who was an audio freak, just going, ‘Jesus Christ!'” “
It was deafening,” says Harrison’s older sister Louise, now seventy-two, who sat in the seventh row, surrounded by shrieking. Lennon’s then-wife, Cynthia, stood at the back of the studio, stunned by the reaction. “They’re more enthusiastic here than at home,” she raved to Beatles roadie Mai Evans.
Lennon himself couldn’t believe the din and devotion, even after playing to hysterical crowds and being chased by ecstatic mobs in Britain throughout 1963. “They’re wild, they’re all wild,” he said of the Americans. “They just all seem out of their minds. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”
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