IT WAS SIXTY YEARS AGO TODAY: The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, 60 years later: “Life went from black and white to color.”
The most culturally significant musical performance on television of all time, February 9, 1964 pic.twitter.com/pL7P0joWvn
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 9, 2024
How radically did the Beatles change the zietgiest? This radically:
Here’s one weird anomaly to start with — the article [inside the February 24th, 1964 issue of Newsweek with the Fab Four on the cover] about the four musicians we know as John, Paul, George and Ringo is called “George, Paul, Ringo and John.” Go figure. And, boy, did Newsweek just not get it. They started that article like this:
“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.”
It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? The Beatles generation became so mainstream that nobody can imagine that people felt that way, but Newsweek wasn’t just being stuffy, they were representing the overwhelming feelings of the vast majority of people over, say, twenty.
Indeed; my dad, whose teenage years and early 20s was spent listening to big bands, Crosby and Sinatra expressed similar views of the Beatles long into the ’70s. Others who had the same take in 1964 include:
Los Angeles Times
Feb. 11, 1964
With their bizarre shrubbery, the Beatles are obviously a press agent’s dream combo. Not even their mothers would claim that they sing well. But the hirsute thickets they affect make them rememberable, and they project a certain kittenish charm which drives the immature, shall we say, ape.
William F. Buckley Jr.
Boston Globe
Sept. 13, 1964
An estimable critic writing for National Review, after seeing Presley writhe his way through one of Ed Sullivan’s shows … suggested that future entertainers would have to wrestle with live octopuses in order to entertain a mass American audience. The Beatles don’t in fact do this, but how one wishes they did! And how this one wishes the octopus would win….
The Beatles are not merely awful; I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are god awful. They are so unbelievably horribly, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as “anti-popes.”
Not surprisingly, Newsweek predicted little future for the group after their Sullivan appearance:
“The big question in the music business at the moment is: will the Beatles last? The odds are that, in the words of another era, they’re too hot not to cool down, and a cooled-down Beatle is hard to picture. It is also hard to imagine any other field in which they could apply their talents, and so the odds are that they will fade away, as most adults confidently predict.”
Flash-forward to last November: ‘Now and Then:’ How the Beatles Created Magic on Their New ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ Albums, Via a Little MAL-ware.