How the Beatles Went Viral in '64 (5 page)

So how is it that the Beatles were able to start at the very top? The incredible phenomenon of British Beatlemania, covered obsessively by the American media, caused Beatlemania to hit America like a tsunami, already humongous by the time it rolled ashore here. American Beatlemania was merely a continuation of the British variety, with the band not being required to start again from the bottom. As McAndlish Phillips wrote in the NY Times, America simply “heaped tinder on the enormous bonfire they have lit in Britain.”

As the Beatles’ February 7th U.S. arrival date approached, TV & print coverage of the band intensified. Ed Sullivan had already started hyping on-air the Beatles’ upcoming appearance in mid-January, right after the Jack Paar performance aired. Late night talk show hosts were regularly peppering their monologues with Beatles jokes. And Life Magazine, which reached up to 40 million readers a week, ran a 7-page photo-filled essay in their January 31st issue entitled “Here Come Those Beatles,” which reported, “First England fell, victim of a million girlish screams. Then, last week, Paris surrendered. Now the U.S. must brace itself. The Beatles are coming….”

The country had found the diversion it desperately needed, post-JFK. As one baby boomer, writing decades later on a Beatles internet message board, recalled: “Thanksgiving and even Christmas, that year, were very somber occasions. No one laughed or even smiled very much. It was very “Twilight Zone”-ish… OK—jump ahead a few weeks. I swear the entire population of the world was talking about The Beatles! It was the “grown-ups” that were doing all the talking! It was as if someone had come in and flipped the light switch! People were smiling again! Some because they really liked the “new sound"—others because they had something weird to criticize and make fun of —and get their minds off the big, black cloud that hung over America for far too long!”

Understanding that this was perhaps the biggest pop phenomenon ever, radio stations tripped over one another in order not to be left behind—everyone wanted to be the station listeners most associated with the group. As a way of allowing stations access of a sort to the band, Capitol Records in late January distributed discs featuring a pre-recorded interview with the Beatles to radio stations. The discs contained no questions; only the Beatles’ answers were recorded, allowing local DJs in cities large and small to pretend they were conducting their own interviews with the band. Searching for more Beatles records to play, stations turned to the flip side of “I Want to Hold Your Hand”—“I Saw Her Standing There,”—and the flip sides of the Vee-Jay and Swan singles, as well.

While the Beatles singles initially appealed to teenage girls, it was a matter of mere weeks before the boys signed on as fans as well. “Originally every female went ga-ga and every guy got shut out,” recalled New York Top 40 DJ Scott Muni. “They were like four teddy bears who didn’t look like other guys. To coexist with Beatlemania, the guys figured out they had better know something about the music, and they started to dress, talk and act like the Beatles.”

So widespread was the demand for Beatles music that WYNR Chicago, which had recently abandoned pop for an R&B format, decided to make an exception and add Beatles records to its playlist. Other R&B stations and some middle of the road (MOR) stations began doing the same.

Even the Beatles haters felt the need to acknowledge the band: DJ William B. Williams of New York’s MOR station WNEW, for instance, would introduce the song as “I Want To Hold My Nose” and play just a few seconds of it before tearing the needle off the record. No doubt about it, the Beatles stood at the white-hot center of the culture. By the end of January, they had already sold 2.6 million records. And then things really took off.

In the days leading up to the Beatles’ visit, New York radio stations in particular battled to be the home for teens who wanted the most up to the minute information on the Beatles’ imminent arrival at the newly renamed John F. Kennedy Airport. Regular updates on the Beatles’ flight from London were broadcast on each of the city’s three Top 40 stations, with promises that correspondents from each would be on the tarmac to greet the Fab Four and provide live coverage. Capitol Records made sure to provide specific information to the DJs in advance, with scheduled arrival time and gate number, in order to insure that fans wanting to greet the band would know where to go. In those pre-airport security days, it was no wonder that fans began to flock to JFK as the Pan Am jet drew closer to the eastern seaboard.

In addition, Seltaeb, the company that held the Beatles’ US merchandising rights (its name was Beatles spelled backwards), encouraged the stations to hype the arrival by letting them know that fans who went to JFK would get free Beatles T-shirts. It is unclear how many shirts were actually distributed, but in any case it is doubtful that mere T-shirts were the inducement for teens to head to remote JFK airport on a school day.

At about 1:20 p.m. on February 7th the Beatles arrived at Kennedy Airport on Pan Am flight 101, greeted by the high-pitched squeals of approximately 4,000 teenagers, plus over 200 reporters and photographers, and 100 police officers. The crowd was larger and louder than that which Ed Sullivan had chanced upon three months earlier at London Airport. At the famous press conference conducted inside the airport, the Beatles proceeded to show the charisma and wit which had won over the British press four months earlier. Defying the low expectations which journalists had of rock and rollers in that era, the Beatles wowed the skeptical crowd. If anything, it was the reporters who appeared to be the dullards, asking banal questions—“What do you think of Beethoven?”— which the Beatles fielded with their patented cheekiness—“Great,” responded Ringo. “Especially his poems.”

The press conference done, the band headed to Manhattan, chased by rabid fans shouting at them from the windows of their moving cars on the expressway. Upon arriving at the Plaza Hotel, they found thousands more fans waiting for them, once more tipped off to the band’s whereabouts by radio DJs who’d gotten their information straight from Capitol. The fans remained throughout the visit, and any rumor of the Beatles’ comings or goings would lead the swarm to rush, en masse, down the street, around the block or wherever it was they believed the band was about to emerge.

The arrival of the Beatles received major coverage on that evening’s news shows. Walter Cronkite’s report on CBS was awe-struck, showing much more respect than his program had the first time around. “The British invasion this time goes by the code name Beatlemania,” Cronkite intoned. “D-Day has been common knowledge for months, and this was the day.” Whether because he felt invested in the band due to his role in bringing them to America’s attention, or because the band were about to appear on Ed Sullivan’s CBS show, Cronkite was now a believer.

In stark contrast was the coverage afforded the Beatles on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. By this point, NBC had de facto positioned itself as the anti-Beatles network, and in the spirit of the November Edwin Newman piece and the January Paar broadcast, Huntley went out of his way to be demeaning to the group. He explained to his viewers that NBC had “sent three camera crews to stand among the shrieking youngsters and record the sights and sounds for posterity…the pictures are very good, but someone asked what the fuss was about and we found we couldn’t answer. So, good night from NBC News.” The broadcast ended without Huntley bothering to show any of their footage. Perhaps it was NBC not wanting to promote the Sullivan show on arch-rival CBS, although there was a pretty high firewall between network news and entertainment divisions back then.

The next day, every newspaper covered the Beatles’ arrival. During the course of their visit, the New York Times printed at least one article about the band every day. The New York Daily News, then the newspaper with the largest daily circulation in America, ran enough photos of the band throughout their visit to cover the bedroom walls of countless girls, top to bottom. A visit by President Johnson to the city, just wrapping up, was relegated to the newspaper’s inside pages.

Throughout their historic JFK press conference, the Beatles had been peppered with private questions by a strange man in a straw hat, who had squirreled his way to the front of the crowd, sticking his own microphone up to the band at the podium. The man in question wasn’t a journalist at all, but rather DJ Murray the K (nee Kaufman) of New York radio station WINS. Murray managed to hijack the band’s attention, getting exclusive sound bites for his radio show. Finally, someone shouted out “Would somebody to tell Murray the K to cut the crap out?”, at which point the Beatles all looked down at him and yelled “Cut that crap out,” with Paul adding “Hey Murray!” in a fake New York accent, granting him the greatest sound bite of all. Thus was born Murray the K’s brief career as The Fifth Beatle.

It was something of a fluke that Murray the K was broadcasting on WINS at all in 1964. Having taken over as the station’s evening DJ four years earlier, replacing Allen Freed, who was fired in the wake of the payola scandal, Murray had known great success—Tom Wolfe called him “the original hysterical disc jockey” in a famous profile published after the Beatles’ visit—until the station was sold to Westinghouse in 1962. The new owners inched the station’s format away from Top 40, but were required to keep some of the old broadcasters on the air due to an existing labor contract. Murray’s popularity had fallen ever since, and by the time of the Beatles’ arrival his ratings lagged behind those of his rivals Jack Spector on WMCA and “Cousin Brucie” Morrow on WABC. He played a desperate hand by elbowing his way to the front of the airport press conference, but in doing so he had managed to do more than just get some exclusive sound bites; he also captured the band’s curiosity.

Luckily for Murray, he was close with Veronica Bennet of the Ronettes, a group he had regularly presented as part of his package shows at the Brooklyn Fox Theatre. The Ronettes had just returned from a January UK tour where they’d made the Beatles’ acquaintance. As soon as the press conference ended, Murray called Bennet (the future Ronnie Spector) and asked if she and the Ronettes would bring him over to the Plaza to meet the band. Bennet obliged Murray, who managed to exploit the situation to the fullest, becoming the Beatles’ unofficial guide to the U.S., getting endless exclusive interviews and in the process causing a general escalation of Beatles hype among the three Top 40 stations over the next few days.

Rival WMCA managed to spirit George’s sister Louise off to their station, where she was persuaded to call George in his sick bed at the Plaza for an exclusive on-air chat; WABC went so far as to rebrand itself WABeatleC. All three stations had DJS encamped by the Plaza, reporting on any Beatles sighting, and all three battled to see who could raise their audience’s excitement to the most fevered pitch. But it was Murray the K whose show became required listening for Beatles fans during the band’s New York visit, as a Beatle—or all of them—could appear on the air with Murray at any time. (Murray’s new found popularity was short-lived. After the Beatles returned to Britain, he lasted less than a year at WINS, before the station switched formats to become the nation’s first all-news station.)

Every media outlet in the country gave major coverage to the hysteria that was occurring in New York that weekend. And they all made clear that the reason for the band’s visit was their scheduled appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show that Sunday night. It became the most hyped variety show appearance in history. By Sunday, there was no one in America in close proximity to a television, radio or newspaper who could have NOT known that the Beatles were going to be on Ed Sullivan that night—and that it was all a very big deal, indeed.

On the day of the show, further pandemonium reigned in front of the Sullivan theatre, egged on by the local Top 40 DJs. The show had received 50,000 ticket applications for 728 tickets. Thousands mobbed the streets, shutting off Broadway for eight blocks, everyone carrying, as always, their transistor radios and reacting in unison to the prompts of the DJs. The mere mention of the name of one of the Beatles on WINS would cause the throng to let out a collective scream heard from river to river.

The Beatles were slated to perform 5 songs on that first Sullivan broadcast: “All My Loving,” “Till There Was You,” “She Loves You,” “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” Among the other announced guests on the program was the cast of the stage production of “Oliver!”, including future-Monkee Davy Jones as the Artful Dodger. Jones later recalled that it was the reaction given to the Beatles on Sullivan by the girls in the audience that made him decide to leave musical theatre and pursue a career in rock and roll.

Brian Epstein had envisioned the Beatles’ first US visit as a means by which the band could conquer America. But by the time of their arrival, America already lay at their feet. It is doubtful whether the intensity surrounding the band’s visit could have materialized had the chain of events begun by Walter Cronkite and running through Marsha Albert and Carroll James not occurred. Without all of that, the release date of “I Want To Hold your Hand” would have remained January 13th; radio listeners wouldn’t have heard the record incessantly over Christmas break; teens wouldn’t have tuned in to the Jack Paar Show to watch the band perform; Swan Records wouldn’t have rush re-released “She Loves You”; the airwaves wouldn’t have been jammed with multiple Beatles records in January; “I Want To Hold Your Hand” wouldn’t have been number one by the time of the band’s arrival; the media frenzy wouldn’t have reached a fevered pitch before February 7th; and the band would have arrived in NY to do the Ed Sullivan show without the airport scene, the press conference or the screaming fans at the Plaza. But it all had unfolded as if in a fairy tale, and when the evening of February 9th arrived, the Beatles had the attention of the entire country. Already, they were the first act ever with five songs appearing simultaneously on the Billboard Hot 100—and all of them were climbing up the chart. (The next week, when the Beatles played the Washington Coliseum, Marsha Albert got her own fairy tale ending to the story when she got to meet the band, who showed their appreciation by saying “Thank you, Marsha” on the air on WWDC. She also got the band’s autographs, as well as the original BOAC-delivered British copy of “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” which was a gift from James, who passed away in 1997.)