The following is an excerpt from pages 139-142 of The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 (The Beginning of the "Sixties), by Jon Margolis (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1999).
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Thanks to his engaging manner, his eagerness to please, and his velvety voice, radio host William B. Williams was master of most that he surveyed. He was the host of The Make-Believe Ballroom, the radio program created by Martin Block, the one-time shoe salesman who had become the world's first disc jockey.
That position made William B., as he called himself, first among equals of the disc jockey world. His program on WNEW, 1130 on the AM dial, could be heard all over the New York area, but its impact spread farther. William B. was unique among DJs because he didn't just spin platters. His show was so popular that the stars actually came into the studio to chat with him. Frank Sinatra came--later on Williams was the guy who first called Sinatra "Chairman of the Board"--and so did Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, and even Louis Armstrong.
William B. would never have invited the Beatles. He referred to "I Want to Hold Your Hand" as "I Want to Hold My Nose" and played only a few bars of it before telling his engineer to switch over to some real music. Other disc jockeys, who were less restrained and sophisticated, were shamelessly promoting themselves and their stations as the most Beatle-crazy in anticipation of the group's imminent first visit to the United States. This wasn't William B.'s style. He promoted himself--calling himself "William B." was part of the promotion--but he did it quietly. His vanity, like his music, was tasteful, and although he knew enough to cozy up to whichever entertainer was hot at the moment, he would never slavishly link his entire persona to one singer, or even four of them.
On the other extreme, Murray Kaufman had no such inhibitions. He labeled himself "Murray the K," a hot rod sort of a nickname. His show on WINS, 1010 on the dial, was "Murry the K and his Swinging Soiree," and he had glommed on to the Beatles fad quicker than anyone, promoting himself as their biggest fan, their biggest booster, even--audacious as it was--"the fifth Beatle." That was the new way of doing things.
By then, even Jack Gould might have been wondering whether this British rock group had more staying power than he thought. It wasn't just that the first two single releases of the Beatles--"I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "I Saw Her Standing There"--immediately sold more than a million records and had been number one all over the country for almost a month. Nor was it simply that teenage girls sat enraptured next to radio or record player as the songs played, It was that the teenage boys were sitting there, too, and if the look in their eyes was not quite the same, it was nonetheless the look of an addiction.
It got even worse when American boys started trying to look like the Beatles. The barber business suffered throughout much of the country as teenage boys began to let their hair grow, the better to look like John, Paul, George or Ringo. Family harmony suffered, too. In thousands of living rooms, kitchens and dens, parents pleaded, urged, cajoled,, bribed, and finally commanded their sons to get a haircut.
Most complied because they didn't have much choice. In 1964, fifteen-year-olds did as they were told... or else. But compliance was only scalp-deep; beneath millions of skulls, a rebellion brewed. Not that there was anything new about rebellious, long-haired youths. That's who the Students for a Democratic Society was composed of, as well as the group of University of Wisconsin students who sponsored an "unmilitary ball" to compete with the annual dance of the Reserve Officers Training Corps chapter. "Swords optional" was the motto of the rebels, who seemed to be having some impact. All over the country, ROTC enrollment was down.
The kids who were trying to look like the Beatles weren't longhairs. They weren't even in college. Most of them were high school students who weren't active in politics. The few teenagers who belonged to political groups were more likely to be folk song fans, their group was the Weavers, not the Beatles. The Beatles fans were white middle-class suburbanites.
Some of this "Beatlemania," as it was already known, sprang from teenage boys who were trying to make themselves attractive to teenage girls. But that explained only part of it. The Beatles had tapped into something, and if nobody was quite sure what it was, a great many people were sure that they didn't like it.Even at the beginning, there was the sense that this wasn't just a fad. It was an uprising. It was as though millions of well-bred. well-groomed suburban teenagers were rejecting, implicitly but unmistakably, everything their parents held dear.
Some of these parents reacted. Anti-Beatles groups sprang up around the country. One, in Detroit, asserted that its purpose was to "stamp out the Beatles." The more popular the group got with the teenage set--four of February's top hits were Beatles tunes--the more upset their elders got.
Even so, there weren't very many of these ant-Beatles organizations, and they weren't very big.Furthermore, they were moderate compared to the parents who had tried to ban performances or broadcasts of "Louie, Louie." Nobody was trying to get a law passed against the Beatles.
But it was definitely an unprecedented phenomenon. Older folks had ridiculed the early "bobby-soxers" who swooned over Sinatra in the 1940s, and more than a few observers feared the raw sexuality of Elvis Presley's country rock songs in the 1950s. But organizing in opposition to a few pop singers was bizarre, as though people thought differences in taste were political.
It turned out that they were. The fervor gripping so many teenagers over the Beatles did have social, and therefore political, ramifications, though exactly what they were did not become clear until the Beatles actually got here. And they got here to pandemonium. When Pan American Flight 101 landed at the recently renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport on the morning of Friday, February 7, Paul, George, John and Ringo were greeted by several thousand school-skipping teenagers and scores of reporters and disk jockeys.
Murray the K was the most successful, or the most shameless. Somehow he managed to get right down in front of the low platform where the singers stood. He was wearing a crumpled porkpie hat. He shouted questions, talking to the Beatles, who'd never seen him before, as though he were an old buddy.
Finally, John Lennon shouted, "Everybody shut up!" and the questioning began:
REPORTER: Why do you sing like Americans but speak with an English accent?
LENNON: It sells better.
REPORTER: Are you in favor of lunacy?
MCCARTNEY: It's healthy.
REPORTER: Do you ever have haircuts?
HARRISON: I had one yesterday.
STARR: It's no lie; you should have seen him the day before.
REPORTER: How do you account for your great success?
LENNON: If we knew, we'd form another group and be managers.
REPORTER: How about the Detroit campaign to stamp out the Beatles?
MCCARTNEY: First of all, we have a campaign of our own to stamp out Detroit.
Poor William B. It must have been the fondest hope of all the Beatle-phobics that the singers would reveal themselves as semiliterate dunderheads, easily dismissed as beneficiaries of a shrewd publicity campaign. They were that, but they were also witty and irreverent. These four young men represented an affront to authority, which was all the more dangerous because it seemed so benign. They were mildly iconoclastic without being contentious, so suburban teenagers who didn't give a hoot about politics could express the unease they felt about school, neighborhood, and parental control simply through their taste in music.
As if to rub in the undeniable reality of Beatlemania, on Sunday, February 9, two days after the Beatles arrived, 73 million people watched them open and close The Ed Sullivan Show. World Series games and the Kennedy funeral had attracted more viewers, but this was the biggest audience for any entertainment program.
Just how many people found all this upsetting was never very clear. Even at the time, some observers found it easy to ridicule grown men and women who let themselves be bothered by nothing but the popularity of a few young singers. But it was more than that. The Beatles phenomenon did not occur in a vacuum. To the traditional-minded, the late winter and early spring of 1964 were full of vexing events in politics, entertainment, the arts, and even sports.
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I was recently in a staffing at EMHC, when I mentioned this sixtieth anniversary of the Beatles' arrival in the U.S. and the Ed Sullivan Show performance. A social worker whom I've known for some years remarked that she had really, really loved the Beatles. It occurred to me that this woman is probably about my age, and I imagined her being among the screaming teenagers in that audience on February 9, 1964.
I remember my mother showing me a picture of the Beatles in the paper, perhaps trying to test out my adolescent reaction. I had never heard of the Beatles before that moment. But I looked at the picture and read the article, thinking to myself that somehow my mom was a little too interested. I was suspicious of her purpose for inquiring, for observing me like some kind of specimen, or like she was thinking something about me that she wasn't saying.
Of course, it was no more than a few weeks later, when I and every kid my age were singing four different Beatles songs constantly. Our parents' skeptical inquiries were futile; ultimately we converted them to our tastes, maybe sometime after Sergeant Pepper... in what had so quickly become an entirely different world.
My children have said they are occasionally jealous of their parents, because we lived in such an exciting time, and nothing as big as the Beatles ever happened during their youth. Yah, fine, we could have said the same thing to our parents, they of the so-called Greatest Generation (nothing as big as WW-II..?). Every generation has its stories, and each is as great as its dreams. The stories are told by musicians and the dreams are dreamed mostly by artists.
Surely, the dreams of generations are not dreamed by forensic psychiatrists or psychiatric plantation overseers. They're the kind of people who get converted to the dreams of others, that's their upside.
If my social worker friend remembers once being a screaming teenage fan, she can probably still get a more honest job.
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