How the Beatles Went Viral in '64 (4 page)

“It’s a Nakashuma/It’s the Mark 4 model - that’s the one that’s discontinued/And it comes with a leatherette case with holes in it so you can listen right through the case/And it has a wire with a thing on one end that you can stick in your ear”

The transistor radio was the technological spark that lit the fuse of teen culture in the 60s. It enabled both public and private listening behaviors in a combination equaled by neither prior nor subsequent technologies. Public, because you could take it anywhere and share music with your friends in the schoolyard, on the beach, wherever, in an unprecedented fashion. Private, because you could listen through an earplug as you walked down the street, or sat in the back of the class, or lay in your bed at night, under the covers, so your parents wouldn’t know.

Prior radios had neither portability nor the earplug; subsequent technologies—boomboxes, walkmen, iPods—enhanced the public or private listening experience, but not both. The Maysles’ film documentary about the Beatles’ first US visit shows the band members taking their Pepsi-branded transistor radio everywhere, listening both collectively and on earplugs to Top 40 stations. The Beatles even had what we’d today call a “meta” moment, doing a face-to-face interview with a DJ in their hotel suite while simultaneously listening to that same interview being broadcast live on their transistor radio.

So imagine if you will teenagers across America, turning on their brand new transistor radios during Christmas vacation, 1963; listening for hours at a time, everywhere, alone and with their friends; and hearing—over and over again—a new sound that excited them even more than their new piece of hardware.

Within its first three days of release, “I Want To hold Your Hand” sold 250,000 copies, certainly more than any other single over that same period, and the Beatles were immediately the most talked about group in the country. DJs were quick to inform their listeners that the band would be coming to America in February, heightening the sense of excitement. “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was the floor-filler of choice at countless New Year’s Eve parties as teens ushered in 1964.

The youth were instantly smitten, and the backlash from adults was just as immediate. On December 29th, the Baltimore Sun, dreading a replication of Beatlemania on these shores, summed up the grown-up position by editorializing: “America had better take thought as to how it will deal with the invasion…Indeed a restrained ‘Beatles go home’ might be just the thing.” “They look like four of the Three Stooges with a hairy measure of Ish Kabibble,” quipped Donald Freeman in the Chicago Tribune, referencing some of the most unkempt performers of the 1940s. “And if they ever submitted to a barber who loves music-snip, snip!-that would be the end of the act.”

The condescension emanating from adults was just one more reason for teens to love the Beatles.
This annoys the grownups! It’s something that’s ours, that’s not part of the whole messed-up adult world.
The kids were taking matters into their own hands, climbing out of the doldrums in which adult society was still mired. Capitol Records understood the value of adult condemnation in whipping up teen frenzy, and duly noted the Baltimore Sun comments in its own press release.

Of course, in those days, it was no surprise that adult media was completely dismissive of rock and roll. Rock was still, to quote Ed Sullivan’s typical on-air introductions of rock acts, “for the kiddies.” By high school graduation, youth were expected to shed rock and roll and become interested in folk, jazz or other “adult” musical forms. The only time the mainstream press covered pop music was when a phenomenon emerged, like Elvis or the Twist. Then, the serious papers and magazines would duly take notice, solemnly shaking their heads and wondering what had gotten into the youth of today, never conceding any artistic value to the music. That would all change a year or so later, when the Beatles’ music influenced Bob Dylan to marry his folk lyrics to a variation on the rock and roll he’d grown up with and rock suddenly became accepted as art. But in early 1964, such major pop acts as The Four Seasons, Little Stevie Wonder or the Drifters had never earned so much as a mention in the New York Times.

And so, the sudden rise of the Beatles naturally caused nearly all the adult pundits to cover their ears and complain. Perhaps the first to break rank and suggest that the Beatles might have some substance was Lawrence Malkin of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote on December 29th, “In this fad for singers there seems to be something different about it, and about them….They give the fans something to identify with.” But by and large, the press were Beatles haters.

The king of the haters turned out to be NBC TV host Jack Paar. And by his attempt to mock the group on his Friday night variety show on January 3rd, 1964, he managed to send Beatlemania into an even higher orbit. Paar had been in attendance at the Royal Variety Show in November and thought the hulabaloo over the Beatles was ridiculous. Like so many adults, he found rock and roll to be juvenile and had never booked a rock act on his show. Still, once his rival Ed Sullivan announced the band’s February appearances, Paar decided to scoop him. He licensed Beatles performance footage from the BBC, and issued a press release announcing that he’d be the first to present the band. This actually caused Sullivan to consider canceling the Beatles’ appearance on his show, although he quickly thought better of dumping the by-now hot act. Top 40 DJs throughout the country breathlessly conveyed the news to their listeners that the Beatles—who had never been seen by most of their already obsessed fans, except in the photo on their single sleeve —would be making their TV debut on the Jack Paar Show.

The Jack Paar appearance, when it is remembered at all, is generally considered a footnote to the Beatles’ story. NBC doesn’t brag about the appearance, in that Paar turned out to be on the wrong side of history, with Paar himself admitting he showed the Beatles “as a joke.” But outside of radio airplay, the taped performance on the Jack Paar Show on Friday, January 3rd was the single most important event leading to the frenzy surrounding the Ed Sullivan Show appearance the following month. As George Martin commented to Variety in May of 1964, it was Jack Paar who deserves credit as the one who “aroused the kids’ curiosity.”

Paar’s program, which aired at 10pm, drew an average of 17 million viewers weekly, mostly an older crowd. But with the Beatles set to appear, the viewership swelled that week to 30 million. Let’s put these numbers in perspective: Paar’s show typically was not among the Top 30 shows in the country; the January 3rd show had a viewership almost as large as the week’s number one show, which drew 34 million viewers. It’s safe to assume that the 13 million additional viewers were tuning in to see the Beatles; curiosity about the band by January 3rd had already reached an overwhelming level.

The show’s Beatles segment started with footage of fan hysteria at a UK Beatles show, with Paar’s mocking interjections—“I understand science is working on a cure for this”—eliciting laughter from his studio audience. Then, as promised, he presented the first full-song performance by the Beatles on American TV. The song was not the current Capitol single, but rather “She Loves You”—the same song that had enchanted Marsha Albert—and it was an in-studio performance shot for a BBC documentary. Paar’s staff intercut this performance with footage of fans screaming, taken from the Bournemouth show. Just a week after “I Want To Hold Your Hand” exploded into the marketplace, millions were now encountering “She Loves You”—and with visuals, to boot. For the Beatles’ new American fans, the Paar performance was a revelation.

It was also a revelation for Swan Records. According to label president Bernie Binnick, “The record exploded (in sales) the following Monday,” and Swan rushed a proper re-release. If “I Want To Hold Your Hand” took off in the marketplace solely based on radio play, Swan’s re-release of “She Loves You” had the advantage of an incredible—if unplanned—set-up: the TV performance on Jack Paar turned the song into an instant hit, rivaling “I Want To Hold Your Hand” as the most played song in the country almost immediately.

Capitol Records was not amused, as the Paar broadcast brought to market a Beatles song on a rival label. In a press release on January 20th, Capitol condescendingly referred to the Paar performance as “an obvious attempt to scoop arch-foe Ed Sullivan.” The rollout of Beatlemania had never really been under Capitol’s control, but this development ensured it never would be.

As it turned out, Capitol’s having passed on the Beatles’ numerous early singles served to make the initial wave of Beatlemania far more intense than it would have been had the band been rolled out in an orderly fashion by Capitol, one single at a time. On the same day as the Paar broadcast, Vee-Jay re-released “Please Please Me” and “From Me To You” as a double-sided single, with both songs immediately making their presence felt on the airwaves. Having four Beatles singles in heavy rotation on the radio all at once in January 1964 made the band’s impact on audiences exponentially more powerful. It was the Beatles with whom teens fell in love, not just a Beatles single. (By spring, three more Beatles songs licensed to Vee-Jay—“Twist And Shout,” “Love Me Do” and “Do You Want To Know a Secret”—would join the others on the radio, by which time Capitol finally released its official second single, “Can’t Buy Me Love.”)

A week after Paar, Vee-Jay also released the first US Beatles album, “Introducing…The Beatles,” which was originally intended for release in the summer of ’63, but had been shelved in the wake of the label’s financial crisis. Capitol responded to the Vee-Jay releases by obtaining an injunction against the indie, claiming that Vee-Jay had lost rights to these Beatles masters when their license was revoked. The injunction kept the 45 and LP out of stores, but could not keep DJs from playing the songs on the air. A court ruled in Vee-Jay’s favor on February 5th, at which point they were able to get their releases back into the market, with the radio promo single for “Please Please Me”/”From Me To You” now sporting a special sleeve highlighting the Beatles’ appearance on Jack Paar’s show, their upcoming
Ed Sullivan Show
performances, and all the national press coverage.

As a result of the delay caused by the injunction, both “Please Please Me” and “From Me To You” were already huge radio hits by the time they finally debuted on the Hot 100 in early February. “Please Please Me” would eventually peak at #3, trailing only “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” on the chart.

By the time Vee-Jay were able to get “Introducing….The Beatles” back on the store shelves, Capitol was already in stores with “Meet The Beatles!” which they released on January 20th. Thus, within a three and a half week period, the market was deluged with three singles featuring four bona fide hit songs, and two LPs. “Introducing…The Beatles” quickly rose to number 2 on the album chart, behind only “Meet The Beatles!” which had already sold over 500,000 copies by the time the Vee-Jay album returned to the market.

It is clear that virtually upon its release on December 26th, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was the biggest selling single in the country, but chart lag time kept this fact from being reflected in Billboard and Cashbox for several weeks. Cashbox listed it at number one its January 24th chart, reflecting actual sales for the week of January 5th to 11th. This was the first week since the release of the single not interrupted by a holiday, and for which full data was reported and processed. (Billboard listed it atop the Hot 100 the following week.) Back then, publications like Billboard and Cashbox were strictly for the trade, and consumers were not generally exposed to their chart rankings. Teens were more familiar with the countdown on American Bandstand than the Billboard Hot 100. However, just five days before the Capitol single was released, American Bandstand stopped broadcasting from Philadelphia, and the show went on hiatus until February of 1964, when it began originating from Los Angeles. By the time the show resumed, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was already in the midst of its stay at number one. Therefore, the only way teens were able to follow the rise of the record was on their local radio station charts. By the first week of January, WABC New York listed the song at number one, the first station to do so. (WABC had a nighttime reach that covered much of the county, helping the record to spread like wildfire.) The following week, it debuted at #1 on KRLA and the week after that it did the same at rival LA station KFWB.

The pace of the chart rise at any given station had more to do with chart methodology than the song’s actual popularity in the marketplace. Basically, stations placed the song at number one as soon as they figured out that it had defied all precedent and was already the most popular song in the market.

The instant ubiquity of an unknown band, who’d collectively never set foot in this country, defies all accepted precedent of how phenomena spread. In the UK, the band had toured incessantly, playing live in 34 cities in the fall of ’63 alone; released numerous singles; hosted their own weekly radio show; and appeared numerous times on TV, all before Beatlemania erupted. In America, they reached the same heights immediately upon the official release of the first Capitol single.

Pop histories have often suggested that the Beatles were so instantly welcomed by US consumers because they brought rock and roll back to the radio after a period of several years during which it had been rendered toothless by a combination of the payola scandal and the loss of many of its major stars (to death, the draft, incarceration, etc.), but this isn’t quite true. Of course, the Beatles’ sound was fresh, but it’s not as though there was no other rock and roll on the radio for teens to sink their teeth into. The Beach Boys had already begun to rack up the hits and at that very moment, “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen—a record that would have sounded at home on the first Rolling Stones album a few months later—was in the midst of a six-week run in the number two position on the Billboard chart, while on Cashbox it would reach number one, dethroned by “I Want To Hold Your Hand.”