Ok. Here we go. The moment has finally come to talk about THE greatest band of all time, (and I say that not just because they are my favorite group of all time as well), The Beatles. So when thinking about how I wanted to tackle the momentous yet short career of the only band whos bubble never burst, I found myself in a tough place from a die-hard fan perspective. Do I want to dive into the intricacies of “A Day in the Life”? What about the one-day recording session whose fruits became their first album Please Please Me? There’s a lot to say about The Beatles, and a good place to start in my opinion is their early career and what shot them to the forefront of popular music. For my first post about The Beatles on this site, I wanted to talk more about their start in America since this is when they had finally hit it big on the world stage. The start of their major success and the moment that ignited the British invasion was the Beatles first performance on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Of course, many musicians perform on TV, but The Beatles were not just any band. This performance was the culmination of years of hard work and tough times which were finally paying off. Beyond that, the performance itself was a landmark in music history since The Beatles had done something no British band had ever done: cross the Atlantic.
The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show
The Ed Sullivan Show was a variety show which is a form of entertainment that is no longer commonplace. The closest thing to it today would be late night talk shows. The variety show aired once a week on CBS for a record-breaking 23 years from 1948-72. Due to the popularity of the show, it was a big deal to be presented among the week’s talent. Ed Sullivan was not the bubbly charismatic type, but he always got the best talent and got people who would balance out his mellow demeanor. As a result, he would see decades of success and his show would be cemented as one of the greats in television history. Among all of those decades of work though, one episode would easily become his most impactful and significant. That episode would be the one on February 9, 1964. The lineup this week included a new and intriguing foreign group, The Beatles.
One thing important to note is that The Beatles were known to some degree in America before they got here. They had albums released and they were beloved by many. This intrigue produced a record-breaking view count of roughly 73 million screens. This record-breaking and “revolutionary” performance was nothing glamorous, but for John, Paul, George, and Ringo, this was the beginning of one hell of a career. The full video of their first performance is shown below and features their songs All My Loving, Till There Was You, and She Loves You on their first set and then they came back later in the show and did I Saw Her Standing There and I Want to Hold Your Hand. As stated in the video, they would go on to perform on the show the next two weekends, all with incredible ratings.
So what made The Beatles so special at this point in their career? Well, that is a question that has ponders so many for a very long time. Was it their charm? Their talent? Their accents? Honestly, if anyone knew there would have been more people copying, but there is merit to all of these ideas. The Beatles were the total package. They had it all. Men loved them, women loved them, they were charming, clever, generally good looking and they were foreign. They were not doing anything revolutionary at this point but they did not have to since they were perfectly checking all of the desired boxes. I think my favorite way I have ever heard this explained was that most bands of the time had one clear frontman, The Beatles had four members that could have been the frontman of their own group but they decided to work together. Once they had their footing and could take hold of their production, they were unstoppable.
The Beatles’ Early Careers
From here though, I see the need to take a step back and explain how they got their start. By the time The Beatles hit America, they had already been playing together to some capacity for over six years. John was the original member of the band (which was then a Skiffle group called the Quarrymen) and he would meet Paul McCartney early on at a gig in a church. He was a talented musician so John had him join. Then they needed a more skilled guitarist and Paul had a good friend who was a little younger named George Harrison and then they got their drummer since his mother owned a club called the Indra named…Pete Best (yes, not Ringo…yet). Pete would be kicked out when he did not keep up with demands for recording and Ringo Starr would be taken from his band Rory Storm and The Hurricanes. This process took them to Germany, all over England, and had them working like dogs working insane shifts at seedy bars. Ultimately their time on the bar circuit would pay off for them though. When they got into the studio they were tight. They had played there songs hundreds and hundreds of times and had reached a very advanced level instrumentally.
They were knocked down so many times during these years and were continuously put down by those around them and told to give up, but this was their passion and they wanted nothing more than to hit it big. So they played rock and roll cover after rock and roll cover and developed a sort of cult following. Most famously they performed at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, their hometown, and this is where they would be discovered by their future manager, Brian Epstein. Many say without Epstein, The Beatles never would have found the success that they did and their music producer, George Martin, was who would go on to aid in the creative genius behind their most famous tracks.
Below is a sadly low-quality clip of The Beatles actually performing the song Some Other Guy at the Cavern Club (which to me it is just amazing that this clip exists at all). If you keep listening to the end, you can hear someone yell that they want Pete (Best) and not the new drummer Ringo:
Resources for Beatles History
For anyone looking to learn more about the early days of The Beatles in an extremely in-depth manner, I highly recommend the book The Beatles by Hunter Davies. The genius of this book is that Davies was a licensed biographer that followed The Beatles for 18 months during the peak of their careers. He also developed friendships with each of the members that continued even after the split of the group. This meant he had access to stories and interviews that would have been impossible for anyone else to get. I have read my fair share of Beatles books, but this is by far my favorite since it covers a part of their career that is often forgotten since it is not as glamorous as when they hit America. HIGHLY recommend.
Based on my previous dialogue to open the post, I explained how my reluctance was at my inability to go into details of all of the group’s major achievements. Doing so would be an obscene amount of information and take years to compile. What is even crazier is that there is a site that actually did this and I only mention it since it is one of my favorite sites on the web in general and is called The Beatles Bible.
Ok. So now off of my soapbox of giving resources to anyone remotely as crazy about the band as I am…
Ultimately, many of us have at least some idea of the crazy career that would comprise the remainder of the decade for John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Together, they would go on to produce 12 studio albums, 1 double EP and many singles. over the course of about 6 years and many are still some of the most coveted in music history. They would reach success with an amazingly successful team consisting of them, Brian Epstein and George Martin. They famously pushed boundaries that had never been crossed before and made the impossible possible in the world of music. By the end of the decade, each of the members would go their own ways and have largely successful solo careers (except Ringo…) but nothing compared to their time as The Beatles. Also, and most importantly to this article’s premise, The Beatles would return to The Ed Sullivan show several more times over the course of the decade but none would become as famous as their first one in February 1964.
Great blog post, Sloan!!! Well done. Loved it.