The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Greatest group of the 20th Century.


Mick Jagger on the Beatles, you know tomorrow is their 50th anniversary since they appeared on The Ed Sullivan show!
Weren't you particularly compared with the Beatles, though?
The Beatles were so big that it's hard for people not alive at the time to realize just how big they were. There isn't a real comparison with anyone now. I suppose Michael Jackson at one point, but it still doesn't seem quite the same. They were so big that to be competitive with them was impossible. I'm talking about in record sales and tours and all this. They were huge.

Bigger than Jesus?
They were bigger than Jesus!

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/mick-jagger-remembers-19951214#ixzz2sli53...

this aint bringing JB back.........

Not having been alive in 1964, or 1974, for that matter, I feel totally free of the weight of cultural history. Sure, the Beatles were bigger, more historically significant. I honestly don't care.

I'm free to prefer one band to the other.

And while we're at it, looking back on the amazing proliferation of pop music during that period, I don't see a ton of daylight between what the Beatles were doing and what the Kinks, the Who, and the Stones were doing. There's no denying that the Beatles sold vastly more records and scored more hit singles. But is "Ticket to Ride" better than "So Sad About Us"? Is The White Album "better" than Tommy? These are preposterous questions.

Cute? Hardly. The Beatles subverted the American way of life.

Half a century ago, they led the British invasion of American pop music and changed everything.


By Michael Tomasky
February 9, 2014

Fifty years ago Sunday, the Beatles first appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show." You'll almost surely see clips of them on the news this weekend, or on tribute shows, japing with the press, smiling those cheerful smiles, singing "All My Loving" — and you'll probably think, "Oh, they were so cute."

That's today's conventional wisdom: The Beatles were cute and unthreatening. The Rolling Stones — now, there was your threat. And the Who, smashing their instruments. And numerous others, against whom the Beatles were supposedly a dish of vanilla ice cream.

It's ridiculous. If there's one canard I'd like to see these anniversary festivities flip on its head, it's that one. To the America that existed then, the Beatles were plenty threatening. To understand why, you have to understand the music scene of the time, and how utterly new the Beatles were in every way, how totally uncategorizable.

Here's the quick, well-known background: Rock 'n' roll was born in 1955 and was immediately seen as a danger by the day's reactionaries. "Jungle music" and all that; white children screaming for black performers. In a few years' time, the industry tamed rock 'n' roll. Elvis went to the Army. Chuck Berry went to prison. Bobby Vinton went to No. 1. Chew on this little fact: On the American Billboard charts of the hits of 1963, not a single No. 1 song featured an electric guitar solo.

Then, February 1964 — boom! No one had made or heard sounds like these. Here's a crucial truth that goes totally unappreciated today: They were loud. Those Beatles songs don't sound loud now — "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "It Won't Be Long" and the other early ones. And it's true that other groups came along quickly and got louder still.

But by the standards of the day, they were cacophonous. Here's how the Nation's critic, Alan Rinzler, put it in 1964 after a Carnegie Hall concert. In an article headlined "No Soul in Beatlesville," Rinzler wrote that the music was "electrically amplified to a plaster-crumbling, glass-shattering pitch," and was "loud, fast, and furious, totally uninfluenced by some of the more sophisticated elements" of the pop scene.

Rinzler was certainly correct that the Beatles didn't sound like what was topping the charts at the time. Did I mention Bobby Vinton above? The No. 1 song the week before "I Want to Hold Your Hand" commandeered the spot was Vinton's awful (and I don't hate him; he had some decent hits) "There! I've Said It Again." A song from the Big Band era. And the No. 1 album before "Meet the Beatles" parked there for 11 weeks? "The Singing Nun."

For sure, there was great, edgy music coming out of Chicago and Detroit and Memphis. But most popular music was relentlessly mediocre, candied, bleached of anything that might produce in its pubescent listener an impertinent or certainly a sexual thought. Even Elvis, once so raucous, was now producing lame ditties like "Good Luck Charm."

And then suddenly, this glass-shattering, two-guitar noise. And with all those crescendos and climaxes and screams.

Lyrically, the songs may have been about holding your hand and dancing with you. But musically, a lot of the songs were frankly sexual. The extended "ahs" of "Twist and Shout," followed by those screams; the build-up coming out of the bridge ("I can't hide, I can't hi-i-de") in "I Want to Hold Your Hand." They're mild compared to what we can hear today, but in 1964, these were unambiguous musical emulations of sexual climax, aimed smack at a teenage audience, which did not miss the point.

In that first wave, in early 1964, most adults mocked the group. Highbrow derision came not just from the Nation but the New Yorker, the New Republic and the New York Times. This music was dismissed as a little disease that would pass.

And it's true that all this wasn't seen as subversive yet. That would take another year or two, when the disease hadn't abated but, rather, metastasized and started taking over the culture, becoming dangerous.

But just because it wasn't seen as subversive doesn't mean it wasn't subversive. The 1964 Beatles may not have been overtly anti-authority, but covertly, they certainly were. They were even, in their way, political. Their platform? Joy, excitement, pleasure. Within their aura, the future — that distant and sober thing for which the young people of 1964 were supposed to plan, so they could inherit the responsibility of upholding the greatest way of life the world had ever seen — evanesced. That fact alone made many in the establishment nervous, and rightly so.

So celebrate this anniversary, but celebrate it the right way. Don't call them cute.

Michael Tomasky is a columnist for the Daily Beast and editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. His new e-book is "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Beatles and America, Then and Now."

Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-tomasky-beatles-20140209,0,36781...

Why can't we all enjoy everything? That would be awesome.

" I watched the Beatles Sullivan shows as a kid of 12 and the impact on music and culture can't be over stated. There were times when they had something like 8 of the top 10 songs on the charts. So historically they rank #1 imho and second is way down the list. However moving past the 60's the debate opens up and its tough to ignore the Stones 50 years and huge world tours not to mention their own classic run of albums in the 70's. "


The Beatles landed on our shores exactly eleven weeks after JFK's assassination . We ( The United States ) became ' Young Again ' .


For that reason alone The Beatles will always remain special in our hearts and souls  ......... oh , and they were VERY good .



" Hit Me Ronnie !!!!!  "

Jacky Lennon ! ™

Anybody trying to watch this show?  I thought I would try but the never ending 'cameo' shots of Macca are too much for me to handle with his glib looks and nods.  Ugh!

I too recall this day in 1964, as I have an older sister who was in love with Paul, and Beatles music was always on in the house.  It took me a few years later to discover The Stones and there is no turning back. Rock on boys!!

Summit anyone?

Because I'm feeling contrary — and because why not! — there's a technique-nerd thing that's always bothered about Beatles reverence. The whole thing about their musical sophistication. I'm always, like, yeah, for music geared toward teenagers in 1964, it was kind of sophisticated. Look at those jazz chords George was playing on Til There Was You! Seriously? Do you think George could've hung with Wes Montgomery on, say, "West Coast Blues" (recorded in 1960)? Take nothing away from the guy; he was a lovely player.

But no Beatle — no prog-rocker of the 1970s, for that matter — played a chord that Cole Porter or George Gershwin wouldn't have recognized.

Every time I hear a Beatlemaniac slag the Stones for their comparative lack of sophistication, I glaze over. "Midnight Rambler" has three chords. The entire song — the intro, the verses, the sped-up section, the rape sequence, everything — three chords. That tells you exactly nothing about the merits of the song

Ok. Enough for now. Just sayin.'

If there were fuddy-duddies in 1964 who weren't impressed, from a certain vantage point, can you blame them?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R42fm4lm2Q

No need to apologize, Kilroy!

I like the Beatles just fine. And I don't pretend to diminish the excitement and joy of anyone who lived through Beatlemania.

I'll say this: I wish young people today were as excited about music as they were then!

I guess it would have been worse had he liked them, Dean was a part of the old fogies generation, did exactly what the Stones needed, not be accepted by the establishment!
Hell that would have been just wrong.
I would'nt hang him, in a strange way he did them a favor.
BY the way I think it was all an act, he was a comedian/singer.
I don't think it was malicious as much as poking fun.
The Stones from what I've read did not take well to it, and once again, that's part of their allure to the then young fans.
Afterall it was us against them.
I remember not talking around older people back then, we talked to kids our own age,and a little older, but never anyone over........20.

Dean Martin was hilarious. Acting like a mean old drunk.