The Beatles

The Beatles

The Ed Sullivan Show

New York, NY

February 1964

There had been so much advertisement about this new rock’n roll band that I can hardly wait to hear them. They were going to premier on the Ed Sullivan show on Sunday night. My whole family sat together to watch them.

They came on the stage dressed in suits but with long hair. Boys just didn’t wear long hair back then. It was stunning to see them. They sang two or three songs and the audience went wild and so did my family. Maybe my parents weren’t as interested in them as my siblings and I were. But we loved their new sound.

 And then when they finished singing, Ed Sullivan announced that they were going to be back to perform on the next three shows. We were so excited. And when we went to school the next day, that’s all anybody talk about. We all watch the Beatles. And we were stunned by how different they were. They were edgy and talented. The rest of the week, we learned as much as we could about the Beatles and we couldn’t hear enough about them.

The next Sunday my grandparents wanted to take us out to dinner. Typically, that was a very big treat. We rarely went out to dinner because there were so many of us. It was just too expensive. But we didn’t want to go. We didn’t want to miss the Beatles. And so, we protested and we stayed home. My grandparents couldn’t believe it. So, they came over for dinner and stayed for the Ed Sullivan show. They wanted to see what do grabbed our attention.

They were not as enamored with the Beatles as we were. They commented on their tight pants. They found the long hair to be distasteful. There was a comment that maybe they were too feminine. They thought there was too much shouting in the music. They couldn’t distinguish the lyrics. They weren’t enjoying the performance and their annoyance annoyed us. We were thrilled. We couldn’t get enough of them.

The Beatles played the next two Sundays. And again, we were all watched every moment of them. Beatlemania took over our lives. That’s all we talked about. Everybody had a favorite Beatle. Mine was Ringo. I like him because he seemed to be the underdog.

My siblings and I were so infatuated with the Beatles that we put together our own pathetic cover band of Beatles music. Truthfully we sucked. But we loved pretending we were the Beatles. We used badminton rackets as our guitars. A turned over trashcan served as my drum as I was Ringo. And we put on regular performances for my parents and any house guests. We thought we were great and our audience was generous in their clapping and praising of our performances.

It wasn’t until we were adults that my mother finally confessed that we were dreadful. While we thought they were laughing with us, it appears as if they were laughing at us. But who cares now. At the time, it was just so much great fun.