It Was 54 Years Ago Today

It was about ten weeks after President Kennedy was killed in Dallas, but today is the anniversary of another day that changed history.  Four lads from Liverpool, England arrived at JFK airport on February 7, 1964 and were greeted by 3,000 screaming teenagers.  

They appeared twice on "The Ed Sullivan Show" with an estimated TV audience of 73 million people(or 75% of the country).  It's fun to look back at some of the media comments at the time which were almost all negative.  

Newsweek              Feb. 24, 1964

"Visually they are a nightmare, tight, dandified Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near disaster, guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of "yeah, yeah, yeah") are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments….

The big question in the music business at the moment is, will the Beatles last? The odds are that, in the words of another era, they're too hot not to cool down, and a cooled-down Beatle is hard to picture. It is also hard to imagine any other field in which they could apply their talents, and so the odds are that they will fade away, as most adults confidently predict. But the odds in show business have a way of being broken, and the Beatles have more showmanship than any group in years; they might just think up a new field for themselves. After all, they have done it already."

What if they didn't come to America? Would there have been a British Invasion in the 60's? Would we have ever heard of "The Backstreet Boys" or "Destiny's Child?"(music groups) Would the Super Bowl halftime show be as big as it is? Would the music industry be what is today?

Imagine being one of the teenagers at the airport as "The Beatles" walked down the steps of that airplane. How many times over the years did they say to someone, "I was there the day "The Beatles" arrived.  There are very few years that are so dominated by a person or group or an event that you automatically identify the two together.(2001 and 2016 are two recent ones)  1964 was clearly the year of "The Beatles". 

My favorite song, "American Pie" by Don McLean talks about, "The Day The Music Died", the awful day that three popular musicians were killed in a plane crash.  A good argument can be made that 54 years ago today, four musicians arrived in New York and it was the day that music was born.

I still "believe in yesterday."

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