It is hard to explain just how influential a television program was 60 years ago today. Imagine millions of lives being changed, forever. Imagine careers and lifestyles and fates and ideas and almost everything being thrown sideways by an hour of television. The Super Bowl is probably the best example to use nowadays, but it’s still a poor one. If the lives of almost everyone watching the Super Bowl on Sunday were changed, radically, by what happened at the game, then it would be the equivalent. Not just the participants, but the audience. That’s what The Beatles did when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show 60 years ago today, with 73 million people glued to their teevee sets…
73 million people watching that Sunday night was a bigger outlier than the Super Bowl audience will be on Sunday. No program in America had been watched by more than 70 million people until that February Sunday in 1964. 45.3% of the available teevees watched The Beatles that night. The Super Bowl may routinely draw more than 100 million American viewers alone, but because of increased population and teevees in America, percentage-wise no Super Bowl broadcast has cracked the 50% mark, and only one has gone above 49%, the first 49ers-Bengals Super Bowl in 1982 (49.1%). In fact, the last Super Bowl to crack the 45% mark was the Patriots 28-3 comeback over the Falcons in 2017, and it got 45.3%- exactly The Beatles rating on Ed Sullivan…
But the influence of that February night is much more than that. It would be the equivalency of four of the players in the Super Bowl changing the lives of half of the audience. And that’s absurd. Maybe in a decade some pros will talk about being influenced as a kid by what Brock Purdy or Patrick Mahomes does on Sunday. But that’s a handful of people. The Beatles appearance literally changed rock and roll forever…
That’s not an exaggeration. Millions of kids picked up a guitar for the first time because of that night. Countless musicians changed the style they played because of that night. Thousands of rock bands were formed. And, to use the easy joke from the time, millions of barbers went out of business…
You may question the lingering influence of The Beatles, but the fact that most bands are now just “a name” and not “person and the persons” should be proof enough. From “Bill Haley and The Comets” to “U2,” from “Dion and The Belmonts” to “The White Stripes.” The idea of “rock band as an ensemble,” especially with them playing their own instruments- was brought to the forefront simply because of the Beatles…
Or, in list form: if you have ever listened to an artist who a) wrote their own songs b) produced their own songs c) conceived their own cover art d) shared an unpopular opinion e) had their own production company f) played a concert to more than 50,000 people and g) influenced fashion by their custom outfits, you have seen an artist influenced by what the Beatles did…
And yes, Beach Boys fans, Brian Wilson was writing and producing their early records before The Beatles hit America, but they were not influential to this degree in the slightest. Bob Dylan was in the folk movement and hadn’t crossed over to rock yet. The singer-songwriter was not perceived to be valuable until after The Beatles hit. Prior to them Chuck Berry wrote his own songs, and so did Buddy Holly and a few others (both, not coincidentally, big Beatles influences). But they were considered oddballs and outsiders for doing that. Nowadays, singers who don’t write their own songs are the weird ones…
And for you Rolling Stones fans, they did not break in Britain until John and Paul gave them a throwaway song they had written for Ringo called “I Wanna Be Your Man,” and they only broke in America because they rode the wave of The Beatles. The Stones didn’t dress in suits like the Beatles and therefore appeared to be the anti-Beatles, but in reality, every Stone grew up a child of privilege, while The Beatles were all working class lads, well below every Stone. (John didn’t write “Working Class Hero” as a tribute to Mick Jagger, let’s put it that way.) The Beatles wore suits because that’s how performers got to work back then, and their popularity opened the door for groups to not dress that sharply. The Stones took that concept, ran with it, and it’s worked out, I think…
The other side to February 9, 1964, is what The Beatles did after that. It was one thing to grab the attention of the audience for one night. The Super Bowl does that, the higher-rated programs than that appearance did that- the Roots miniseries, the finale of MASH, The Day After- but The Beatles were able to hold that attention and keep evolving as a band for the rest of the decade. A lot of performers would consider that night the peak of their careers and skate on that for as long as they could. The Beatles did not…
The most astonishing thing about the whole performance is that this night is considered a jumping-off point to careers that still continue to this day. Paul and Ringo are in their 80’s but still writing new music, making albums and touring. And whenever The Beatles release “new” music it jumps to the top of whatever music chart is considered important nowadays, like in the case of the re-engineered “Now and Then” single, or the Peter Jackson “Get Back/Let it Be” revised documentary…
The only obvious modern comparison, considering I’m linking this to the Super Bowl, is Taylor Swift. Everything she is doing to become a singing billionaire and seemingly be everywhere or talked about on all media, unintentionally or not she’s using The Beatles playbook. But is she influencing people to go become performers, or has the culture shifted so much that people are content to consume her music and wear her clothes and not use that energy to change their own lives? Encouraging others is the key to staying power. That’s why, 60 years later, we’re still talking about The Beatles…
Read a number of articles regarding the 60th anniversary of this seminal moment in entertainment and pop culture history-- this is the best at capturing and distilling the impact.
Never was anything like The Beatles before The Beatles. And, there will never anything like The Beatles and that moment after The Beatles!
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I agree with everything you said about the Beatles. You sound like a gut who used to have a radio show here in Bend, Oregon, called Beatles with the Dude. Tune in Beatlemania on the Radical Songbook at piratebutteradio.com Saturday, Feb. 10, at 2 pm Pacific time to hear the songs as they were sung on the Ed Sullivan Show and what some seventy-somethings recall about those TV appearances that changed our lives. Archived at https://zeno.fm/podcast/the-radical-songbook/.