Beatlemania! Fifty years ago, the Fab Four released their first album--and changed American culture forever.

• Author: Majerol, Veronica
• Position: TIMES PAST: 1963 - Beatles's 'Please Please Me'

There were the two 16-year-old who were reported missing from Cleveland, Ohio--and turned up in England, having withdrawn $1,980 from one of their college funds to visit the birthplace of the Beatles.

There was the 15-year-old boy in Westbrook, Connecticut, who was suspended from school for refusing to brush back his "Beatle bangs."

And there were the 3,000 screaming fans who greeted the band at Kennedy Airport in New York, prompting one official to remark, "We've never seen anything like this here before. Never. Not even for kings and queens."

The hysteria that rocked Britain, the U.S., and the rest of the world in the early 1960s came to be known as "Beatlemania." Attention is now turning to the Beatles again, more than four decades after they broke up: This month marks 50 years since the Fab Four from Liverpool--John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, all in their early 20s at the time--released their first album, Please Please Me. That marked the start of a new kind of teenage music and culture that helped make the 1960s, well, the '60s.

"They were the leaders of a lot of the cultural changes we associate with the '60s," says Steven D. Stark, author of Meet the Beatles. "Whatever they did, people tended to follow them."

The Beatles are known today as the most successful musical group in total sales (more than 600 million albums worldwide), as well as the band that created the song most recorded by others ("Yesterday," covered more than 3,000 times).

JFK Assassination

Shortly after the Beatles hit it big in Britain, Americans experienced a national shock when President John E Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963. The Beatles arrived on American soil three months later, in February 1964. When they performed live on The Ed Sullivan Show--singing five songs, including "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand"--a whopping 73 million people tuned in, making it the most watched program in history to that point.

"Americans were open to something that would lift them out of their gloom," says Stark. "It would be hard for an American act to have pulled it off quite like that because [Americans] were still in mourning."

The Beatles' sound was dramatically different from the prevailing pop music of American "teen idols" like Fabian and Frankie Avalon, which had replaced the earlier sounds of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis on the U.S. charts.

Even before their appearance on...