America meets the Beatles: four lads from Liverpool perform on Ed Sullivan and usher in a new teen culture.

• Author: Elliott, Stuart
• Position: Times Past

The Fab Four. The lads from Liverpool. The mop-top quartet. The band Paul McCartney was in before Wings. If any of those phrases sounds familiar, it may be because they all describe the Beatles, widely considered the greatest rock 'n' roll act in history.

Thoughts are turning to the Beatles more than three decades after they broke up in 1970 because February 9 will mark 40 years since their first live performance in the U.S., on a TV program called The Ed Sullivan Show. It was that appearance, watched by a whopping 73 million people, that many believe helped usher in a new kind of teenage culture and make the 1960s, well, the '60s.

The Beatles are known today as the most successful musical group in total sales (more than 150 million albums in the U.S. alone), as well as the band that created the song most recorded by others ("Yesterday"). When they first arrived on American soil, it was less than three months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Their music, already a huge hit at home in Britain, was dramatically different from the prevailing pop music of American "teen idols" like Fabian and Paul Anka, which had replaced the earlier sounds of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis on the U.S. charts.

"People were looking for something; that's the only way I can explain it," says Joe McCoy, the program director of a New York radio station, WCBS-FM. Of the appearance on Sullivan's show, he recalls: "When they came on that night, everybody watched."

STARTING RIOTS

By the time the Beatles performed on Sullivan's show, singing five numbers, including "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand," they had already caught the attention of reporters on both sides of the Atlantic. In a Dec. 1, 1963, piece about Beatlemania in Britain, The New York Times had noted that "one shake of the bushy fringe of their moplike haircuts is enough to start a riot in any theater where they are appearing." The article described the group--Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr--as "four young men who play guitars and drums and sing pop songs they write themselves." It noted perceptively: "This sounds like merely a minor accomplishment, but it isn't-not the way they do it."

But would Beatlemania sweep the U.S.? A Times review of a filmed Beatles performance on NBC in early January 1964 said that "it would not seem quite so likely that the accompanying fever known as Beatlemania will also be...