America’s young people were in a dismal place in late 1963. President Kennedy had been assassinated in November, his assassin murdered on national television shortly thereafter. Furthermore, the country was just entering the conflict in Vietnam. On the pop culture front, rock ‘n’ roll seemed to be on the decline as well. Buddy Holly’s plane had crashed four years prior, a moment later memorialized as “the day the music died.” Picking up the slack, Elvis would return from his service in Germany as a pop icon.
The music industry was gearing up for a folk revival, not a rock renewal. But before the year’s end, a single called “I Want to Hold Your Hand” began circulating on U.S. airwaves. The song, thanks to an extensive marketing campaign and the enthusiasm of a largely teenage fan base, went on to sell more than 1 million copies within four weeks, forever changing the scene of 1963. Feb. 9 marks the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” one of the most mythologized TV performances of all time. The initial broadcast – featuring the hit “All My Loving” and the chart topper “I Want to Hold Your Hand” – drew more than 73 million viewers.
By the time the foursome had landed at the recently renamed JFK International Airport they had already developed a strong fan base in the U.K. But convincing American record labels to release The Beatles’ music wasn’t as easy.
“In 1963, manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin were offering these (early) records to Capitol Records, and Capitol wasn’t going for it,” John Kimsey, a professor in the School for New Learning who teaches a course called “The Beatles and the Creative Process,” said. “They would listen to a U.K. hit like ‘Please Please Me’ or ‘She Loves You’ and say things like ‘we don’t think this would be a good fit for American audiences because this seems like rock ‘n’ roll’, which is kind of a passé thing from the ’50s.”
Eventually Capitol Records relented, the single was released, and Beatlemania spread to infect teenagers throughout the country. But that craze might not have merely been a phase of lovestruck young women chasing a boy band, Kimsey said citing an article called