How the Beatles Went Viral in '64 (3 page)

In the weeks after JFK’s death, Walter Cronkite began to feel the weight of the nation’s collective lack of joy, with one heavy item following another on his CBS Evening News. Finally, he decided it was time to air something fun to break things up, but when surveying the cultural landscape, there was nothing cheery to be found. Then, someone remembered that story which was supposed to air the day of the assassination, the one about those crazy kids in England and how they were going bonkers over a group of long-haired rock and rollers….

On December 10th, the CBS Evening News ran a 4-minute piece on the Beatles. Because of the assassination, CBS was late to the story; in addition to Time, Newsweek and NBC, Life magazine had already published its feature with a picture of Princess Margaret meeting the “Red Hot Beatles” which ran next to a piece on the Singing Nun, pop music’s present and future abutting each other in America’s most popular magazine. Even the staid New York Times Magazine had already run a lengthy article, “Britons Succumb To Beatlemania,” which, like the CBS piece, had been filed before the assassination, but shelved until the beginning of December. The Times article, like all the other news pieces, focused on the British teen hysteria and the performance before the Queen Mother.

The CBS piece, reported by London bureau chief Alan Kendrick, offered more of the same: Screaming teens, the Royal Variety Show, and eye rolling on the part of a bewildered correspondent. But it also contained two elements not found in the NBC report: An interview with the band by correspondent Josh Darsa and a live performance of “She Loves You” from the Bournemouth show. Although Kendrick’s reporting was patronizing and dismissive, concluding that the Beatles “make non-music and wear non-haircuts,” and the band seemed far less cocksure in the interview segment than they would just a few weeks later at Kennedy Airport after they’d already conquered America, the live footage of “She Loves You” was raw and compelling. And Kendrick’s tone served to let teen viewers in on the fact that the Beatles were as annoying to adults as they were appealing to British teens—yet another selling point, bound to whip up curiosity.

While Cronkite’s news show was second in the ratings behind Huntley’s NBC program, it still pulled in 10 million viewers a night. One of those viewers that evening was fellow CBS star Ed Sullivan, who phoned Cronkite after the broadcast and asked the news anchor what else he could tell him about “those bugs, or whatever they call themselves,” as Cronkite later recalled. Although Sullivan had already committed to featuring the Beatles, he still viewed them as a bit of a joke; seeing them on Cronkite conferred a bit more status upon the group in Sullivan’s eyes and three days later—a month after the meetings with Brian Epstein—CBS announced in a press release that “The Beatles, wildly popular quartet of English recording stars, will make their first trip to the United States Feb. 7 for their American television debut on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ Sunday, Feb. 9 and 16.”

The CBS announcement went on to recount the considerable press the band had already received in the US, and included the by now obligatory mention of how they’d won over the royals. It also noted that “their first record release is scheduled for January,” an acknowledgement of Capitol Records’ trade announcement of the previous week, which had in fact already spilled the beans about the upcoming Sullivan appearances.

Also watching the Walter Cronkite broadcast that evening was a 15-year-old girl named Marsha Albert of Silver Spring Maryland, who found the band’s performance to be just the breath of fresh air she’d been yearning for. Years later, Albert recalled, “It wasn’t so much what I had seen, it’s what I had heard. They had a scene where they played a clip of ‘She Loves You,’ and I thought that was a great song.”

Albert sat down and wrote a letter to her local DJ, Carroll James of WWDC in Washington, D.C., who had also seen the Cronkite broadcast and been intrigued. “Why can’t we have music like that here in America?” she wrote, although James saw her as a stand-in for teens in general, asking why can’t we be cheerful and silly and excited like that here in America.

Wanting to make the young listener happy, James called a friend at BOAC (the forerunner to British Air), who arranged for a stewardess to bring over a copy of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and deliver it to the station two days later. As an extra treat, James invited Marsha Albert to come down to the studio and introduce the song on the air herself. And so, on December 17th, Marsha announced on WWDC, “Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time on the air in the United States, here are the Beatles singing “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” By the time the song was finished, the station’s switchboard was lit up with calls from listeners who wanted to hear it again. WWDC immediately put the song into heavy rotation, with a voice over in the middle of the song announcing “A WWDC exclusive” to keep the other DC stations from recording it off the air and broadcasting it. By the next day, record stores all over the DC area were deluged with requests for this record they’d never heard of—and which was not in fact available. Carroll James then sent a tape of the record to a DJ friend at a station in Chicago, who got the same reaction and then sent it on to a friend in St. Louis, where “I Want To Hold Your Hand” received a similarly ecstatic response.

Why was it that the Beatles connected so powerfully when Carroll James gave them one spin on December 17th, while their previous releases had gotten no such response? While it’s tempting to suggest that “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was simply a better record, it’s worth remembering that it was “She Loves You” that had gotten Marsha Albert and Carroll James excited in the first place. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that had “She Loves You” been the record played on WWDC on December 17th, the reaction would have been the same. Indeed, within a few weeks, “She Loves You” would be as much of a sensation as “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” So what had changed?

For one thing, the Beatles appear to have been exactly the remedy for those dark days after Kennedy’s death. As Lester Bangs has written of that winter, “We needed a fling after the wake.” No doubt the JFK assassination caused a fundamental wound to the national psyche, and young people were indeed anxious for something new, to begin to help them get over it, or at least distract them. Something different, exotic, joyful, exuberant, euphoric even, was just the remedy. And in retrospect it’s clear it needed to come from outside the US, beyond the borders of a country still very much in mourning, because on these shores there was nothing euphoric to be found.

Additionally, the significant US media attention already given to British Beatlemania made it easy for American teens to know exactly how to respond to the Beatles by this point. The first few Beatles singles had appeared in a vacuum and flopped; it was only after the band was on TV and featured in magazines that they hit hard. By way of the Cronkite and Huntley appearances alone, over 20 million Americans watched news features about Beatlemania. More than half of these were adults, who reacted with scorn, but it was an era when families gathered around the TV to watch the evening news together, and these programs were powerful agenda setters.

By the time of the first spin on WWDC, The Beatles were already beneficiaries of exposure from some of the most influential media outlets of their day: NBC, CBS, Time, Life, Newsweek, the NY Times. To call this level of media attention out of the ordinary would be a vast understatement. It is hard for today’s consumer of pop culture to imagine a world prior not only to the saturation coverage of all things pop on the internet, but also prior to MTV News, the E! Channel, Entertainment Tonight, even People and Rolling Stone magazines. Back then, radio airplay, coverage in the teen magazines, and the occasional wire service feature were the most pop acts could hope to receive, plus, TV appearances on American Bandstand, local imitators of Bandstand, and, if an act’s single was big enough, a performance on one of the major network prime time variety shows, with Sullivan’s being the biggest.

Yet the Beatles were suddenly everywhere, and the fact that not one bit of the hype was instigated by their label or anyone who had anything to do with the group—and that so much of it consisted of adults openly mocking the group— insured that it didn’t feel forced or phony.

Tales of British Beatlemania were becoming common knowledge across the US, thus priming the public for the hysteria here. A cartoon which accompanied the New York Times Magazine piece on Beatlemania summed it up: A girl is shown playing a Beatles record on her phonograph, while explaining to her bewildered father: “But naturally they make you want to scream, daddy-o; that’s the whole idea of the Beatles’ sound.”

When you hear the Beatles, you scream.
Fans were learning how to react to the band before they’d ever heard the music. And when it turned out that the music was, as a matter of fact, terrific, the choice between American depression and British Beatlemania became a no-brainer. To reprise Lenny Kaye’s observation, “Everybody was ready for the 60s to begin.”

Everyone, that is, except Capitol Records, who weren’t quite ready just yet. Capitol had scheduled “I Want To Hold Your Hand” for release on January 13th, 1964 and the early airplay given by Carroll James on WWDC, with no records in stores, was seen as potentially harmful to the project. The music business was still many years away from the practice of releasing singles to radio in advance of the retail date in order to build up demand. Airplay without records in stores was seen as the equivalent of an uncapped gusher spewing wasted oil. And so, Capitol called in their lawyers, who immediately sent a cease and desist letter to WWDC, demanding they pull the record off the air. The station responded with an emphatic refusal; this was the hottest record in ages, and WWDC had an exclusive. Carroll James, meanwhile, kept circulating tapes of the song to more and more DJs in other cities, with every station getting the same unprecedented reaction. Finally, Capitol relented and decided to move the commercial release up to the earliest date possible, December 26th.

By this point Capitol understood they were sitting on a monster and that they’d need to manufacture far more than the 200,000 singles they’d planned on. Factories worked overtime as Christmas approached. Capitol even did third party deals with manufacturing plants owned by rival labels in order to meet the expected demand.

Moving up the release date would prove to be the key decision made by Capitol in the entire campaign, making possible everything that followed. Had Marsha Albert not written to Carroll James, setting this acceleration into motion, the conditions could not have existed to allow for the fan hysteria that accompanied the band’s February trip to the U.S. and the record shattering ratings for the February 9th Ed Sullivan appearance. But now it all unfurled very quickly.

Capitol had finally snapped to attention, and on December 23rd, Paul Russell, the label’s National Album Merchandising Manager, sent out a memo to the staff outlining the Beatles marketing plan. As was standard in those days, almost all the marketing effort was aimed toward the industry, rather than consumers: A two-page ad set to run in the December 30th Billboard, entitled “Meet The Beatles!” would be reprinted and distributed to radio stations and retailers. It would be reproduced as an easel-backed cardboard point of purchase item, intended for placement on record store checkout counters. Also for distribution at retail and radio, Capitol created a motion display diorama, with the heads of the four Beatles shaking back and forth in unison. This display was quite elaborate, and can be seen in action in the Maysles Brothers’ documentary about the Beatles’ first US visit.

Some of Capitol’s marketing tools seem quaint by today’s standards: All members of the sales and radio promo staff were instructed to wear Beatle wigs during business hours and to encourage retailers and DJs to do the same. “Get these Beatle wigs around properly, and you’ll find you’re helping to start the Beatle Hair-Do Craze that should be sweeping the country soon,” read the memo. Further, millions of stickers reading “The BEATLES are Coming!” below a picture of the four Beatle hairdos were distributed to the staff, with the following instruction: “We literally want your salesmen to be plastering these stickers on any friendly surface as they walk down the street or as they call on radio or retail accounts…Make arrangements with some local high school students to spread the stickers around town. Involve your friends and relatives.”

By the time the marketing plan was set into motion, however, it was hardly needed. Alan Livingston later reported that Capitol never even made it through the entire $40,000 budget. From the moment “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was released on December 26th, it simply sold itself.

Suspending all sales and promotion staff vacation over Christmas week, Capitol sprung into action on the 26th, its promo men hand delivering the Beatles’ 45 to key stations by 9am. Before the morning was over, Top 40 stations around the country were hammering the record. Record stores were immediately besieged, as teens rushed to spend their Christmas money on the hot new song. As one New Jersey retailer told Billboard, “Sales started out like an explosion.”

Moving the release date up had an unexpected benefit. In 1964, the average American teen listened to the radio for slightly more than three hours per day. With kids out of school for all of Christmas week, that number was undoubtedly even higher. And, importantly, the most common stocking-stuffers received by teens that Christmas were transistor radios, which had become cheaper than ever.

Although wildly popular since the mid-50s, the Japanese-made transistor radio experienced exponential sales growth in the mid-60s, as inexpensive off-brands proliferated. While 5.5 million sets had been sold in the U.S. in 1962, by 1963 that number nearly doubled to 10 million. So ubiquitous was the transistor radio as a holiday gift in 1963 that the popular comedy songwriter Allan Sherman recorded a “12 Days of Christmas” parody keyed around having received a Japanese transistor radio “on the first day of Christmas”, with more and more details about the radio provided with each successive verse: