THE BEATLES' 40TH Yeah, yeah, yeah YEAH!

The Beatles completely changed the music scene.
By RICHARD HARRINGTON
WASHINGTON POST
CALL IT POP CULTURE meets Chaos Theory, where something of importance is rooted in an apparently trivial event that ultimately catalyzes a chain of events of major consequence. Chaos theory is exemplified by the proverb about a battle in which the loss of a nail in a horseshoe leads to the loss of the horse, which leads to the loss of the rider, which leads to the loss of the battle, which in turn leads to the loss of a whole kingdom.
In the Beatles' case, a whole kingdom was gained because, 40 years ago, a Silver Spring, Md., teen-ager saw a CBS television news clip and wrote a letter to a Silver Spring DJ who went to great lengths to acquire an imported copy of the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand," which became a local sensation after being played incessantly and exclusively on a Silver Spring, Md., station. Six weeks later, a previously unknown British band had captured a nation's eyes, ears and hearts and ushered in a new era of rock 'n' roll.
Forty years on, the Beatles are the band we've known for all these years, making it easy to forget the immediate and lasting impact they had on American music, fashion and popular culture. Looking back 20 years later, cultural analyst Greil Marcus called the Beatles' seminal Feb. 9, 1964, appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show," "a pop explosion ... an irresistible cultural upheaval that cuts across lines of class and race and, most crucially, divides society itself by age. The surface of daily life -- walk, talk, dress, symbolism, heroes, family affairs -- is affected with such force that deep and substantive changes in the way large numbers of people think and act take place."
February marks the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' coming to America, and there will be plenty of celebrations -- in Washington, New York and sites both stateside and abroad. "The speed and the magnitude of it was the important thing," says Bruce Spizer, whose expansive and authoritative "The Beatles Are Coming! The Birth of Beatlemania in America" has just been published. "The Beatles would have been popular in America regardless," Spizer says. "But the actions of three people set forth a chain of events that not only jump-started Beatlemania in America, but changed American culture."
LOVE ME DO
By the end of 1963, the Beatles' fame had reached epic proportions in England, capped by their October appearance on the Sullivan-like "Sunday Night at the London Palladium." The hysteria surrounding that appearance, and the huge British television audience that resulted, first inspired the word Beatlemania.
America was proving to be a much-tougher market.
American rights to the Beatles' recordings for EMI were held by Capitol, a Hollywood label whose name and logo were directly inspired by the U.S. Capitol building. But no British act had ever broken through significantly on the American pop charts, and Capitol didn't seem to want to change that: It declined to release any Beatles singles. According to an internal memo, "We don't think the Beatles will do anything in this market."
After Capitol passed on the Beatles, EMI licensed the band's British singles to several smaller labels and Chicago's Vee Jay released "Please Please Me" on Feb, 7, 1963. With minimal promotion, it did nothing. In May, Vee Jay released "From Me to You." It did nothing. Philadelphia's Swan tried next, releasing "She Loves You" in August. It also did nothing. It wasn't until late November 1963 that Capitol finally agreed to release a Beatles recording.
American media did notice Beatlemania in England: On Nov. 11, 1963, Time and Newsweek each devoted half a page to the "New Phenomenon in Britain." On Nov. 18, NBC ran a brief British-produced news segment, as did CBS on the morning of Nov. 22. That segment would have run again on "The CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite," but all scheduled programs were knocked off the air by the assassination of President Kennedy. It eventually did run Dec. 10, and among those watching were WWDC-AM (Silver Spring, Md.) DJ Carroll James and 15-year-old Marsha Albert in Silver Spring.
SHE LOVES YOU
James was a 1958 Princeton graduate with a political science degree. He had bounced around at several local and regional stations before landing at WWDC in early 1963, eventually hosting the drive-time show "CJ and Friends."
"Carroll wasn't opposed to rock 'n' roll; it depended on the quality," says his widow, Elizabeth "Betty" James Duke (James passed away in 1997).
In a 1984 interview, James said of the CBS story, which included a snippet of "She Loves You," "I looked at it and thought, well, that's interesting ... and didn't think anything more about it. She [Marsha Albert] looked at it, saw the same thing and wrote me a letter saying, 'Hey, that music looks great, why can't you get some to play over here?'" Two days later, an English pressing of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was on James' turntable, hand-carried across the Atlantic by a British Airways flight attendant.
"Marsha was the only one to make the request, so I invited her in to the show that afternoon to introduce it on the air," James recalled.
"I was kind of disappointed that he had 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' instead of 'She Loves You,' but it did well, too," says Albert, a quiet person then and now. Recently found by The Post, Albert has asked that her married name and home town not be identified.
At 5:15 p.m. Dec. 17, Albert read the introduction written by James: "Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time on the air in the United States, here are the Beat-les singing 'I Want to Hold Your Hand.'"
The station's switchboard lit up immediately with requests and James responded by playing it frequently. For almost a week, WWDC was the only station in America to have a copy of the record, which Capitol had finally agreed to release Jan. 13 in anticipation of a publicity boost from the band's scheduled appearance Feb. 9 on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Capitol issued a cease-and-desist order to keep WWDC from playing the song -- James ignored it -- then decided to press a few thousand early copies solely for the Washington market.
But James taped a copy for a DJ pal in Chicago, who did the same for a DJ pal in St. Louis, and reaction in those markets was similar to Washington's.
As a result, Capitol rush-released "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on Dec. 26, three weeks earlier than planned. A month after James played it for the first time, the song was No. 1 in America (a first for a British group), which led to reams of media analysis of said phenomenon, which inspired a mob scene at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport when the Beatles first landed in America on Feb. 7, 1964, which led to the largest audience in television history when the Beatles appeared two days later on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and a sell-out for their first American concert at the Washington Coliseum here two days after that. Which is why Carroll and Betty James were invited to New York for the landmark Sullivan show.
IT WON'T BE LONG
When the Beatles appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show" -- their first live appearance on American television -- no one could have guessed that this showcase would be so historic, or that the show's impact on pop culture would be so deep.
It was and remains one of the most important milestones in the history of rock music, eyewitnessed by 728 people in the audience at CBS' Studio 50. They were the lucky ones among the 50,000 who had requested tickets, an all-time Sullivan record. The biggest numbers, of course, came in the next day when A.C. Nielsen reported that close to 74 million people -- 40 percent of the entire U.S. population at the time -- had watched what a CBS press release identified as "The Beatles of London ... a wildly popular quartet of English recording stars."
The first set consisted of "All My Loving," "Till There Was You" and "She Loves You"; the second of "I Saw Her Standing There" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand." The Beatles were relatively sedate in their matching collarless Edwardian jackets, shirts and neckties, and so was America. But their appearance had such an impact that most normal activities in America came to a standstill during their performance.
After the show, Carroll James went backstage to say hello to the Beatles and ran into Ed Sullivan, recalls Betty James Duke. Sullivan came over, looked squarely at James and said, "'Now you remember, young man, I'm the one who discovered the Beatles and brought them to America!' Carroll had no problem with that."
The Beatles followed the Sullivan show with several sold-out concerts, radio promotions and bantering with the press.
After a fortnight in America, they flew back to England to begin filming "A Hard Day's Night."
On March 31, the Beatles did the impossible, capturing the top five positions on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart with "Can't Buy Me Love," "Twist and Shout," "She Loves You," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and "Please Please Me." They controlled 11 of the Hot 100 spots. Nobody has come close to matching that achievement.
In July, the single and album "A Hard Day's Night" reached No. 1 on the British and American charts. The following month the film opened at No. 1.