Free How the Beatles Went Viral in '64 by Steve Greenberg

HOW THE BEATLES WENT VIRAL IN ‘64

    A while back I was talking about old records with my friend Lenny Kaye when I posed a question that has long intrigued me: “At the end of 1963 virtually no one in America had heard of the Beatles; yet on February 9th, 1964, they drew the largest television audience in history—73 million viewers—when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. How in the world did that happen in the course of six weeks?” Lenny thought for a couple of seconds and then answered: “Everybody was ready for the 60’s to begin.” While that reply was surely true on some metaphysical level, I suspected that there was more to the story. And in fact there’s much more.
    While the Beatles’ sheer talent and drive made it nearly inevitable that they would eventually conquer America, quite a few interlocking gears needed to click into place in order for Beatlemania to hit with the speed and force that it did fifty years ago. The rapid explosion of the Beatles in America was the result of a mind-boggling combination of persistence, luck, good timing, and passion.
    There’s no sense trying to explain WHY the Beatles hit as dramatically as they did. It’s a subject that’s been written about exhaustively (Short answer: They were really great). Rather, let’s focus on the nuts and bolts of it all: How did it happen that they came out of nowhere to become the biggest cultural sensation ever, in six weeks?
    Of course the Beatles didn’t really come out of nowhere; they came out of England. And England was where the frenzy that was Beatlemania began. But unlike its blitzkrieg-like arrival in America, Britain’s obsession with the Beatles emerged over the course of nearly a year. The band was already huge locally in their native Liverpool, even before they’d begun to make records. After they signed to EMI’s Parlophone label, a series of singles appeared beginning in late ‘62—“Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” “From Me To You”— each a bigger hit than the previous one. The first whispers of remarkable mass hysteria — the fainting, the screaming, the extreme lengths to which fans would go just to get near the band — wafted out of the north of England in late spring, just as the “Please Please Me” album moved into the number one position on the UK chart, a spot that a succession of Beatles albums would hold for nearly a year solid. With the Beatles touring the country relentlessly, the screaming girls, the frenzied chase scenes, the whole carnival spread steadily through the UK, town by town.
    In late August the band released its biggest hit yet: “She Loves You,” which quickly became the all-time best-selling single by a UK act. It was then that the major newspapers brought the Beatles frenzy to national attention and by doing so, whipped it up further. Previously, pop hadn’t been a subject to which the papers paid much attention; in fact, it took John’s involvement in a fistfight at Paul’s birthday party in June to garner the band its first headline in the national press: “BEATLE IN BRAWL—SORRY I SOCKED YOU,” read the banner across the back page of the Daily Mirror.
    But by late summer of ‘63, the press couldn’t have been more eager for the story of four young outsiders from the hinterlands who had the power to arouse young British womanhood to heights of hysteria. In the wake of the Profumo sex scandal (which at that very moment was in the midst of bringing down the government) and several concurrent revelations of outrageous sexual escapades involving Britain’s upper crust, the UK press were newly fascinated by, and emboldened in covering, sexually charged topics, which previously had been swept under the rug. This new attraction to raciness, the precursor to Britain’s subsequent sex-crazed tabloid press, found an eager audience with the British public. The Times of London opined: “On the island where the subject has long been taboo in polite society, sex has