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

exploded into the national consciousness and national headlines.” Stories about the Beatles craze, a phenomenon viewed as overtly sexual in a nearly primal fashion, fed the media’s hunger for more. The Beatles quickly became a daily presence in the tabloids.
    At first, the press took a bemused stance toward the whole spectacle. In September, The Daily Mirror ran a story about the Beatles headlined “Four Frenzied Little Lord Fauntleroys.” But then, on October 13th, the frenzy hit London itself: The Beatles appeared that evening on Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium, the biggest TV variety show in the country, and thousands of screaming fans descended on the venue, closing off entire streets and clashing with the police for hours.
    Coincidentally, on that same day the Daily Mirror coined the term “Beatlemania” to describe a similar scene at the band’s concert the previous day in Cheltenham. (The term itself was a play on Lizstomania, the 1840s frenzy that had accompanied the concerts of Franz Liszt.) It wasn’t long before the more “serious” broadsheets were weighing in with pseudo-psychological analyses of the anatomy of Beatlemania. The Sunday Times of London got straight to the point, quoting a young girl who answered a BBC interviewer’s question regarding why she screamed at the mere mention of the group by confessing “It’s not something I could say on the radio.”
    Meanwhile, America was oblivious to what was transpiring across the ocean. Throughout 1963, Capitol Records, who as a sister EMI-owned label held the US rights to Parlophone’s product, showed no interest in the band. This was largely due to the tastes of the man in charge of the label’s international A&R, Dave Dexter, whose responsibilities included sifting through EMI’s international product searching for potential US hits. Capitol’s track record in international A&R was actually quite good: In June of ’63, for example, they released a record from EMI Japan called “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto and had a number one hit with it. But rock and roll, well, that was American music—Capitol already had the Beach Boys—and there was no reason to be importing it from England. After all, no English act had ever sustained a career as a hitmaker in the US.
    Besides, Dexter just plain didn’t like rock and roll. A 20-year veteran of the label who had joined Capitol shortly after it was founded, Dexter rued the day rock and roll hit the scene. In an internal memo several years earlier, he condemned rock as “juvenile and maddeningly repetitive” decrying the fact that the music biz was increasingly being driven by the tastes of children. Dexter’s musical preferences ran towards jazz, and he’d had a good run signing jazz artists to the label, including Peggy Lee, Nat “King” Cole and Stan Kenton.
    The first two #1 Beatles singles offered by Parlophone to Capitol, “Please Please Me” and “From Me To You,” were turned down by Dexter and licensed instead to the Chicago indie label Vee-Jay Records, whose attorney, Paul Marshall, happened to be EMI’s US attorney, as well. Vee-Jay might have been a good home for the Beatles, as they were seeing considerable success at the time with The Four Seasons, another Paul Marshall client. But by early ‘63 the label was short of funds due to its president, Ewart Abner, having dug into Vee-Jay’s operating budget in order to cover personal Las Vegas gambling losses.
    Upon its February, 1963 release, Vee-Jay was able to get some airplay for their first Beatles single, “Please Please Me” (mistakenly credited to “The Beattles”on the 45 label and in trade ads), notably on local Chicago Top 40 radio station WLS. WLS DJ Dick Biondi, a personal friend of Ewart Abner, was the first DJ to play a Beatles record in the US, and can be viewed as the band’s first US champion at radio. Due primarily to airplay on Biondi’s show, “Please Please Me” made it to #35 at