Clever Ruse Gets These Teens in to Meet the Beatles

On this date 50 years ago — Monday, August 15, 1966 — a bunch of 15- and 16-year-old boys cooked up a scheme that would get them into D.C. Stadium (as it was called before it was renamed Robert F. Kennedy Stadium) to actually meet the Beatles and then watch their Washington D.C. concert.

They did so by impersonating the group that was the opening act on the program. That group was called the Cyrkle, and it had scored a big hit with a song called "Red Rubber Ball" that was co-written by Paul Simon of Simon & Garfunkel.

Today's Washington Post's story is told here.

Ticket to the Beatles'
Aug. 15, 1966, show at D.C. Stadium
Note: Upper Deck seat was just $4.00!

 Beatles take a bow,
Aug. 15, 1966, D.C. Stadium

The Beatles were on what turned out to be their last tour ever. (It was also their third U.S. tour.) I was not able to go to the show, as I was working evenings at an Arthur Murray Dance Studio. I was supposed to be on hand to sell (expensive) ballroom dancing lessons to potential female customers, with whom I would dance briefly and then make my pitch. I was 18 years old. Problem was, ballroom dancing was in serious decline. There were few potential new customers at the best of times, and on this particular evening there were none. At the moment I imagined the Beatles were taking the stage at the stadium, I was stranded in a lonely office and wishing I was on hand for the concert.

I may have dreamed this part up, but my recollection now seems to be that the windows of this office were open — even in the hot Washington summertime — and I could just barely hear the sound of fans screaming as it wafted in from the open-air concert several blocks away.

By the way, this tour came right on the heels of John Lennon's faux pas in stating the the Beatles were "bigger than Jesus" ... The final show was the now-famous one at San Francisco's Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966.

Beatles at the Washington Coliseum

On February 9, 1964, the Beatles made their first live appearance in America. It was on the Ed Sullivan TV show.

The Beatles with Ed Sullivan,
Feb. 9, 1964

A little-known trivia fact: their second live appearance in the U.S. was exactly two days later, on February 11. It was in my hometown, Washington, DC, at the Washington Coliseum.

The Beatles at the Washington Coliseum,
Feb. 11, 1964

This show was performed "in the round," meaning audience members were sitting on all sides of the stage. So Ringo had to manually turn his drum set around in the middle of the concert so that the fans on the other side could see him ...

For more on the Washington Coliseum Beatles show, see here.

The Earliest Beatles LPs, Part 2

In "The Earliest Beatles LPs, Part 1" I talked about how the first Beatles LP in the U.S., Introducing the Beatles, was much like the first one in Britain, Please Please Me, except that two songs were missing: "Ask Me Why" and "Please Please Me."

Here's the song list from the British Please Please Me LP:

1. I Saw Her Standing There
2. Misery
3. Anna (Go To Him)
4. Chains
5. Boys
6. Ask Me Why
7. Please Please Me
8. Love Me Do
9. PS I Love You
10. Baby It's You
11. Do You Want To Know A Secret
12. A Taste Of Honey
13. There's A Place
14. Twist And Shout

The U.S. Introducing the Beatles LP was released by a relatively obscure label, Vee-Jay. But every LP after that was released by Capitol records ... until, that is, the Beatles created their own label, Apple.

In 1965, Capitol played catch-up by issuing a "new" album called The Early Beatles.

Its track list:

1. Love Me Do
2. Twist And Shout
3. Anna (Go To Him)
4. Chains
5. Boys
6. Ask Me Why
7. Please Please Me
8. PS I Love You
9. Baby It's You
10. A Taste Of Honey
11. Do You Want To Know A Secret

So 11 of the 14 songs on Britain's Please Please Me were finally present and accounted for on a Capitol LP. The missing ones: "I Saw Her Standing There," "Misery," and "There's A Place."

"I Saw Her Standing There" had by that time been inserted onto the Capitol LP Meet the Beatles, which was the second Capitol album issued here, and was based on the second British LP, With the Beatles. As far as I can tell, "Misery" was never released on a Capitol LP. Nor was "There's A Place."

I'd love to know why Capitol and Vee-Jay didn't simply issue the original British LPs intact! Does anybody know?

Anyway, I was oblivious to such niceties back in the day. One had to carry around a mental catalog of Beatles songs in one's head to be able to figure out which were not showing up on LPs here in America! I know that now, but I didn't know it then ...

The Earliest Beatles LPs, Part 1

In "Pre- and Post-Rubber Soul Beatles Albums" I mentioned that I myself didn't buy any Beatles records until the Rubber Soul album, even though I was a big Beatles fan. I could listen to their earlier albums at the house of my friends Gretchen and Ricky Murphy, for one thing.

My experience in doing so, and in listening to Beatles LPs at other friends' abodes, was of course limited to the records released here in the U.S. I didn't know it at the time, but U.K. releases were, to some degree, not the same.

You can see a discography of all the U.S. releases at "Beatles discography: United States of America (USA)." Compare it to "Beatles discography: United Kingdom (UK)" and you will see what I mean.

Oh, most of the songs on, say, the very first U.S. album release, Introducing The Beatles, were the same as on the U.K.'s earliest, Please Please Me. But two songs, "Ask Me Why" and "Please Please Me," were missing on the U.S. release. (The U.S. record appeared on the Vee-Jay label, by the way, although all subsequent early Beatles albums in the U.S. came out on Capitol.)

Introducing the Beatles (U.S.)

Please Please ME (U.K.)

Why did the U.S. album lack two key songs? Who knows? But that practice of omittimg songs continued with the Capitol LPs — prior, that is, to Sgt. Pepper.

Pre- and Post-Rubber Soul Beatles Albums

To my mind, you can split the Beatles' career into two sections: that which came prior to Rubber Soul, and that which Rubber Soul inaugurated:

Rubber Soul

Rubber Soul was released in the U.S. on December 6, 1965. That meant it arrived just about two years after "I Want to Hold Your Hand" got its first radio airplay here.

This album "spoke to me" as no prior Beatles album had. I had just started my freshman year at college, and Rubber Soul's songs seemed — oh, I don't know — a bit more "grown up" than their earlier songs had been.

Some background is in order. The 1964-1965 period encompassed my last two years in high school. Two of my best childhood friends, Gretchen and Ricky Murphy, became huge Beatles fans in late '63 or early '64 after we heard "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on the car radio of their father's 1955 Chevy Bel Air convertible, which looked like this:

1955 Chevy Bel Air convertible

It must have been during the '63-'64 Christmas vacation. Gretchen, who had just gotten her driver's license, was driving Ricky and me to the grocery store on behalf of their mother. "IWTHYH" came on, and they heard it for the first time.

They were hooked.

From that time on, every time I went over to their house, they would likely be playing one Beatles album or another on a portable record player that may have looked a bit like this one:

1960s-style portable record player

I didn't own any Beatles records, not yet.

Don't get me wrong. I loved their music. I just wasn't a record buyer. I was more of a radio listener.

But Rubber Soul somehow changed that. I guess one main reason was that my father had just installed a fancy stereo setup into the room he used as a study and office. I was able to borrow it to listen to my records. The problem was, I didn't have any records yet. Rubber Soul was, if I recall correctly, my first.

I was at that point able to have Gretchen and Ricky (and other friends) over to listen to my records.

After Rubber Soul, there was Revolver. (I'm skipping over the Capitol album Yesterday and Today. Capitol was the U.S. record label associated with the Parlophone label that released the Beatles' records in the United Kingdom. Capitol would typically delete some of the tracks on the early Parlophone albums and later combine them with singles that had not appeared on any album. It would then release a "fake" Beatles record, such as Yesterday and Today, as if it were a brand new album.)

Anyway, after Revolver came Sgt. Pepper, which was the first Beatles album to be released in the same form in the U.S. as in the U.K. ... But I'm getting way ahead of myself ...

January 3, 1964 — A Beatles video is shown in the U.S. on the Jack Paar show

The first time the Beatles were shown on American TV, other than a news show, was probably this clip from the prime-time Jack Paar show of Friday, January 3, 1964, over a month before their first Sullivan appearance:

(Don't be confused by the "03.01.1964" date attribution. In Britain, the day of the month comes before the month itself.)

This was, obviously, not a live TV appearance.

First Beatles news coverage on U.S. TV?

Before "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was first played on American radio on December 17, 1963, there had been a pair of TV news reports about the Beatles' success that year in Britain.

The first seems to have been on NBC-TV's Huntley-Brinkley evening news program of Monday, November 18, 1963. The video of Edwin Newman's report has been lost, but this YouTube selection has the audio:

The first television report for which actual video is still in existence came from a CBS-TV morning news program on Friday, November 23. The reporter is Alexander Kendrick:

These TV reports were spurred by U.S. newspaper and magazine articles, according to "What You Don't Know About The Beatles' U.S. Debut". Here's more:

On November 4, at the outset of another marathon British tour, the Beatles were the main attraction at a Royal Command Performance in London. With the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret looking on, John Lennon famously asked for the crowd’s help: “The people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands, and the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewelry.” (He’d actually threatened to say, “rattle your f**king jewelry,” but thought better of it.) With that, the band launched into their closing number, a blistering version of "Twist and Shout." The next day, British newspapers were beside themselves. The show was broadcast in Britain on November 10, bringing the Beatles to yet another enormous television audience.

American journalists picked up the story. “Thousands of Britons ‘Riot’ – Liverpool Sound Stirs up Frenzy,” headlined the Washington Post. Time magazine described Beatlemania in vivid detail in an article headlined “The New Madness.” That same week, NBC, CBS and ABC dispatched crews to cover the Beatles performing at the Winter Gardens Theater in Bournemouth. The date was Saturday, November 16 ...

That in-Britain coverage by the U.S. TV networks resulted in the NBC News report on November 18 and the CBS report on November 23. (ABC apparently never aired its report.) Then, this:

CBS’s plans to air a story that evening [of November 23] were scrapped after the assassination of President Kennedy that afternoon.

Then, almost 2 months later ...

... on Sunday, February 9, 1964, the Beatles sang "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on their first appearance on the "Ed Sullivan Show":

It was their first live TV appearance in America. I watched and was mesmerized. (My parents watched with me, as I recall, and were not mesmerized.)

Yet the record had already entered the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart on January 13, positioned at #45.

By February 1, it held the #1 spot, and stayed there for seven weeks before being replaced by "She Loves You."

How could the record been at #1 before the first Sullivan appearance? Capitol Records had rush-released it 2 weeks ahead of schedule, on December 26. This happened because "I Want to Hold Your Hand" went viral on radio stations around the country following the Carroll James-WWDC premiere on December 17.

The first to play a Beatles record on U.S. radio?

There are competing claims, but it could be that the man shown in the center here, Carroll James ...

Carroll James amid the Fab Four

... was the first to play a Beatles record on U.S. radio. The date was December 17, 1963, and James played "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on radio station WWDC in Washington, DC.

I just happened to be listening.

James had been building up to it on the air for a week. He said he had a "spy" who was in England and would soon bring back to him a copy of the record that was then topping the British charts, by a new group few Americans had heard of, much less heard.

Apparently, his "spy" was an airline stewardess!

A Washington teen named Marsha Albert had written a letter to James requesting to hear a Beatles song, so there were indeed some Americans who already knew of the group.

After James aired the record, the WWDC switchboard lit up with calls from listeners who wanted to hear it again. Even though the record could not yet be purchased here, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was placed in the regular "rotation" of records being played on the station ... it proceeded to go viral throughout America ... and the rest was history!

He collects Beatles album parody art!

According to "Beatles album parody art? He loves it, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah . . .", a column by John Kelly in today's Washington Post, there's a guy who lives in Baltimore who has collected 2,000 album covers that parody or pay homage to those iconic Beatles album covers back in the '60s:

Ken Orth

His name is Ken Orth, and he's a collector of real Beatles records too.

Just so you know the kind of thing I mean by parody/homage:

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it strange how fixated we still are on all things Beatlesque?

Welcome to Beatles Rewind!

Too much has already been written and said about the legendary Fab Four ... and so, naturally, here's yet more!