This Day in Pop Music History (The Beatles Appear on Ed Sullivan)

February 9, 1964—With a live studio audience packed with teenagers providing the noise and four moptops from Liverpool providing the visual accompaniment, the Beatles launched the British Invasion in earnest with their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. The cultural landscape would never be the same.

A mite too young for the first American manifestation of Beatlemania, I became interested in the Fab Four a few years later, through, of all things, the half-hour Saturday morning cartoon series featuring the group. So, about a decade ago, curious about their first live appearance before an American audience, I watched the show at Manhattan’s Museum of Television and Radio (now the Paley Center for Media).

What struck me full force on that viewing was not the tumultuous reception for the group (I’d read all about it, so I wasn’t surprised), nor their skills as musicians (the wall of sound surrounding them, which sometimes threatened to drown them out entirely, was probably not the best environment to appreciate their abilities), but the sharp difference between them and the other acts that Sunday night.

Billy Crystal’s movie directorial debut, Mr. Saturday Night, concerned a sour Bortsch Belt comic—a would-be Milton Berle—who not only got clobbered in the TV ratings by “Davy Crockett” but then had the rotten luck to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show the same night as the Beatles.

It’s easy to imagine the sense of bewildered anger displayed by Crystal’s fictional character, Buddy Young Jr., as you watched the other real-life entertainers who filled out the rest of the card in the Beatles’ first of four appearances on the longtime Sunday night hit.

The face most recognizable to Baby Boomers is probably Frank Gorshin, who a couple of years later won enduring fame as one of the villains in one of the favorite shows of my childhood, Batman.

But the musical entertainment that Sunday night is what I’m really concerned with here. Like the many other variety shows that filled TV screens in the Sixties, Ed Sullivan’s was based on the dream of a common culture—the idea that all manner of acts could find a home there, to be welcomed by young and old alike. This night was no different.

One act, Georgia Brown and the “Oliver Kids,” performed a skit from the Lionel Bart musical Oliver! The entertainer that really appeared out of left field, though, was an English act, Tessie O’Shea, a blonde 50-year-old who belted out songs like a Cockney Sophie Tucker, her original inspiration.

At the age of three, Tessie had climbed onto a stage at an English seaside resort and let out with a song called “An Egg, An ‘am and an Onion,” and she hadn’t stopped since. She was an irrepressible product of the dance-hall tradition that John Osborne had already christened a symbol of dying imperial Britain in his play about a seedy comic, The Entertainer.

These types of musical acts—along with, say, opera stars such as Roberta Peters, or jazz musicians such as Buddy Rich or Ella Fitzgerald—depended, to one degree or another, on an older musical tradition in which a performer played songs written by someone else.

And if you wanted further confirmation of the source of these songs, you only had to turn, on the same Sunday night that the Beatles came on, to the show that immediately followed Sullivan’s on CBS, The Judy Garland Show. On that particular episode of her short-lived but well-loved series (JFK’s favorite), the legendary film star sang songs to her children with lyrics crafted for the occasion by the great songwriter Johnny Mercer.

The Beatles were not the first singer-songwriters (Bob Dylan, among others, had gotten there ahead of them), but they gave that emerging movement a tremendous forward thrust with their appearance that night. With their powerful demographic force, Baby Boomer listeners—and especially Baby Boomer musicians inspired by the Liverpool quartet—would increasingly desert a tradition that called for composers who crafted songs explicitly for other voices—a tradition that had given rise to Oliver!, Tessie O’Shea and Judy Garland.

One of those listeners was a member of “The Oliver Kids,” a youngster named Davy Jones, who decided, after listening to the Beatles, that he wanted to be a part of a musical group, too. A few years later, he would get his chance when he became part of an American TV knockoff of the four English charmers, The Monkees.

But, after a season of pop hits but no critical love, Jones and bandmates Mickey Dolenz, Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork decided they wanted to be more like The Beatles than their record company expected. They not only wanted to act as musicians or even play instruments, but write songs, just like the group that had inspired the creation of their show. So they insisted on ditching the Brill Building stable of songwriters put together by music publisher Don Kirshner and started playing songs their own songs.

Record sales for The Monkees promptly tanked, but at least they had the artistic satisfaction of breaking with the past, just as The Beatles, four years earlier, on a midwinter night before an estimated 73 million viewers, had done.