Steve Smith remembers reading about the arrival of the Beatles at JFK Airport in New York City on Feb. 7, 1964.
It was a story at the bottom of the front page of the Saturday, Feb. 8, edition of The Joplin Globe with a photo of the Beatles at their airport news conference. The headline: “Britain’s Beatles invade U.S.”
“Britain’s way-out Beatles, equipped with rag-mop hairdos and guitars, invaded the colonies Friday,” the story began. “Thousands of delirious teen-age native girls paid them wild tribal homage when they landed at Kennedy Airport.”
Smith, now 58 and the coordinator of digital media content at Missouri Southern State University, was 8 at the time, living in Carl Junction with his parents and older brother.
“There was a lot of anticipation and excitement that was building nationally,” Smith said.
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” topped the U.S. charts. The Beatles were scheduled to perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on Sunday, Feb. 9, and two subsequent Sundays.
Smith and his brother watched the show from the floor of his aunt’s house in Carl Junction, where his family often visited on Sunday nights. His parents and aunt also were there.
He said he remembers his dad criticizing the Beatles’ hair.
“When they started playing, it seemed to me that it was like a life-changing experience,” Smith said. “I suddenly realized my parents did not know what they were talking about.”
The Beatles performed “All My Loving,” “Till There Was You,” “She Loves You,” “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on that first show. It attracted 73 million viewers — the largest-ever television audience at the time.
It had been just 11 weeks since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“We were a nation in grief, a nation in shock,” Smith said. “I think without it being planned, the Beatles helped bring the nation out of that shock. It was the beginning of our recovery period, especially for young people.”
Smith said the impact has never left him.
“They looked different,” he said. “They sounded different. The experience my generation came away with was completely different, too.
‘I wanted to be Ringo’
Mark Woodin, a Joplin dentist, was in the first grade then, the week before his seventh birthday. He was watching TV at home in Joplin.
“My initial reaction was it was the coolest thing I had ever seen,” Woodin said. “They looked cool. Very impressive.”
At school the next day, the performance of the Beatles was the hot topic, resulting in a classmate getting in trouble when she imitated the “woo” from “She Loves You.”
Woodin said the impression stuck with him. He received a 7-inch picture sleeve single of “She Loves You” for his birthday. A few years later, he received a drum kit for his 11th birthday.
“I wanted to be Ringo,” he said.
As an adult in the 1990s on a visit to Liverpool, the Beatles’ hometown, Woodin was able to jam with other musicians at the rebuilt Cavern Club. The Beatles had performed nearly 300 times at the original site.
Woodin also has a collection of Beatles memorabilia.
He said the enduring impact of the Beatles is their music.
“The music is brilliant and sounds great,” Woodin said. “They were so ahead of their time.”
Rock ’n’ roll as art form
Sean Harrison, a spokesman for Downstream Casino Resort, was 5 years old in Fayetteville, Ark., when the Beatles performed on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He sat on the floor with his older sister and younger brother in front of their black-and-white television, with their parents sitting behind them.
“The Beatles in my mind influenced and affected everybody and everything,” Harrison said.
He said he was unsuccessful in an attempt to create a Beatles fan club at his elementary school.
“The Beatles turned on the youth of America like nothing has since,” he said. “It was a remarkable phenomenon.”
Ed Minton, 57, of Joplin, said the things he loves about the Beatles today aren’t the things that first captured his attention. He said they grew as musicians, though they were accomplished at that even in 1964.
“They evolved very quickly, and their songs became something more than simple love songs,” Minton said “They started to write about the world around them. They elevated rock ’n’ roll to an art form if anybody did.”
Minton said it was inadvertent that “The Ed Sullivan Show” was on the family’s television the night of the Beatles’ debut.
“I just remember seeing it and being taken up in the excitement,” he said.
Minton, like millions of others, was inspired to play the guitar, but he didn’t pursue it until he was 14.
“For me, I couldn’t figure out their darn chords,” he said. “It was hard to make a Beatles song sound right. They were doing things back then that weren’t easy to duplicate.”
Minton said he didn’t think the Beatles realized the impact they would have.
“I don’t think they set out to change the world, but thank goodness, they did,” he said.
‘MY Kid brother’s band’
Louise Harrison, George Harrison’s sister, was backstage at “The Ed Sullivan Show” on Feb. 9, 1964.
“I was in the theater with them,” Harrison said. “I was one of the few people to see it in color.”
She had traveled to New York from her home in Benton, Ill., to meet her brother at the Plaza Hotel, surrounded by screaming teenage girls, after the band arrived on Feb. 7.
George had a sore throat and was running a fever of 104.
“The hotel doctor wanted to send him to the hospital,” she said. Their manager, Brian Epstein, rejected that plan.
“Brian was almost having a heart attack,” she said.
Then they realized that George’s sister was there.
“I was roped into being Florence Nightingale,” she said. She said she stayed in the hotel room with her brother, dispensed medicine provided by the doctor and nursed him back to health. George missed a photo shoot in Central Park and a rehearsal on Saturday, Feb. 8.
“It was very hectic,” she said of the scene at the hotel.
George and his brother, Pete, had visited Louise in Illinois for two weeks in September 1963. Beatlemania already was going strong in Britain, but George was discouraged that no one in the United States was aware of the Beatles.
She said George met members of a local band during the visit, and they invited the siblings to the local Veterans of Foreign Wars club, where they were performing that weekend. They then invited George onstage to play with them.
“When George got up and started to sing, they absolutely went wild,” she said of the audience. It also was the first time she had seen her younger brother perform.
Louise Harrison now lives in Branson and lends her name to the Liverpool Legends, a Beatles tribute band in Branson. She’s writing a book that she said she’s thinking of calling “My Kid Brother’s Band.”
Missouri concerts
Their first movie, “A Hard Day’s Night,” was in U.S. theaters when the Beatles undertook their first full U.S. concert tour in the summer of 1964.
They almost didn’t perform at Municipal Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., on Sept. 17, 1964, according to beatlesbible.com. Charles Finley, owner of the Kansas City Athletics, wanted the Beatles to perform in Kansas City on what was scheduled to be a day off for the baseball team. Epstein, the band’s manager, accepted only when Finley increased his offer to $150,000, which at the time was the highest price paid for a single concert.
Finley tried to make his money back by boosting the ticket price for the best seats to $8.50, which was considered outrageous at the time. Perhaps as a result, the size of the audience was 20,280, far short of the 35,000 capacity of the stadium.
But that crowd seemed enormous to Debbie Pisoni, of Neosho, who went to the concert.
“Just the amount of people, it was the biggest event I had ever experienced,” Pisoni said. “I had been to the symphony, but this was just an amazing amount of people.”
Pisoni grew up in St. Louis. She said she and her older sister, Linda, begged their mother to let them go to the Kansas City concert, because the Beatles weren’t scheduled to play in St. Louis.
She said the concert was a birthday gift to her sister. Her sister was allowed to take two friends, and she was allowed to take one friend. Pisoni, who had turned 11 in June 1964, said an uncle who was a business executive in Kansas City secured the tickets for them. The sisters’ mother took them to the concert and joined them in the audience.
Pisoni said they had good seats, and they could hear the music over the screaming.
“It was just all the girls and screaming,” she said. “They put on a really good concert. They were a lot of fun onstage.”
Pisoni, 60, said she was more interested in listening to the music and watching the Beatles.
“I’m not a screamer,” she said, adding that the screams gave her mother a headache.
The Beatles eventually went to St. Louis, playing at the new Busch Stadium on Aug. 21, 1966. It was two days before their second concert at Shea Stadium in New York and eight days before their final concert in the United States. The crowd of 23,143 in St. Louis paid from $4.50 to $5.50 for tickets. The Beatles had played an afternoon concert in Cincinnati before flying to St. Louis for the 8:30 p.m. concert.
Pisoni’s parents came through with the tickets again. This time, her sister went to the concert with her friends, and friends of her parents agreed to take Pisoni, who by then was 13. Her sister was nearly 16.
Pisoni said she remembers the screams being louder in St. Louis. Her seats also weren’t as good.
“I had a much better view in Kansas City,” she said.
She said the Beatles have remained an important part of her life over the past 50 years. She said two of her three children became Beatles fans, and a grandson, Zayne, 11, loves the Beatles.
“If I close my eyes, I can still see both stages and both venues,” Pisoni said. “It was really a great gift from my parents.”
Revolutionary sound
Jonathan Gould, author of “Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America,” published by Random House in 2007, said the success of the Beatles in the United States was a combination of several components, notably luck, timing and talent.
“The Beatles were more talented than anyone realized,” Gould said in a phone interview.
He said their manager, Epstein, also was crucial to the band’s success.
And there was the band’s sound, established with British No. 1 hits “Please Please Me,” “She Loves You” and “From Me to You.” It reached a new level with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which topped the charts in the United States, too. The other songs also were subsequently released to brisk sales in the U.S. Gould said the lyrics of the songs were quite tame and sentimental, but the music was ferocious.
“Their music was more revolutionary than anybody understood at the time,” Gould said.
He said the voices of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Harrison were key to the sound.
“There’s nothing that sounds like what the Beatles sounded like,” Gould said. “We’ve never gotten over it. We’ve never gotten over the sound that they made.”
Fast forward
THE BEATLES broke up in 1970.
PAUL McCARTNEY, 71, won a Grammy award last month for Best Rock Song with former members of Nirvana. He still records and tours regularly. His hits with post-Beatles band Wings have included “Band on the Run,” “Live and Let Die” and “Silly Love Songs.”
RINGO STARR, 73, also records and tours regularly. Solo hits have included “Photograph” and “You’re Sixteen.”
GEORGE HARRISON died in 2001, at age 58, of cancer. He is known for the benefit “Concert for Bangladesh” and for solo songs including “My Sweet Lord” and “Got My Mind Set on You.” He also was a member of the Traveling Wilburys with Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison.
JOHN LENNON was killed by a gunman in 1980, at age 40. Solo hits included “Imagine,” “Give Peace a Chance” and “Instant Karma.”