Listen. Want to hear the sound of a phenomenon?

It conquered its last biggest frontier tonight, thirty-four years ago.

And it emerged from a landscape entirely outside of America's realm (still
a blow to historians who are convinced that all *real* rock-and-roll was
home-grown. :-) But although its jargon had the sharp tang of genteel
English exoticism, its subtext was bathed in familiar words and
rhythms...and themes as old as humankind itself. 

This mania was not, after all, the least bit unintelligible. We Yanks were
already equipped to comprehend the dialect of Britain's great gift to pop
music---England's modern-day revolution. We just had to see it in motion,
for ourselves, to fully appreciate its voice. Which sounds like a paradox,
but it's not. We had to see to hear.

And we had no choice. It was either learn to speak their tongue or be left
in the archaic musical syntax that had carried pop music from its roots of
passion in the mid-fifties to the cooler, soulful transmutations of the
early sixties. Today is England's triumph too, not merely the night
America began to breathe in time with Merseybeat.  Thirty four years ago
tonight, a wave broke over us and subsumed us in a sound of joyful
pandemonium. 

You know how it happened to you---whatever your age, whatever your country
of origin: the first glimpse of their startling new image, the first 
fair notes of their song.

You needn't have seen it on Ed Sullivan's variety show, as many of us did
tonight, to understand what happened. But if you do remember that night,
maybe---like me---you have some way of commemorating that evening.

I sit down with my VCR and play a video of the whole show. Start to
finish, in real time, at eight o'clock in the evening on February ninth.

It's better than time travel. In fact, it may well *be* time travel. 

I swear, the first few minutes of Mr. Sullivan's show---antique
commercials and all--have me hooked as if no time had gone by. I've heard
the Fabs' music a million times; seen their images (in dreams and in
reality) probably every day of my life since that night. And yet I'm as
breathless tonight as I was the first time I saw them move. It's the same
electricity, then as now.

Now I *knew* who they were; had heard their "I Want To Hold Your Hand" for
well over a month (and been charmed by it since I first turned up the
transistor to hear it better); even sneaked a look at these odd lads in
national magazines (the 31 January 1964 issue of "Life" didn't quite get
it, comparing them to another fine fad in the great tradition of goldfish
swallowing).

But like then...now (because I'm writing this in real time too, and
watching the show even as we speak, so to speak), I can't quite shake
loose the irrepressible impression that I'm seeing them for the very
first time tonight. 

And I am, I suppose. Or rather there's some element here that imprinted me
with the sense of that evening, and I *can* watch them with a kind of
double vision. I see them with my eyes now, with the nearly
three-and-a-half decades of knowledge and reading and listening and
loving...and in the same moment I see what I saw when the slate was nearly
empty, when the four young men moved with such magnetism and sang with
such mesmerizing power that it was like the first time you realize you're
in love---only you're not quite sure what it's called when the medium is
music!

What they were doing, of course, was giving back, through their melody and
movement, the same passion that had lit them aflame when they heard
"Heartbreak Hotel" a decade earlier. Those of us watching the show glowed
with a resonant fire. For me, it's a flame that's never gone out. 

Folks in England had nights like ours ("Sunday Night at the London
Palladium", the Royal Variety Performance) but they had something we
didn't---a quiet, subtle seduction by the four Liverpool lads.  The wave
of change in England had built slowly all during 1963, but here was its
crest. The Beatles turned the tide of American music. How sweet to feel
enveloped in it! 

Tonight, though, visual language of pop music changed as well, adapting
itself to new terminology, the only iconography that could explain the men
who *seemed* identical but who were distinct; the hair; the humor; the
anti-choreography of their stage presence. Rising from the rubble (like
the "bomb site" images exploited by the Fabs' own press photographer) was
a sharp Northern accent, a lilt of the underclass, an image of musical
rebels...yes, despite the suits. :-)  American journalists, having thought
they'd seen it all before, were bedazzled by the onslaught.  Did they
fall? Like us, I think they did.

That was only one part of it, of course. There was music there too, not
just mania-for-its-own-sake, but so early on, America was still was hard
pressed to discern it. The noise, the pandemonium, the screams of the
girls were part of the phenomenological storm. But the creative tempest
was buried under that roar: new words built on lyrical themes of old,
country-style harmonies transfigured and recombined. They would grow and
flourish over time, as we began to see their art.

But here, tonight, that future was newborn. In the swirl of their own
freshly-minted fame, the Fabs themselves were in a sort of netherworld,
where reality had not yet reached them. They said many times that they
didn't understand their own power until relatively late in the game, when
they returned from a brief tour of Sweden in late '63 and found Heathrow
massed with hysterical hordes.

But it's touching to realize that as they flew across the pond to the
States, the Beatles wondered why America would want them. This despite
the fact that "I Want To Hold Your Hand" was number one on the U.S. 
charts, and had been for three weeks when the Fabs stepped in front of the
camera for their first live show on American soil...they still could not
quite comprehend what had happened to them. 

I'll venture to say that neither did we. We knew we'd been knocked off our
feet this night so long ago. Who knew what a lasting vertigo we'd enjoy?

Give England its due. Four of its native sons made this happen, with the
help of their own musical heritage as well as the one they admittedly
borrowed from us; backed by family, compatriots, soulmates; and bolstered
by twin desires to create and to excel. For a short little while, this 
"Beatlemania", in all its facets, was Britain's own lustrous artistic gem.

But then it was ours too, and the world's. 

I'm very grateful for that gift!

-- 
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"America has everything. What do they want us for?"
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saki (dlm3@midway.uchicago.edu)