-Can you give me a
little background on the performance itself?
Sullivan had seen the
reception to the Beatles' by local London fans while at Heathrow airport in
1963 and, with the remarkable instincts of a veteran vaudevillian and talent
booker, had recognized that such an intense fan reaction might actually translate
from the very different English to American audiences. In the event, he was
proved right.
-Why was this
appearance so important?
The timing was
extraordinarily good: John Kennedy had been killed in Dallas in Nov '63, an
event which was both massively traumatic and also massively publicized
(including the notorious on-camera murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby).
At the same time, after a remarkable apotheosis of American-born rock &
roll acts between about 1954 and 1959--Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard,
Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and many "crossover" black
artists--American pop music had to an extent entered a fallow period: Elvis was
in the Army, Little Richard had (temporarily) gone back to work, Buddy &
Richie Valens had been killed, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry had legal or tax
problems (or both). At the same time, while this "media space" was
opening up, remarkable things were happening in England with overseas
transformations of American blues and R&B.
-How did this
performance, or the Beatles in general, change American culture?
That's a huge question,
and really impossible to answer. The Beatles represented a response to the
"Baby Boom"--the post WWII boom in births and, by the early '60s, an
entirely new social and marketing class called "teenagers." At the
same time, they were a remarkably talented group of individuals--3 incredibly
strong songwriters (John, Paul, George), 3 incredibly talented instrumentalists
(Ringo, George, and Paul)--and they were remarkably self-contained. They had
both the musical talent and imagination and the social/media skills--much of it
innate, or learned on the tough stages of the English provinces and the north
German nightclubs--to be able to respond to a worldwide media meltdown, with
themselves at the eye of the storm, and still be able to respond quickly,
comedically, and very, very cannily. They were a remarkable unit.
-How did the Beatles
change music?
Well, they took the
lessons of many American roots musics, from country, R&B, and blues; to
'50s rock 'n' roll; to various Latin pop styles (cha-cha-cha, tango, beguine);
elements of big-band music; the choral singing tradition of English
Anglicanism, and English folk's modal scales. They wrote all their own music
(and John, Paul, and George were all flat-out genius songwriters). They had
worked out a way to be remarkably self-contained, both creatively (as
songwriters, singers, and instrumentalists) and also financially (Brian Jones,
before his accidental death, had charted the course of their success, and its
careful, sequential steps) with masterful precision. They managed an
oppositional stance to social norms and political conservatism with the same
sardonic, parodic, and cocky sense of humor that comedy groups like the Goons
and later Monty Python used to such devastating effect. They were remarkably
courageous as artists--they constantly tried new things. All of these tendencies
drastically "upped the bar" for what a pop group could seek and could
accomplish.
-Have you seen the
performance, either the first viewing, or a recording? What are your thoughts
about it?
I didn't see the
performance on first viewing--I was a toddler, but my family weren't
particularly television watchers--but as a scholar of American music, of course
I've watched recordings. I have very complex reactions, as I suspect do many
who loved the group. First of all, they all seem so *young* (younger every time
I watch it, as I age). The screaming teens seem like a time capsule--we would
never be that charmingly naive or "over the top" in our adulation of
pop stars again. But what I take away every time I watch *any* live performance
recording of the Beatles--or for that matter, studio footage as well--from the
1964 Ed Sullivan appearances to the last performances on the rooftop of Apple
Records in January of 1969--was what astonishing, unique, mutually compatible
musicians they were. From the clubs of Hamburg or Liverpool, playing marathon
4- and 5-hour gigs with dancers tumbling into the bandstand, to live
performances on Sullivan, to Shea Stadium with a tiny little Shure Vocalmaster
PA in the face of 50,000 fans, to that last, elegiac performance on the rooftop
at Apple, they were four of the 20th century's greatest pop musicians. And
surely, surely, one of the century's greatest, most brilliant, most courageous,
most influential musical ensembles.
That's what I've got.
