(The Beatles performing on The Ed Sullivan Show.)

I turned 13 the month that the Beatles made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.  (Go ahead, do the math.)  I wish there was some cosmic significance to that chronological coincidence, but I suspect I’d be the same if the Beatles had appeared a month or a year later.  However, change me they did.

In my memory, I picture the first twelve years of my life, 1951-1963, as black-and-white, Leave It to Beaver years, where entertainment is bland, everyone is polite and says, “Yes, ma’am,” and nobody brings up unpleasant subjects.  Then in a space of six months, Martin Luther King delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech, John F. Kennedy gets assassinated, the Beatles transform pop culture and Muhammad Ali becomes heavyweight champion, and all of a sudden everything is in bright psychedelic colors, the streets are filled with hippies and protesters and everyone is challenging authority, growing their hair and letting their freak flags fly.

That’s a gross exaggeration, but everything did change in 1964.  I’d been listening to pop music for a while, but the first time I heard the opening chords of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” I felt the music tapping into primal urges that the Four Seasons and Bobby Vinton just couldn’t satisfy.  (To show you how bland the music was, the month before the Beatles arrived, the #1 song in the country was “Dominique” by the Singing Nun.)  I knew almost instinctively that I would never listen to music the same way again.

Almost overnight, I became the music obsessive that I remain to this day.  I got myself a loose-leaf notebook and every week, I diligently wrote the down the Top 40 countdown songs on both WMCA and WABC, New York’s two biggest rock and roll AM stations, a habit I continued until I left for college.  If the Beatles cited Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins as influences, I wanted to get acquainted with their music.  With the Beatles covering Larry Williams songs like “Slow Down,” I desired to learn everything I could about him.  (Oh, if only they’d had a Google and an iTunes that accommodated a 13-year-old’s allowance back then!)  My fascination continues unabated; just recently, I downloaded a CD of skiffle music that was a big part of their musical background.

It wasn’t just the Beatles, of course.  They were the biggest wave of a whole British rock and roll tsunami. Anything British was inherently cool.  1964 saw not only the first chart appearances of the Rolling Stones and the Kinks, but also the Dave Clark 5, the Searchers, Manfred Mann, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Herman’s Hermits and Dusty Springfield, as well as lesser acts like Freddie and the Dreamers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas and Peter and Gordon (Peter is the brother of Paul McCartney’s girlfriend?  That’s SO cool!).  I was fascinated by all of them, and to this day, I can name pretty much all their biggest hits.

(The Beatles arrive at JFK, February 7, 1964.)

People who weren’t alive then can’t imagine how instantaneously the Beatles took over culture, even in the days before TMZ and E!  The band’s arrival and cheeky press conference at Kennedy Airport on February 7 was headline news.  (Q: "What do you think of Beethoven?" RINGO: "Great. Especially his poems.")  Four different record labels rushed out Beatles 45s in the first month (all hits), and an old recording of “My Bonnie” in which the Beatles performed as backup band to some forgettable crooner became a minor hit.  At one point in April 1964, the top five records in the Billboard charts were all by the Beatles.

The reaction of the girls was something else.  My cousin Ann, one year older than me, declared George Harrison as her favorite, and I watched with awe as she would play her 45 of “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” in which George sang lead, and stared at her photo of him on her wall for the full 2:10 while barely blinking.  I attended the local premiere of A Hard Day’s Night with her and the screaming was so deafening that I had to attend the movie again a week later in order to finally hear the dialogue. 

Many analyses of the time cite the King speech, Vietnam and JFK’s death as factors in early Beatlemania.  This is malarkey, an outgrowth of today’s inclination to overanalyze everything and try to add 2 + 2 and get 22.  I was only dimly aware of King and had never heard of Vietnam, but still dug the music immediately.  British girls screamed their heads off for the Fab Four months before JFK traveled to Dallas.

A few years ago, I went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland where they had an exhibit about teen idols.  World-changers like the Beatles, Elvis and Sinatra were there, but so were relative flash-in-the-pans like Fabian, the Bay City Rollers, New Kids on the Block and the Spice Girls. I realized that kids have always been looking for something new and fresh, and whether it has lasting value is simply coincidental.

The Beatles were certainly new and fresh.  They sounded like nothing else on the radio.  Their rockers were joyous, their ballads sweet.  They had four voices that meshed in harmony but sounded great individually.  They looked like nobody else.  They had four distinct personalities that could appeal to everyone (my favorite was John Lennon, the brainy, artsy smart-ass I always wanted to be). 

But I’ve always wondered: What would have happened if the Beatles had broken up in 1965?  If they had stopped before recording adult records like Rubber Soul and Revolver, how would history remember them, as a significant act or just another flash-in-the-pan?

Of course, they didn’t stop, they evolved through the decade, as did we all.  Now you can mention King and Vietnam, because as the times became tumultuous, they dove in themselves, with a restless curiosity for new sounds and, very importantly, a producer in George Martin who encouraged the curiosity and could transform the new sounds into memorable hooks.  Their later recordings expanded the concept of what popular music could sound like, and we’re still enjoying the fruits to this day.

So on the 30^th anniversary of Lennon’s murder – can you believe it’s actually been 30 years? – I prefer not to mourn his loss but to celebrate the lifetime of joy and passion that he and his band mates gave me.  I would be a different, and certainly lesser, person if I had never been exposed to them.

(The Cusses take a walk across Abbey Road.  The studio is behind the white wall.)