Pre-mania

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' first appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show." The Los Angeles Times has a fine piece about the run-up to Beatlemania.

It inspired us to dig up some archival footage and news reports from 1963, before the onset of what the L.A. Times calls the pop culture Big Bang. The first is a report from a snarling Edwin Newman that closed out Chet & David's nightly NBC newscast in mid-November:



A few days later, a CBS fuddy-dud tried to make sense of the mop tops and their screaming fans. (He credits the boys with "saving the sagging British corduroy industry.") This report aired the morning of the JFK assassination and was supposed to air again that evening on Walter Cronkite's broadcast. It was pre-empted, of course, and aired again, instead, a few weeks later. It prompted Capitol Records to move up the release of the single "I Want to Hold Your Hand" from January to December 26, 1963.




And here's a BBC documentary from August 1963, which starts with the Beatles but then moves on to others as it explores "the Mersey sound."



You can feel an eruption building. On Feb. 9, 1964, the "youngsters from Liverpool" played to 78 million viewers. "Close your eyes ...."