Lyr Req: I Want To Hold Your Hand (Beatles)

Subject: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: clare s
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 03:37 PM

I've recently been reading some books about the Beatles. Having been born in 1967, I only have the writers' views.

Several authors claim that I Want To Hold Your Hand and the Beatles appearance on the Ed Sullivan show was a massive cultural event, and that it 'changed America' One book even claims that it was 'the pivitol event in American post-war culture'

I'd be grateful for the thoughts of anyone who was there...

Many thanks

Clare

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: Joe Offer
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 04:27 PM

Hi, Clare - can't say I was "there," but I certainly watched the event on television, and I've seen that performance rebroadcast many times since. The promoters did a very effective job of hyping the introduction of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, and the excitement generated by the show was phenomenal. At the time, the show was "the" place for the most popular performers to appear, so I suppose a Beatles performance on Ed Sullivan was inevitable.
Would they have been as popular if they hadn't appeared on Ed Sullivan? I think so, but the show certainly helped them get a quick start in the U.S. If you want to get an idea of the importance of the Ed Sullivan Show at the time, rent the movie "Bye Bye Birdie."
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: kendall
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 04:31 PM

I remember when the Beatles hit the states..I hated them and their music for putting the Kingston Trio out of business. The music scene has gone downhill steadily ever since. Was it Charles Dickens who said "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public?"

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: Peter T.
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 04:31 PM

Hey, I was there! My mother went to England in late 1963 and came back to America (where we lived then) with these records and the news that there was this strange group that was driving England crazy. So we were primed to watch out for what was coming, and I have original Beatle 45s (from Vee-Jay records) that are worth a tidy sum. They first appeared on the Jack Parr show (a forerunner of the Tonight show) in fall 63 in a clip, and then in February 1964, they hit New York live. It was a total media hype, fuelled by TV (Good thing the lads were better than their hype!!!). The first telecast on Ed Sullivan was seen by more people in North America than anything up to the recent millenium broadcast, which proportionately to the populuation was practically everyone. It was like everyone in England watching the Palladium shows -- it was just what you did on Sunday night.

My own opinion is that it was the first happy thing that had happened since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and so people just went crazy, just to have some fund. Within a few weeks, they had totally overwhelmed the top 5 record spots (everyone had always said that a British group could never break into the American market) on the charts. More importantly (and people have said this), they really broke open the black r & b barrier, and the whole flood of whitened black music arrived very quickly (especially the Stones), very much like a second wave of the black influenced music of early rock and roll and rockabilly with Elvis. The Beatles killed off for about three years, most country music, the Sinatra-influenced music, and almost anyone else.

It was totally formative for me -- got me thrown out of school for wearing an illegal Beatle sweatshirt -- but was it the big postwar event? No. Musically, probably Elvis was more important for breaking down barriers in North America.But the importance of the Beatles was not as one event, big as that was, it was the fact that they they were openly creative for the next 6 years, always changing, and right in the middle of the political changes -- that was what was so influential culturally. Everyone who grew up then has lived with the example of huge popular creativity that can bring a mass audience along for the ride. Everyone else fed off that possibility, which, alas, was only occasionally matched afterwards. But it was sure great being a young teenager in February 1964, you bet! Nothing has ever beaten "She Loves You" for sheer glee!!!

yours, Peter T.

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: kendall
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 04:33 PM

all bomb threats will be ignored

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From:
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 05:06 PM

Born in 67? I'd a thought you were older from the wisdom of your posts Clare S.

The original lyric, if written by Lennon, was probably, 'I want to lift your loin cloth.'

No, Kendall, Dickens never said that. it's been attributed to P.T. Barnam, and others I believe.

Dickens in one of his many levitatious moments wrote:

By and by the beadle comes out, once more intensifying the sensation, which has rather languished in the interval. He is understood to be in want of witnesses for the inquest to-morrow who can tell the coroner and jury anything whatever respecting the deceased. Is immediately referred to innumerable people who can tell nothing whatever. Is made more imbecile by being constantly informed that Mrs. Green's son "was a law-writer his-self and knowed him better than anybody," which son of Mrs. Green's appears, on inquiry, to be at the present time aboard a vessel bound for China, three months out, but considered accessible by telegraph on application to the Lords of the Admiralty. Beadle goes into various shops and parlours, examining the inhabitants, always shutting the door first, and by exclusion, delay, and general idiotcy exasperating the public. Policeman seen to smile to potboy. Public loses interest and undergoes reaction. Taunts the beadle in shrill youthful voices with having boiled a boy, choruses fragments of a popular song to that effect and importing that the boy was made into soup for the workhouse. Policeman at last finds it necessary to support the law and seize a vocalist, who is released upon the flight of the rest on condition of his getting out of this then, come, and cutting it--a condition he immediately observes. So the sensation dies off for the time; and the unmoved policeman (to whom a little opium, more or less, is nothing), with his shining hat, stiff stock, inflexible great-coat, stout belt and bracelet, and all things fitting, pursues his lounging way with a heavy tread, beating the palms of his white gloves one against the other and stopping now and then at a street-corner to look casually about for anything between a lost child and a murder.

He wrote whole books like that, Dickens did, on and on and on and on and on. Orwell said that the outstanding characteristic of Dicken's writing was the unnecessary detail. After Dickens, the British needed the Beatles more than dull old Ed Sullivan did.

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: flattop
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 05:07 PM

Hey, I meant to sign that last one.

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: Peter T.
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 05:11 PM

I don't know what any of that means. I am still thinking about how low music has sunk if it is downhill from the Kingston Trio. (joke, kendall, joke!!!!)

yours, Peter T.

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: Blackcat2
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 05:28 PM

flattop,

Wisdom has nothing to do with age.

pax yall

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: flattop
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 05:44 PM

What is it then, gender or hair colour? I was just trying to tell Clare that I like her posts without getting kissyassed.

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 06:13 PM

Charles Dickens used to put in the odd paragraph, Oh Nameless One. Made it easier to read.

As it happens the urban legend referred to in the passage by Dickens about boys getting boiled in workhouses and made into soup appears in another thread at the moment -

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: clare s
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 06:13 PM

Thanks - Peter T, for an illuminating and intelligent reply

This is something that really interests me - if I don't get any better replies I guess I'll have to post again - with a different title

Clare

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: Captain Swing
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 08:16 PM

Dickens used to be popular in the 60s .... though I never went to one myself!

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: sophocleese
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 08:51 PM

The quote about underestimating the American public is attributed to H.L. Mencken.

Sorry clare s. I can't help you, I was only two and a half years old when the Beatles hit the Ed Sullivan show. I know my parents liked their music, I grew up with most of their albums ringing in my ears. In 1977 we were camping near Naples Italy. My older brother had a guitar and there was a bus load of single adults from New Zealand, Canada, and Britain also in the camp site. We got together for a sing around. The only songs that people could sing that we all knew were Beatle's tunes and Christmas carols. I don';t know if that helps but it is a surreal memory for me.

Sophocleese

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: Michael K.
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 10:10 PM

.....The Beatles were the greatest rock 'n roll band that ever was and will be.....There has been NOTHING even remotely close to their phenomena, since.....

They had it all.

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: kendall
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 10:18 PM

I knew it wasnt Dickens who said that...HL Mencken has been a hero of mine. Just trying to start something..The stuff the Kingston Trio did was hardly folk music, but, it was closer than anything those Beatles did.In any case, they pretty much ended the great folk scare of the 60's.

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: bseed(charleskratz)
Date: 14 Jan 00 - 11:45 PM

I was in the Philippines when the Beatles hit America, and the music took over urban pop culture in the Philippines almost instantly: In the town of Laguna de Bay, site of the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture where I was teaching, there was a club which played Beatles music at deafening volumes all through 1964 and into 1965. But when I returned to the States, folk music was still going strong withJoan Baez and Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul, and Mary and Simon and Garfunkle and Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton, and American rock and roll was going through its own transformation that had as much effect on the Beatles as they had on US music. And the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War both had huge influence on pop culture. The Beatles, and later, the Stones, certainly had more than their share of hits but Bob Dylan was almost as big and Janis Joplin and the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead were making their own marks, and Motown: the Supremes, the Jacksons, James Brown, Smoky Robinson and the Miracles--all of these were bigger among youth in Berkeley (Berserkeley) en masse than were the Beatles--but when a new Beatles album came out or they toured, they ruled...for a while. Rubber Soul and Revolver weren't so big, and the band seemed for a time to be sinking--and then came Sergeant Pepper and for a time there wasn't much else on the air. The White Album and Abbey Road had nearly the same effect, and the Stones and the Who had big impact--but in between there was Country Joe and the Fish and the Allman Brothers and Aretha Franklin and the Platters and--this is kind of stream of consciousness reconstruction--Dylan gone electric with The Band at Big Pink: Dylan's Blonde on Blonde (Blond on Blond?) was almost as big as Let It Be--and then the Beatles broke up: Was it really only six years? Did their long hair really inspire the hippies to give up haircuts entirely? Were they more influential on the growing drug culture than Timothy Leary? Were they more influential on music of the seventies than acid and marijuana and Southern Comfort were?

I really don't know. I like what Peter said about them being the first fun thing to happen since Kennedy's murder...they wrote some damned good songs and they seemed to have an effect of freeing rock and roll from three chord structures, not that there's anything wrong with three chord structures. But modal rock and roll? That was a revelation. And I think my consciousness was changed a bit by "A Day in the Life." They may not have altered the course of civilization, but they certainly had more of an effect than Don MacLean gave them credit for in "American Pie."

--seed

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: sORCHA
Date: 15 Jan 00 - 12:00 AM

I think drugs had a lot to do with it. Not necessarily "Hold Your Hand", but with the whole Beatles phenomenon. A lot of us were trying to find a way to break free of something, but we didn't really know what. The Beatles gave us something to search for, i.e., alternative meanings to everything, anything. If our parents were agin' it, we were for it. Even now, all these years later, I can find hidden meanings in the songs. I also think that it had something to do with "rock" finally having a real message of some sort, other than "I love you, I miss you, let's dance,"etc.

Subject: RE: I Want To Hold Your Hand
From: flattop
Date: 15 Jan 00 - 10:04 AM

Please excuse my digressions Clare S, I'll try to not do it again.

I watched the Beatles first appearance on Ed Sullivan on TV at my grandmother's farm in Nova Scotia. On the farm, they only get two channels on the TV. 'This one and the other one,' my uncle told me when I asked him what stations he got a few years ago.

My grandmother always choose Ed on Sunday nights, so we couldn't have watched the other channel, even if we wanted to. The Beatles made females scream. They didn't make my grandmother didn't scream. That was probably a good thing. In the late 1940s a Doctor had told her that her heart was bad and indicated that she didn't have long to live. She expressed a slight contempt for the Beatles (but not as much contempt as she had for Elvis) and lived on into the 1970s.

Unlike Peter T., I didn't realize that the Ed Sullivan was a historical event. Perhaps the influential women in our lives make a big difference in how we see the world. Peter's excited, Beatle-fan mother may have made it an incredible event for him. My mother died a few months before I moved to the farm and about a year before the Beatles played Ed Sullivan. My five brothers and sisters had been sent to live with other relatives in Nova Scotia, Quebec and Ontario. I lived on this isolated farm, about a mile off a highway, with my grandmother and uncle. They didn't see the Beatles as having any significance to the serious work of making a living at farming and they were right. The dairy cattle still needed hay the next morning and so did the two work horses, Tom and Jerry.

The Beatle music interested me but the radio picked up a lot of noise from nearby navey radio towers. My grandmother also had a habit of turning off the radio once she had heard the new, weather and farm market prices. The first time I remember being extremely moved by a Beatle was on a school bus that was driving me home from school. A girls in my class, who I had probably glanced at too often as the depressed new kid, held a crackly transistor radio up to the bus window to get better reception. The Beatles were screaming 'I Saw Her Standing There.' I can still feel my heart speeding up as I watched and listened from the other side of the bus.