I've never liked the Beatles, but I used to watch Ed Sullivan sometimes with my grandmother. She'd cuddle me, but I wasn't allowed to talk except during the commercials. I believe I liked the Lennon Sisters best.

That is a really cool story, thanks for sharing. I've always liked reading rock history, and in fact just finished the first book of a planned trilogy that is to the definitive Beatles history. The early years have always been the most interesting to me. Think of yourself at only 17 as George Harrison was at the time - living in a single dingy room with your mates, in a country you were at war with 15 years ago and you don't speak the language, spending literally all night on stage in the rough waterfront bars of Hamburg's Reeperbahn with all the girls, booze, and amphetamines you could handle, and at the end of it all, having become a professional musician with a new genre that would go on to literally change the world. That last statement is no exaggeration - our culture as we know it would be totally different without the Beatles.

By the time America saw them that night on Ed Sullivan, they were the cute and polished Beatles. Underneath that thin veneer though were four working class lads from a bombed-out seaport city that was looked upon by the rest of their very class-conscious country as the lowest of the low. George and Ringo especially were from poor, tough neighborhoods, and all of them were no strangers to a fight. They had no future and the music to them was at best was just a way of postponing for a year or two the inevitable - a miserable and dreary life as low-class laborers or maybe for Paul and John, a lower middle class existence doing something they had no interest in to start with.

That they overcame all of that to get where they did and to have the influence they did is really an amazing story.

Great post! Thanks for sharing.

YES! I remember that Ed Sullivan show. And the "records" that followed (yes, actual records).

The Beatles are one of the illustrations for the 10,000-hour rule by author Malcolm Gladwell in his book, The Outliers. Due to a bit of a mistake, the recruiter ended up with the Beatles instead of some band from London. As cplnuswing said, they played and played and played. Several return visits to Germany. I really liked the reference to the bombed out Liverpool and the fact that WWII was only 15 years removed, kind of like the attack on the World Trade Center from today.

In the book, Gladwell proposes that nobody gets really good at what they do without doing it diligently for at least 10,000 hours. That is five years of standard 2,000-hour years.

Terrific post. Great era of music.