The Beatles: A Hard Act To Follow

There’s a bit of musical trivia embedded in the show that most of America viewed on this date in 1964.

The program, of course, was the Ed Sullivan Show---and the introduction of The Beatles to America. This past weekend’s Super Bowl apparently set the all-time TV audience record, but 47 years ago, it was Sullivan’s program that set the bar at over 73 million viewers—a mark that would take years to topple.

Here’s a clip of perhaps the most electrifying song of that performance-“She Loves You”:




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBnC8REsvwg

An aspect lost to modern audiences is the fact that there were OTHER performers on that fateful night. The first to follow the Beatles after their initial appearance on the show was a magician by the name of Fred Kaps.

Poor guy.

Hundreds of screaming girls in the audience and this guy is in a tuxedo doing card tricks. The size of his audience that night is tempered by the fact that nobody cared about him or his magic.

One of the other performers that night, however, may have appreciated The Beatles more than he could fully realize at the time. It was the Broadway cast of “Oliver!”—singing the song “I’d Do Anything”. The featured young singer was a young man named Davey Jones as the Artful Dodger, who, in less than three years time would star in his own TV show as the lead singer of a musical group whose very existence would not have occurred without the Fab Four-----The Monkees!

Here is that performance:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXu3LS1fmdg

Who knew that that kid would himself become a teen heartthrob? And while the musical contribution of the Monkees cannot be compared to that of the Beatles, they were a pop culture phenomenon---and yet, just an obscure trivia footnote to the landmark TV show on this date 47 years ago.

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