But whatever it was that made them different, what resonated most for me was that they defined themselves. Nodding my head to the beat of the Beach Boys or Jan and Dean or Gary Lewis and the Playboys-or heaven forbid, Elvis-was as unthinkable as it was unforgivable.Īfter the Beatles’ appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” however, I often found myself thumbing up the radio dial to WIXY-1260, Cleveland’s white rock station, to catch “She Loves You,” “Help,” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” There was something very different about these “white boys.” Maybe it was the hair, or the fact that they were from across the pond, or their devil-may-care attitudes.
I tuned it almost exclusively to the soul music broadcasts of 1540-WABQ and 1490-WJMO. Until the Beatles crossed the Atlantic, my radio and mind had been fixed firmly at the end of the AM dial. It’s also why I hadn’t told any of them that I’d been surreptitiously listening to the Fab Four on my transistor radio.
It just wouldn’t have been cool to share with my friends that I was going to sit in my living room in front of the black and white Zenith to watch the Beatles that Sunday night. I lived in inner-city Cleveland, Ohio, in a neighborhood that was, for all intents and purposes, 100 percent black. That was me in 1964, which is exactly why I didn’t disclose my plans. Now if there is one thing to know about preadolescent boys, it is that they live in a constant state of desperation: Attaining a modicum of cool while adroitly avoiding any move that could lose it is paramount. Just as Cassius Clay, soon to be Muhammad Ali, would do two weeks later in Miami, the Beatles “ shook up the world”-particularly the world of this then-11-year-old black boy-when they appeared on “ The Ed Sullivan Show” on February 9, 1964.
In case you missed it-as if that were possible with the wall-to-wall media hoopla-four mop-top lads from Liverpool made their audacious U.S. It was 50 years ago today that the Beatles taught us how to play.
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