Sentimentality be damned.  This has been in my head for years, and maybe because their names have been in the news recently, it’s time.  Although some names have been changed, if memory serves, the events related here are true.   

            Catholic high school  girls  didn’t cut classes in the ‘60’s, so I never made it to JFK or The Plaza, but the day you landed, I knew who you were.  For a week before you arrived in New York, on that cold Friday in February 1964, Murray the K, a local DJ, had been playing your music and pre-recorded interviews incessantly.  It drove my mom crazy but I loved you and your music.  By the end of that week, America knew about you, your music, your families, your lives.  

            John was the “Sorry girls,  he’s married” one.  He and Cynthia even had a son, Julian, and suddenly I thought Julian was a fab name.  Paul, the “cute,” one, wasn’t married and lived with his widowed father.   George was the “quiet” one, and Louise, his married sister, was living here in the States.  About Ringo, he of the “four rings,” we knew his real name was Richard, he was the newest member of the group, and everyone agreed he just wasn’t as cute as the others were.  We instantly became fascinated with the geography of England because you were “Liverpuddlians.”  The rest of your story is what legends are made of: although you’d each been in different bands, you hadn’t been playing together very long, and through some quirk of fate, you coalesced into a winning combination, and now you were about to hit the big time – the Big Apple. 

            For the next two days,   New York City and the rest of the world saw and heard your every word, your every move, and very often you were “cheeky.”  When asked what you called your long haircuts, (when boys were snipping their ducktails and girls were teasing and spraying their beehives), Ringo answered flippantly, “Arthur.”  Cheeky, along with gear, fab, fav, jelly babies, Mersey, mods, and rockers were words we quickly incorporated into our everyday speech.  We thought we were so gear.

          Everything you did   that weekend, from sightseeing in Central Park to television dress rehearsals, was considered a major news event, and reported on every channel of the evening news and in the newspapers – even the esteemed New York Times acknowledged that you were news that was fit to print. 

         That Sunday night,   February 9, 1964, over 73 million Americans, including my three best friends and me, watched you on the Ed Sullivan Show from my living room.  We bounced, squealed, kissed the screen at you and your mop-top haircuts, not on cute little boys like our John-John, but on clean-cut young men in suits, whose jackets happen not to have collars.  My mom watched too and although she pooh-poohed you, she didn’t think you were too bad, “not like that gyrating Elvis anyway.”  Besides, she’d been a screaming “bobby-soxer,” for “Frankie” at the Paramount Theatre twenty-five years earlier.

            Mom surprised us   that night by giving us tickets to the Carnegie Hall concert for later that week, as she had arranged it earlier with the other parents; Mary’s dad had to take us and Janie’s dad had to pick us up.  Since Susan and I were joined at the hip and cohorts in crime, all we had to do was stay out of trouble and not get detention for the next few days.  We were amazed as mom said that every teenager needed a “Frankie” and she believed you would be ours.  We didn’t get detention and my mom soon found our how right she was.

            Carnegie Hall   holds about 6,000 and the horseshoe-shaped interior didn’t look very big until we sat down.  Our seats were right in front of you, in the back, on the floor, under the first tier, not stage right or left, but dead center at the apogee of the curve, in a direct line with you – when the stage looked about a block away.  It was a thrilling, exciting, and frightening experience all at the same time.  This was a very big moment for me, not only attending your concert, or even being at Carnegie Hall. 

          I’d been there  almost every Saturday morning the year before, forced to attend the Bernstein Young People’s Concerts with Leopold  Stokowski, (I can’t believe I’m saying “forced” – but at the time, Saturday morning’s were not for school-bussed symphony appreciation.), but to be in Manhattan at night was the dream of most teenagers.  The Manhattan nightlife was for the older, more sophisticated, more cosmopolitan, legal-drinking-aged New Yorker, which we most definitely not.  Whereas we were from  the Bronx, an hour, a bus, a subway a lifestyle away, and we were certainly not sophisticated – in any way. 

          That night we were  delivered right to your doorstep and abandoned on the sidewalk for hours.  Do you realize where we could have gone, what we could have done?  I didn’t – my friends and I didn’t have a clue, which is why our parents knew they could trust us ~ we really were clueless.  No one blew it and we all gained the respect of our parents but more importantly, the awe of our friends.  This was my Independence Day, the very beginning, the first baby step into my adult life and you were the catalyst behind it. 

            Your Carnegie Hall   appearance was my first rock n’ roll concert and probably your most sedate.  You were only on stage for about a half-hour that night and although we tried to scream out in between songs, I don’t think we succeeded.  I wanted to be one of those people sitting behind you on stage and I always wondered how much they paid for those seats.  You sang the same songs you did on the Sullivan Show; “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” was your biggest hit but John’s, “Twist and Shout,” has always been my fav.

            I screamed at Forest Hills   in 1964 and at Shea Stadium in ’65 and ’66.  Forest Hills Tennis Stadium holds about 16,000, people and was located right in the middle of a neighborhood ~ I think two-story adjoining brick townhouses surrounded it.  I can’t imagine arriving by helicopter and landing in the middle of that stadium in the heart of a congested suburb.  I can’t imagine what it was like to listen to you and those 16,000 fans for an hour right outside your backdoor.  It was an amazing performance, but I know that our screaming, as always, drowned out your voices.

            I was one of 56,000 fans  at the first Shea Stadium concert in 1965.  Continue reading »