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Beatlesmania Lives On! Looking Back 60 Years After John, Paul, George and Ringo Conquered the U.S.

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Feb 23, 2024 5:38 pm·

By Scott Barwick

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Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! John, Paul, George and Ringo left England to conquer the states six decades ago.

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Beatlesmania! Looking Back 60 Years After the Beatles Conquered the U.S.

Warm Welcome

“I can’t tell you how incredible it was,” said Ringo Starr of arriving in the U.S., where 3,000 fans welcomed him, George Harrison, John Lennon and Paul McCartney at NYC’s JFK airport on February 7, 1964. “And 60 years later, I’m still here talking about it.”

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Here Comes the Sun

“I’d seen quite a few of our major stars go to the States and come back and they weren’t famous,” said Paul, here making a splash in Miami before the band’s second gig on The Ed Sullivan Show, on February 16. “[We didn’t] want to come back with our tails between our legs. [But] people loved us. So we loved it.”

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Band of Tourists

Can’t buy me love! Besides the sights of NYC’s Central Park, the band had plenty to point to during their U.S. visit — by April 4, they had the top-five singles in the country!

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Breaking Records

On February 9, a then record 73 million people tuned in to see the Fab Four’s U.S. debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. And, Ringo recalled, there was a bit of luck involved. “One day we’re on a plane coming back to London from Sweden, and [met Ed]. He’d never seen us play. He just saw the crowds on the airport roofs screaming and shouting and [he] booked us blind.”

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Happy Times

“Being in America was so exciting,” remembered Ringo. “All the music that we loved was in America.”

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Fangirls

“It was very exciting, just having that many people — predominantly girls, all screaming,” admitted Paul of the band’s first U.S. concert, on February 11 at D.C.’s Washington Coliseum.

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Strep Secret

Do you want to know a secret? While John, Paul and Ringo got to horse around in Central Park before their U.S. TV debut, George stayed back at the Plaza Hotel nursing his strep throat.

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Good Humor

“The press conferences were quite funny,” said Paul, here with the lads in L.A. on August 23 for their gig at the Hollywood Bowl. “[The reporters were] grown-ups looking disapprovingly at the children having too much fun. We knew it wasn’t hard to beat that kind of cynicism.”