America meets the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show
At approximately 812 p.m.Eastern time Sunday February 9 1964 The Ed Sullivan Show returned from a commercial (for Anacin pain reliever) and there was Ed Sullivan standing before a restless crowd.He tried to begin his next introduction but then stopped and extended his arms in the universal sign for Settle Down.
Quiet he said with mock gravity and the noise died down just a little.Then he resumed Heres a very amusing magician we saw in Europe and signed last summer.Lets have a nice hand for himFred KapsFor the record Fred Kaps proceeded to be quite charming and funny over the next five minutes.In fact Fred Kaps is revered to this day by magicians around the world as the only three-time Fdration Internationale des Socits Magiques Grand Prix winner.
But Fred Kaps had the horrific bad luck on this day in 1964 to be the guest that followed the Beatles on Ed Sullivanpossibly the hardest act to follow in the history of show business.It is estimated that 73 million Americans were watching that night as the Beatles made their live U.S.television debut.Roughly eight minutes before Fred Kaps took the stage Sullivan gave his now-famous intro Ladies and gentlementhe Beatles and after a few seconds of rapturous cheering from the audience the band kicked into All My Lovin.
Fifty seconds in the first audience-reaction shot of the performance shows a teenage girl beaming and possibly hyperventilating.Two minutes later Paul is singing another pretty mid-tempo number Til There Was You from the Broadway musical Music Man.Theres screaming at the end of every phrase in the lyrics of course but to view the broadcast today it seems driven more by anticipation than by the relatively low-key performance itself.
And then came She Loves You and the place seems to explode.What followed was perhaps the most important two minutes and 16 seconds of music ever broadcast on American televisiona sequence that still sends chills down the spine almost half a century later.Oliver who sang Id Do Anything as the Artful Dodger midway through the show.His name was Davy Jones and less than three years later hed star in a TV show of his own that owed a rather significant debt to the hysteria that began on this night in 1964 The Monkees.
