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When the Beatles touched down in New York on February 7, 1964 for their first visit to America, they brought with them a sound that hadn't been heard before. By the time they returned to England two weeks later, major changes in music, fashion, the record industry, and the image of an entire generation had been set into motion.
Coming less than three months after the assassination of President Kennedy, the Beatles' visit helped rouse the country out of mourning. A breathless and condescending media concentrated on the band's hairstyles and their adoring fans, but their enduring importance lay in their music, their wit, and style, a disconnect that signaled the beginning of the generation gap.
In this intriguing cultural history, Martin Goldsmith examines how and why the Beatles struck such a lasting chord.
"... fascinating ... quotations from those fusty Americans..." (New Statesman, 12th April 2004)
"...a breezily intelligent biography...perhaps the first serious Beatles history to have a truly happy ending." (Entertainment Weekly, February 6, 2004)
Whether you're old enough to have lived through Beatlemania or young enough to know only that one of these guys went on to play in Wings, Martin Goldsmith offers new twists on a fascinating subject in The Beatles Come to America. In this reflective account of the Beatles' explosive arrival on the U.S. music scene in 1964, Goldsmith digs into the tale with such attention to detail that its freshness seems never to have faded. Discovering what went into designing the stage set for the Beatles' first appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show," for instance, makes clear how portentous that broadcast turned out to be.
The story is put into a personal context as the author inserts himself into the narrative, both as a teenager bearing witness and an adult now looking back with some perspective. The opening pages, for example, take us along on his pilgrimage to Liverpool on a recent summer day. Where the Britney generation might see an unremarkable urban panorama, Goldsmith finds evidence of miracles—a street called Penny Lane, a dank reliquary in the shadows of the Cavern Club-and, briefly but gloriously, bonds with a couple of Russians drawn on their own "hadj" to the center of Strawberry Fields.
This magic blows through the book, past delightfully obscure anecdotes and insightful reflections that present the Beatles as both a tonic for the malaise that followed the Kennedy assassination and a harbinger of the feminist revolution. When the Fab Four, a little bewildered at what they had just unleashed, wave goodbye to America and fly back home, Ringo wonders, "How i...