It Was 50 Years Ago Today.....

Unless you have been living under a rock and avoiding all media of late, you know that it was fifty years ago tonight, February 9, 1964, that The Beatles made their historic first live appearance on American television on the Ed Sullivan Show.  A then-record 78 million Americans watched that show, and popular music in America was never the same.

In 2003, there was a DVD set released that contained all four of the Sullivan shows on which The Beatles appeared.  The complete shows, all acts and all of the commercials.  In addition to seeing The Beatles, this set is a remarkable time capsule of American popular culture, and that is what I wish to write about today.

I will say right off the bat, that fifty years later, The Beatles remain incredible.  It never gets old seeing and hearing them sing, and watching them sing live, as they did on the Sullivan shows, is to use a word that they introduced to us, absolutely fab!

As for the Ed Sullivan Show - not so much.

You might often hear older folks waxing nostalgic and saying things like "I wish there were shows like Ed Sullivan's still on today."  Don't believe them. To celebrate this 50th anniversary, and in anticipation of writing this post, last night I watched that Sullivan show from 2/9/64, and I have to tell you, it took all in my power to stay off of the fast forward button.  Here's what you saw:

• The Beatles opened the show and did three numbers.
• They were then followed by a magician doing card tricks.  Card tricks! I kid you not.  Can you imagine the phone call from his agent?  "The good news is I got you a gig on the Ed Sullivan Show.  The bad news is you are following The Beatles."
• Two musical numbers from the Broadway show "Oliver". That wasn't bad, and it did feature, playing the Artful Dodger, a young Davy Jones, the future Monkee.
• Frank Gorshin doing eight - EIGHT! - minutes of bad impressions and unfunny material.
• USA Olympic Terry McDermott introduced from the audience.
• Old bag British music hall performer Tessie O'Shea getting seven - SEVEN! - minutes singing and playing a banjo.  I am not making that up. If ever the past and future of British musical entertainment was in one place at one time, it was the night Tessie O'Shea and The Beatles were on the same a TV show.
• The very unfunny and very forgettable comedy team of McCall & Brill.
• Two more numbers from The Beatles.
• The show closed with an act of acrobats. Again, I am not making that up. I suppose that their agent had the same conversation with them as the magician's.

When I first got this DVD set back in '03, I made the effort to watch all four of the shows in their entirety, and by about mid-way through the third show, I gave up, and went the the FF button to stop on The Beatles and some of the acts that I might have wanted to see.

For over twenty years, the Ed Sullivan Show was "must see TV", but times and tastes change.  Very few forms of entertainment are timeless.  The Beatles are timeless, but there is a reason why there are no Ed Sullivan Shows today.