How America fell for the Beatles in aftermath of JFK assassination

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An astonishing run of hit singles - Please Please Me, From Me to You, She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand - rocketed them to the top of the charts. They also had two chart-topping albums (Please Please Me, and With The Beatles) and two best-selling EPs. There had been four tours of the UK, including, in January, gigs in Dingwall and Aberdeen, amongst other places.

In the course of 1963 the Beatles played 287 live shows, made 49 appearances on radio and 35 on TV, and even guested on a Royal Variety Performance. They had Britain at their feet. Would America be next?

The Beatles (top) with pupils at Stowe School, Buckinghamshire, where they played a concert in early April 1963 (Image: Stowe House Preservation Trust. Photo supplied by Ken McNab)

The intriguing story of how the Fabs did finally crack the world's biggest and most lucrative market is narrated by author and former Evening Times journalist Ken McNab in his new book, Shake It Up, Baby!, which tells, month by month, the story of that tumultuous year.

The fact that their entry route into America in 1964 - groundbreaking appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, accompanied by staggering amounts of hero-worship and equally astonishing record sales - is tied in with the assassination of President John F Kennedy, makes the story even more compelling.

Veteran US broadcaster Walter Cronkite, who told millions of viewers on November 22, 1963, that President Kennedy was dead (Image: Getty Images)

Alexander Kendrick, the London correspondent of the American broadcast channel, CBS, had interviewed the Beatles for a profile at the beginning of the month, in Bournemouth.

McNab writes: "Kendrick, in almost funereal tones, said he was speaking from 'Beatleland, formerly known as Great Britain', and unapologetically felt compelled to spell out the band's name to distinguish them from the arthropods more commonly found in soil.

"... Kendrick began: 'Besides being merely the latest objects of adolescent adulation and culturally the modern manifestation of compulsive singing and dancing, The Beatles are said by sociologists to have a deeper meaning. Some say they are the authentic voice of the proletariat. Some say they are the authentic heart of Britain in revolt against the American cult of pop singers represented by Elvis Presley and his long line of British imitators...'"

Prior to the assassination, President John F Kennedy, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and Texas Governor John Connally ride through the streets of Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 (Image: © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

His light-hearted profile included a brief, grainy filmed interview, and footage of Beatles fan club workers sifting through piles of mail.

McNab writes that the segment was shown on The CBS Morning News, with Mike Wallace, on November 22.

"It was on the station's rolling news schedule to be repeated throughout the day. But by the time the fateful news started coming in from Dallas, The Beatles had been dropped, shunted into the TV equivalent of the Dead Letter Office - seemingly forever - as the station's famous anchor, Walter Cronkite, eventually told a stunned nation their president was dead

That same day in Britain, the band's second album, With The Beatles, went on sale, but the news was of course overshadowed by reports of JFK's assassination.

And that coud have been that, at least for the Beatles in America.

But then, on December 10, fate took a hand. America was still in mourning for Kennedy. US newspapers were also reporting the escalation of the Vietnam War, and racial tensions in the segregated American South.

"The problem for Cronkite ... was clear; when do you turn the page? When it the right time to move on? And how do you find any shafts of light amid such darkness?

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"Abruptly, in one of those inexplicable moments, his mind drifted back to November 22 ... and he suddenly pulled from the depths of his memory a small feature made by the CBS London bureau about an obscure pop group whose music was creating bedlam in Britain ..."The three-minute film, he recalled, included interviews with all four members of the group and also captured the frenetic scenes that were now part and parcel of every show they ever played", McNab continues.

Cronkite took the view that the Beatles were not a musical phenomenon. He later said: "The phenomenon was a social one, of these rather tawdry guys, we thought at the time, with their long hair and this crazy singing of theirs". Despite his reservations, he added Kendrick's segment to the early evening news schedule.

When it was screened, it utterly mesmerised a fifteen-year-old Maryland schoolgirl named Marsha Albert.

"It wasn't so much what I had seen, it's what I had heard", she would recall. "They had a scene where they played a clip of 'She Loves You' and I thought that was a great song ... I couldn't get it out of my mind and I wanted to hear more".

The cover of the new book by Ken McNab (Image: PR)

That night she wrote a letter to her favourite radio DJ, Carroll James, at the Washington-based station WWDC, asking why music like the Beatles was not available on American radio. Curious, he asked an air-stewardess friend to bring him a Beatles record when she next flew to London. By December 17, James had a 45rpm single of I Want to Hold Your Hand, one of perhaps only two copies in the States.

Like Marsha, he was stunned by what he heard. He rang her and said that if she could make it to WWDC she could introduce the single's debut on his show. She arrived at the station and announced to its listeners: "Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time on the air in the United States, here are The Beatles singing 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'."

The public's response was overwhelming. Before long, the single was on heavy rotation on WWDC. James made a private taped copy of the song and sent it to DJ friends in other cities, from where other copies were made and forwarded to other DJs.

In the meantime, Capitol Records, in America, had been arguing with the Beatles' British label, EMI, over Capitol's refusal to license the group's music. Eventually, Capitol agreed, on December 4, to put resources behind a Beatles campaign in America for 1964.

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The plans included a January 13 release of I Want to Hold Your Hand, but, recognising the record's sheer popularity thanks to the combined efforts of Marsha and James, they brought it forward to December 26. As it happened, millions of American teens had Christmas cash gifts burning holes in their pockets. Once they heard the single, they flocked to buy it.

As a teenager Marsha Albert helped spark Beatlemania in the United States (Image: Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The stage was set for the Beatles invasion of the States in February 1964. "Their lives were never the same again", McNab said this week. "America fell in love with them in a way that no-one could have foreseen.

"Their press conferences after they landed in the States were a masterclass in impish humour and brazen defiance. And their performances on the Ed Sullivan Show were watched by an estimated 73 million Americans - among them two teenagers, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty, whose own lives would be forever altered by what they saw".

As for the record that Carroll James played on December 17, he gifted it to Marsha Albert. She has it to this day.

* Shake It Up, Baby! The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963 (Birlinn, £22) is now on sale.