The biggest top 40 station in New York, WABC, renamed themselves as WA Beatle C when the came to New York then, I can’t imagine any group having that impact today. Their songs dominated radio like no other.
Since I wasn’t born when Beatlemania and the rest of the British Invasion hit in 1964, I was wondering if, to adolescent males of the time, the Beatles were initially considered more of a band for girls. For years I’ve had the perhaps mistaken impression that at least until 1965 or so, the Beatles were generally dismissed by many teenage boys as cuddly teen idol types as opposed to groups with a harder edge and ballsier sound like the Animals, the Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Kinks.
for people born in the 60s, am i correct to say you got your beatlemania through back-tracking? i mean sure, as a toddler my mind was filled with songs that instantly jolted me into recognition, even after 20 years. but i was starting to tune in on my surroundings only when the beatles were just about ready to break-up. growing up in the 70s, there was still a lot of beatlemania in various pop media (like in sesame street.) then, when music videos got boring in the late 80s and i was entering adulthood, only then was i able to explore the beatles on my own. i talked either to people who were fully aware back in the 60s or guys my age who made it their hobby to study beatles lore. later, i discovered other 60s attractions (other invaders to the US like the zombies) and home-growns like the four seasons and the beach boys. then there were the hollywood and british musicals.
maybe it really has something to do with time frames but i’m glad for it and say without shame that no decade can surpass the 60s; and the beatles defined the 60s.
“Top 40 radio” is dead. Radio is split into genres now and I haven’t listened to a pop station (as an example local to both of us, 98 PXY) in decades.
But the Clear Channel-owned rock station has done this a few times. I think they did it for the new Coldplay album, but I’m positive they did it for U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
According to my mother, it was like a bunch of stupid teenage girls screaming so you couldn’t hear the music.
No. It was the girls who did the screaming, but boys liked The Beatles too. There were teen idol types for young girls in the '60s too, but The Beatles were not in that category (or rather, they transcended it).
By the later '60s there were older teens and twentysomethings who looked down on The Beatles and preferred bands such as those you mention, but that had more to do with a music-snobbish attitude that The Beatles were too popular, mainstream and ‘bland’. It was not to do with them being ‘for girls.’
I was born in 1960 and when I was a little boy I remember the first song I ever really noticed as “hey, that’s good!” was mom’s car radio playing “Love Me Do”.
In America, at least, girls and boys liked the Beatles equally. They were everybody’s favorite.
In retrospect, I know it seems like it all happened at once. But the heavier groups didn’t hit huge until 1965. At the time that was a huge gap. The British invasion groups that made the Top 5 (because the Billboard Book of Number One Hits lists them, which makes life easy) after the Beatles were, in order, the Dave Clark Five, Peter and Gordon, Gerry & the Pacemakers, Animals, Manfred Mann, Zombies, Petula Clark, Searchers, Herman’s Hermits, Freddie & the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana & the Mindbenders, and Seekers, before the Stones hit with “Satisfaction” in Summer 1965. The next hard rock British group to make the Top 5 wasn’t until a year later, with the Troggs and “Wild Thing” in the summer of 1966. The Kinks never had a Top 5 hit in America, though they went Top Ten three times. The Who, unbelievable as it seems today, had exactly one Top Ten hit, “I Can See for Miles” which went to #9 in 1967.
Those groups had far more success in the U.K. than in the U.S. They were almost alternative rock, cultish bands for a sliver of the audience. They came out of the huge r&b tradition that almost all British bands seem to have started with but was mostly invisible in America because the black/white separation was a thousand times bigger here. They also had a sound that could be played out over albums but didn’t translate into singles at the time (though they are classic today). And album sales, except for The Beatles and the Stones, weren’t nearly as important until at least 1967. The few that broke through in the U.S. were greatest hits albums but that wasn’t a fair representation of their sound as we know it now. The Dave Clark Five and Herman’s Hermits and Animals were the only ones who had more than one Top 10 album, although each included a greatest hits.
I heard about boys for Stones/girls for Beatles in the late 60s, but I never encountered much of that among my acquaintances. As I said earlier, the release of any Beatles album was far more of an event that the release of any Stones album and their breakup in 1970 was bigger news than any song anybody else made.
That stations today play whole albums is totally unexceptional. As soon as FM started to take over from AM in the early 70s, playing of whole albums was a normal event, especially upon release. Before then there’s no modern equivalent for how unique hearing a whole album played on radio was. It was like the world stopped. That’s my point. The Beatles could make the world stop whenever they did something new. Can anybody today match that? Not hardly. Before them? I’m not old enough to remember Elvis’s impact, but from reading it doesn’t seem quite comparable. No radio station would stop its programming to play a new album by him, for sure. And Top 40 was jitteriness and non-stop music and promos and screaming dj’s and noise and ruled the airwaves. Imagine if all three networks were to dump their programming for an hour to play a new U2 album. That’s literally unimaginable. Only the Beatles could make something as large occur.
Oh hell no.
Like the others have said, guys were into the Beatles as much as the girls, maybe more so. If I can don my Freudian hat for a moment, the free-spirited wild abandon they showed in the first couple of years kind of represented a release of frustrated sexual energy that all teens experience, not just one sex, and it could be argued that boys had more to release. The girls were just more emotional about it and got noticed more for it.
Compared to edgier bands that came later like the Stones and Animals, the Beatles were tamer. But compared to the soft, adult-approved crooners like Pat Boone and Fabian and The Four Lettermen who were foisted on teens before, the Beatles were revolutionary.
**I was in second or third grade when the Beatles hit the US. I remember the girls on the playground singing thier songs and the older boys wearing Beatle boots which were pointy toed slip on boots that were a little more than ankle high. I recall the coolest guys putting “heel plates” on thier Beatle boots which made clicking sounds as you walked, kind of like tap dancers. Us wanna-bees swiped thumbtacks from the bulletin boards and stuck those in the heels of our shoes.
Not sure when it came out but ***Paperback Writer ***( which I heard as *Paperback Rider *at the time) was one of the first songs to really catch my ear. I loved that song!
I was exactly the right age for them. Talked about them at the cafeteria at school when I Want To Hold Your Hand came out. I went to see them when they performed at the Cleveland Stadium, rushed the stage, over the flimsy snow fence, was right in front at the stage under John’s nose, yelled (with my voice that carries so well) John! and he looked down right at me. That was cool. Interestingly, I have 3 different concert programs so I must have seen them 2 other times but I don’t recall any but that event (and I didn’t do any drugs back then (still don’t), such a good girl).
My brother’s life was totally changed by them, he is a musician because of them, he holds a life-long grudge against my father because of some random anti-Beatles comment Dad made circa 1966 (my brother will still get apoplectic speaking of it, even though Dad is long gone). He brought the “mania” to the whole thing… I think their music got better as they went along.