Questions for First Generation US Beatles Fans in 1964

Ha! I was 5 and asked for the Beatles (not sure if it was for a birthday)...and I got this one...


Bern

TRACKLIST
1/1 Beats!!!!- I Want To Hold Your Hand
1/2 Beats!!!!- This Is What I Mean
1/3 Beats!!!!- Tell Me I'm The One
1/4 Beats!!!!- Joshua
1/5 Beats!!!!- Maybe I Will
2/1 Beats!!!!- I Saw Her Standing There
2/2 Beats!!!!- Seems To Me
2/3 Beats!!!!- Got To Get Another Girl
2/4 Beats!!!!- Your Kind Of Love
2/5 Beats!!!!- There I Go

 

And all I got was a rock.

 

I actually liked the LP....played it a lot.

Bern

 

But LOVED the Capital orange & yellow swirly! Would watch it go round and round and round and get hip-mo-tized.

 

I got a Stones album... so with my rock I also got some roll.

 

In the spring to summer of 1964, The Beatles were on fire, plain and simple. They could do know wrong. However, the best thing about them at that time is that they opened the doors for a ton of other British Bands that I liked just as much if not more than the Beatles. Dave Clark 5, The Searchers, The Animals, The Rolling Stones, The Zombies, etc. etc. All reared their heads in the first 6 months of 1964. For me it was 45 heaven. I didn't have enough money to buy record albums, but I could cough up a buck for a single record.

It was a great time to be a teenager on the planet.

 

My local top-40 AM station (WINX-AM) had "Tell Me Why" in heavy rotation at
one point in '64. I went to store after store but could never seem to find what I
thought must be a 'big hit' 45. I was nine years old and knew not the ropes then.

 

My historian side is itching here, so I want to interject; It must be remembered that up until post-"Sgt. Pepper", just about all the youth-oriented Rock 'n Roll & R&B records were largely seen as silly, trivial, and simply another young fad no different from the hula hoop or the slinky. And when the Beatles hit like a hydrogen bomb in early '64, there was simply a mad, mad rush to ram the record shelves to rake in the bucks, chronological order be damned. We wouldn't have had the '64 mess had A-holes like Dexter not thought he was some kind of god for the tastes of the young at Capitol. The teenagers spent the equivalent of Fort Knox that year on the British Invasion, and the more important Beatle discs made their way to the higher rungs of the charts. They largely sorted it out give or take an Ed Rudy or "Beatles Story".

 

Your post made me smile. This was my first Beatles record! I just bought it again, over 50 years later, just last month. It made me happy.

This cover band was from the US. Gary Wright was in it. Yes, that Gary Wright.!

 

Not to disagree with Steve, but in my experience the average radio listener in 1964 did not consciously think "Oh, 'She Loves You' and "Please Please Me' are older Beatles songs that were already hits." We did perceive that it was "I Want to Hold Your Hand" that started it all here in the states, but for most those other songs were just a wonderful and simultaneous embarrassment of riches, and we didn't make any distinction between them — we just enjoyed the hell out of all of them.

My local Top 40 station played any and all Beatles songs — A sides, B-sides, album tracks, and yes, "Ain't She Sweet" — during those heady early months of Beatlemania. And most interestingly, I very clearly remember them playing "Shout" from the Around the Beatles TV show. Obviously, that had not officially been released anywhere, so some enterprising DJ had secured a home recording of this performance made off the air in the UK. I spent many subsequent years wondering where the hell that came from.

I also have a clear memory of going to the record department of a local discount store and seeing it overrun with the kind of fake Beatle product that has been alluded to in this thread. I was, needless to say, not fooled by any of this, and I doubt many of my peers were. But as some have attested, any number of well-meaning parents, aunts and uncles, etc. were!

 

This exactly except for me it was the east coast NYC AM radio staions! : ) It as all beatles all the time! WABeatlesC...

 

It truly was an invasion! everyone I knew was smitten with them...

 

I hated seeing the old Beatles catalog get reissued on it whenever that happened. My sister brought home the White Album when it came out and it had that label so somehow I permanently associated the hippie-ish new vibe with the Apple label. That made things like Something New or The Early Beatles look totally incongruous to me using those labels when they were reissued a couple of years later on Apple. Just didn't seem right somehow.

 

I have a question: We know where the Vee Jay album ended up once the rights got sorted out (it was cut up, thrown in the air and taped back together as The Early Beatles). But what of the early 1963-64 singles? I know some were reissued briefly on the Starline oldies label (and oddly, those don't seem to have been available for very long), but I don't remember seeing for instance, "Love Me Do," "She Loves You," etc. on Capitol 45s unless they were from Canada.

I get that they wouldn't have been current any more by then, but I had (for example) a "Help!" 45 on Apple, so it would seem most of the singles catalog stayed in print for years. (Heck, I even remember seeing "Ain't She Sweet" in the oldies 45 bins as late as the 1980s on the Atlantic label.) Just seems odd to me that those early singles didn't. Or am I wrong about that?

 

That's an interesting question. Just took a quick look through Discogs and all I saw for She Loves You on Swan (both black labels and white labels) and then a late '70s or '80s purple label Capitol. I had a Swan white label copy in the early '70s and a copy The Beatles Second Album so I never thought to look elsewhere.

 

When I started buying Beatles records in Canada, I had no idea about the original UK records, nor the difference between US & Canada records. Only imports I saw where the German singles

No Internet back then.

The Capitol 6000 website - Beatles Cover Versions /// Found on the album Beatlemania!

 

Some of them showed up an imprint called "Oldies 45," which had the label name in a white antique font against a red backdrop. I had some of the Vee Jay and Tollie singles on that label. Not sure about "She Loves You."

I have always wondered what became of the tapes that were sent to these labels. Anyone know?

 

WKBW in Buffalo would string a series of Beatles hits together but there was also one occasion when”kb” played multiple songs simultaneously.

I had my transistor radio and my still treasured copy of the VJ LP Pictures, Songs and Stories of the Beatles, later retitled and released on Capitol.

My family was not well to do but with our two dollar a week allowance, there was always 89 cents available for a new 45 and a pack of Beatles bubblegum cards.

 

As a second generation fan, I actually received this LP when my Aunt gave me some of her records in the early 70s. So I now had The Beatles' Second Album, UA A Hard Day's Night & Magical Mystery Tour Capitol LP, plus McCartney's RAM, Badfinger's Straight Up, Nilsson Schmilsson & this Beats!!!! album, which I actually liked although I could tell their versions were pretty weak and out of tune. I just loved the song "This Is What I Mean" at age 5 and even covered it in my first band, mid eighties.

 

I was eight years old in February, 1964, and didn't know or care about record labels. It just seemed amazing beyond words that this group seemingly came from nowhere with a veritable avalanche of fantastic music. There was (obviously) no internet or sources of information where the curious among us could research the group's history. We had to rely on whatever the very limited electronic and print media of the day had to offer. But it didn't matter one bit. It was all about the music, and it just blew us all away. And in the end, that's what mattered.

 

There wasn't anything confusing about it: we were rockin'!

 

I am asking about how kids with presumably limited income dealt with the glut of available product.

 

Radio was king

 

Asked and answered. Those who had a reasonable allowance saved their money each week.

Plenty of others simply listened to the radio non-stop, knowing that they were bound to hear these songs without much of a wait. A lot of stations would have "Top Ten Countdowns" every night, with the ten determined by listeners' call-in votes. You knew beyond a doubt that you would hear Beatles songs on this feature.

I don't myself recall buying a lot of records until 1966 or so — though it helped that my best friend bought a lot more than I did, so we listened to our combined stashes together.

But radio was pretty much of a constant.

 

The VeeJay album was obscure as were the Beatles in 1963 in America.

Then teaser posters started appearing in small record shops--"The Beatles Are Coming". Who?
By 1964, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, She Loves You, Ed Sullivan appearance. I was 14 and didn't think at all about what label those two hits were on. Swan. Capitol. Didn't get into LP s yet, a year away, but had every new single as it appeared. We had five Beatles albums from Capitol & United Artists, from Jan-Dec 1964 (including Beatles '65 released in December of 1964).

It was Beatles heaven for us with a new single very few weeks. That is when we kids realized any four guys on the block could start up a band...bass, drums, rhythm guitar and lead. We could naively dream. The music sounded deceptively simple (not knowing then just how hard The Fabs had worked to achieve their success. Honing their craft in German dives and Liverpool underground clubs. Hard work & a ton of raw talent got them there, not Britain's Got Talent!)

I still remember just how different their sound was. Nothing like it. Magical times. Rock music as we know it now was just getting started (not rock and roll, a la Elvis), but ROCK...a la The Beatles, Stones, Animals....a completely different animal.

We were amazed. I started to hate school band, and just wanted to drum along to the newest 45's. Had only a Ludwig snare to practice on. Then a high hat. Then a beautiful red sparkle Gretsch trap set and ride cymbal (it was "trap set" then, not drum kit). Then a garage band.

In one short year The Beatles grew from "Meet The Beatles" to "Rubber Soul"....a remarkable change and growth. Hearing and seeing rock grow so fast was like watching one of those nature programs with stop action shots of a plant growing from seed to tree. Wow!

Yep, The Beatles were IT. Those were the days. You can't imagine it if you weren't there. Not like discovering Abbey Road nowadays at 14, and working backwards on youtube. Fun maybe, but just not the same...our minds were just starting to open up, along with the new music scene. Now days it's just the music scene. Music is new and old today. Then, MUSIC, our music not our folks', our MUSIC was new. And very cool.