America meets the Beatles: four lads from Liverpool perform on Ed Sullivan and usher in a new teen culture.

The Fab Four. The lads from Liverpool. The mop-top quartet. The band Paul McCartney was in before Wings. If any of those phrases sounds familiar, it may be because they all describe the Beatles, widely considered the greatest rock 'n' roll act in history.

Thoughts are turning to the Beatles more than three decades after they broke up in 1970 because February 9 will mark 40 years since their first live performance in the U.S., on a TV program called The Ed Sullivan Show. It was that appearance, watched by a whopping 73 million people, that many believe helped usher in a new kind of teenage culture and make the 1960s, well, the '60s.

The Beatles are known today as the most successful musical group in total sales (more than 150 million albums in the U.S. alone), as well as the band that created the song most recorded by others ("Yesterday"). When they first arrived on American soil, it was less than three months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Their music, already a huge hit at home in Britain, was dramatically different from the prevailing pop music of American "teen idols" like Fabian and Paul Anka, which had replaced the earlier sounds of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis on the U.S. charts.

"People were looking for something; that's the only way I can explain it," says Joe McCoy, the program director of a New York radio station, WCBS-FM. Of the appearance on Sullivan's show, he recalls: "When they came on that night, everybody watched."

STARTING RIOTS

By the time the Beatles performed on Sullivan's show, singing five numbers, including "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand," they had already caught the attention of reporters on both sides of the Atlantic. In a Dec. 1, 1963, piece about Beatlemania in Britain, The New York Times had noted that "one shake of the bushy fringe of their moplike haircuts is enough to start a riot in any theater where they are appearing." The article described the group--Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr--as "four young men who play guitars and drums and sing pop songs they write themselves." It noted perceptively: "This sounds like merely a minor accomplishment, but it isn't-not the way they do it."

But would Beatlemania sweep the U.S.? A Times review of a filmed Beatles performance on NBC in early January 1964 said that "it would not seem quite so likely that the accompanying fever known as Beatlemania will also be successfully exported." (As Chandler Bing might say, "Could that reviewer be any more wrong?")

THE HAIR

And the snide comments about their hair! Short by today's standards, its length and shakeability subjected the Beatles to remarks in The Times about "hair that never seems to be cut" and even a comparison to "the square hairdo used every morning on television by Captain Kangaroo."

Such negative attitudes prevailed among many adults, who believed the Beatles, "with their shaggy hair and their sexuality, were a 'threat to life as we know it,'" says Tim Brooks, a television historian.

So Sullivan's decision to have the Beatles on his weekly CBS variety show--which he hosted from the same studio in New York where Late Show with David Letterman is now taped--"was a big part of making them acceptable," Brooks says. This was because of Sullivan's reputation as a "very smart guy who had his finger on the pulse of the public."

Arthur Smith, a researcher with the Museum of Television and Radio in New York, notes that Sullivan's show had multigenerational appeal, which worked in the Beatles' favor. "Sullivan sort of officially presented them to the American audience, putting his imprimatur on the Beatles and making them 'safe' for mainstream consumption."

Think of what Sullivan did on his Sunday night CBS variety show on Feb. 9, 1964--and with two more Beatles performances that month, and another in 1965--as similar to what MTV did decades later, when it helped the hip-hop culture cross over from urban obscurity to national ubiquity by playing rap-music videos on Yo! MTV Raps.

Sullivan's first Beatles show also "helped usher in a new era in pop culture explicitly aimed at teenagers," Smith says, adding: "The Beatles drew a line, saying 'This is for the kids.'"

Soon came the so-called British invasion, targeted directly at teens, in which the Beatles were followed to America--and onto Sullivan's show--by groups like the Rolling Stones and the Who, and the rise of native talents that also fed the exploding youth culture, like the Doors and Jefferson Airplane.

And during the late '60s, as America and the world endured round after round of profound social, cultural, and political turbulence, the Beatles changed with the times, making music that was more artistically daring. (McCartney and Starr are still musicians today; Lennon was murdered in 1980, and Harrison died of cancer in 2001.)

But for many who were alive then, the Ed Sullivan Show appearance remains the indelible image of the Beatles and the youthful hysteria they inspired. "I saw the Beatles every time they came on Ed Sullivan," says McCoy of WCBS-FM. "All you remember is the girls, screaming and crying in the audience, even before he introduced them."

As the Beatles used to say, yeah, yeah, yeah.

BILLBOARD'S TOP 5 ALL BY THE BEATLES

1 * Can't Buy Me Love

2 * Twist and Shout

3 * She Loves You

4 * I Want To Hold Your Hand

5 * Please Please Me

3/31/64

Stuart Elliott covers advertising and the media for The New York Times.