It was 40 years ago today ...

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

It's happening all over again. We must still love them - yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know that can't be bad.

After all, love is all you need.

The Beatles put the words in our heads and the feelings in our hearts. They turned young girls into shrieking, babbling, screaming lunatics and gave the rest of America's youth the sense that rock 'n' roll could change the world, even if Mom and Dad just shook their heads and wondered if their children had lost their minds.

Beatlemania came to America, came across our TV screens in black and white on "The Ed Sullivan Show" 40 years ago today, just 11 weeks after we watched nonstop coverage of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in the same hues. And maybe John, Paul, George and Ringo came just in time.

`From the depths of the shock and depression around that situation came the `happy pill' of the Beatles and their music,' said Eugene's Rob Tobias, a music teacher and guitarist who remembers watching coverage of both historic television events as an 8-year-old in Cincinnati.

"They just sounded good, and they were positive," he said. "And for a time we forgot about the ugliness of politics, racism and the death of our popular president."

Today, four decades after the British band's American invasion and 73 million - 40 percent of the nation's population at the time - watched the Fab Four on "Ed Sullivan," many of us are still nuts about them. Still turning to them for comfort, in a time of terrorism and war, as if it were yesterday.

"I have goose bumps just remembering how I felt," said Springfield's Kina Pearce, who was 16 when she saw the Beatles at Portland's Memorial Coliseum in August 1965. "We were breathing the same air they were. And policemen were patrolling the aisles with bullets in their ears so they didn't have to hear it."

Culturally, if not musically, the Beatles were the most important rock 'n' roll band ever, said Jivin' Johnny Etheredge, host of the "60s Beat" and other rock programs at Eugene's KRVM-FM.

`Rock 'n' roll happened before the Beatles,' Etheredge said. `And rock 'n' roll would have happened without the Beatles. But culturally, the Beatles' impact on society was just immeasurable. They really changed the way the youth subculture looked at the world.'

They changed the way Greg Sutherland looked at the world - 10 years after the band's break-up in 1970. Sutherland, 38 and a 17-year employee at Eugene's House of Records, was born in 1965, a year after the Beatles' historic Feb. 9, 1964 television appearance. And he was 15 when John Lennon was assassinated in December 1980.

As America recoiled in horror at the murder of a rock icon, radio stations began playing Beatles songs once again and Sutherland, who grew up in the tiny town of Sams Valley east of Grants Pass, was listening. He got ahold of an album with some of the early hits - "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand" - that the band played on "Ed Sullivan," and compared the Beatles' mop-top look of the early 1960s with their more psychedelic look later in the decade.

"That just fascinated me," Sutherland said. "That they could go from looking like that - to that," he said, moving his hands across the countertop at the record store last week.

As Sutherland was talking about how the Beatles are still big sellers at the used record store, Arlene Stone of Eugene walked in and asked for a CD of the band's 1970 "Let It Be" album. Turns out she had called ahead of time to reserve it for her son's 26th birthday.

Jon Stone, who grew up in Oregon, is a singer and songwriter in Nashville, Tenn., and he recently saw for the first time a tape of the Beatles' appearance on "Ed Sullivan" and was taken aback by the footage, his mother said.

George Horn of Eugene was taken aback that very night. He was there 40 years ago today. A New York City native and intern on "The David Suskind Show," Horn was given two tickets by the show's executive producer as an early gift for his 21st birthday on Feb. 12.

"It was outrageous," said Horn, a salesman who's lived in Eugene for about 10 years. "The problem was the audience couldn't hear anything except the girls screaming. It was wild, and I was one of only a few guys there as I recall."

Arlene Stone was 18 when she saw the Beatles perform in 1964 at John F. Kennedy Stadium in her native Philadelphia.

"When they came out, the screaming alone lasted a half hour," she said.

Indeed, the Beatles were different than anything America had seen before. We had seen Elvis shake his hips and Chuck Berry skirt across the stage in the 1950s. We had seen Buddy Holly and Fats Domino and Little Richard. But we had never seen a rock 'n' roll band like the Beatles performing right before our very eyes.

`Sullivan delivered the nation's first blast of Beatlemania in extreme close-up, an unprecedented display of the liberating, openly sexual ferocity of live, loud rock 'n' roll,' Rolling Stone magazine reports in its Feb. 19 issue that hits stores this week.

Half of the Fab Four - Lennon and George Harrison - is now gone, but the Beatles will continue to influence the musical world long past our lifetimes, said Carl Woideck, a professor of jazz, blues and rock at the University of Oregon's School of Music. And that has nothing to do with what the Beatles did in 1964, Woideck said.

"It's because of what they did after those first couple of albums," he said. "It's how they developed as artists."

In 1964, many older Americans thought the Beatles' mop-top haircuts and their wild-at-the-time "yeah, yeah, yeah" in "She Loves You" and thewoooo!" in "I Saw Her Standing There," were "absolutely outrageous," Etheredge said. Compared to what they looked like a couple of years later, after consuming their first hits of LSD and discovering marijuana, and with what rock bands look like today, however, the Beatles of 1964 looked clean-cut in their matching suits.

It was in those later years, though, that the Beatles proved their worth, and preserved their legacy, in rock history, Woideck said. Albums such as "Rubber Soul" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" expanded the band's great body of work and its diversity, he said.

"Elvis is great," Sutherland said, `but it's just rock 'n' roll. You get sitar music with the Beatles.'

Still, Joan Schryvers of Springfield will always remember the Beatles she saw in Portland during that 1965 concert. "I loved them, loved their music and I wanted to marry Paul," she said, referring to Paul McCartney, the band's lead singer.

Schryvers, who was 11 at the time, went with her parents and her younger brother, the family driving to Portland from their Monmouth home. She still has a 45 album with "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on one side and "She Loves You" on the other. And she still has the ticket stubs from the show.

"It's just one of those things in your life that you'll never forget," Schryvers said.

Mark Baker can be reached at 338-2374 or [e-mail].

CAPTION(S):

Joan Schryvers of Springfield attended the Beatles concert in Portland in 1965. " ... I wanted to marry Paul," Schryvers says.