It was all there in the desperate, joyful cries of teenage girls in Ed Sullivan’s audience, all hoping that John, Paul, George or Ringo might want to hold their hands, too.
(The historical record reflects an uptick in the number of boys enrolling in guitar lessons to hasten the date at which they might get in on the holding as well.)
Boys and girls from that era who on Friday will celebrate the 60th anniversary of what Sullivan called “a really big show,” gathered last week to reminisce over it in the company of Springfield’s best-known Beatlemaniac, John Lippolis.
Thirteen on that Feb. 9, 1964, he confesses he could not at the time tell a Lennon from a McCartney. But he well remembers the faces on the Meet the Beatles albums for sale in Springfield’s F.W. Woolworth and S.S. Kresge stores, where he shopped with his grandmother.
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
He recalls, too, a snippet of conversation among of teens in the basement cafeteria of Wren’s Department Store: “One kid said, ‘I heard they were better than the Beach Boys.’’
The Beatles’ appearance on Ed Sullivan was so anticipated that teens from coast to coast had their cameras at the ready so they could photograph the performance in living black-and-white from their little television screens.
Lippolis remembers Dave Storer being the envy of many in Springfield (and elsewhere) because his dad filmed the show with an 8 mm movie camera.
Suzie Broidy, who grew up in Cedarville, said her family took it all in for the reason so much of three-channel America did: “We watched Ed Sullivan every weekend. My dad especially loved (the singer) Kate Smith.”
He didn’t, it turns out, like the Beatles.
He said “they should be horsewhipped,” but Broidy said he wasn’t so much angry with the band as with the mania: “He thought the whole thing was silly.”
That same night Broidy’s future husband, Steve, was a Columbus lad who had a bone to with a bone to pick with Mr. Sullivan because he introduced the Beatles as “such nice boys.”
To the 16-year-old Broidy, the words trivialized “something really important” about the Beatles’ status that would eventually find expression in the term “rock stars.”
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
Still, he doesn’t dispute Sullivan’s role in the Beatles success story, noting that the year before their debut on his show, Sullivan had an entire song devoted to him in the hit Broadway musical Bye-Bye Birdie. And the musical was set, set, no less, in a small Ohio town.
Paula King, Lippolis’s sister, remembers an ambivalent buzz on the playground the day after the first of the band’s four Ed Sullivan Show appearances.
On the one hand, said King, everyone was singing “yeah, yeah, yeah,” just like the Beatles did while performing She Loves You.
On the other hand, in that time of rigid gender roles, the young men’s “mop-tops” — longer hair — triggered some anxiety regarding the same “British Invasion,” that brought the Dave Clark Five to Sullivan’s stage 12 times.
Said King, kids “didn’t know if (the Beatles) were guys or girls.”
Whether it was the hair, the mania, or some combination of the two, Springfielder Tina Koumoutsos said the principal of her Cincinnati area school got on the loudspeaker the next day and referred to “the mess last night on the Ed Sullivan Show.”
But at his own St. Joseph Elementary School, Lippolis reports, Sisters Karen Marie and Helen Christus “loved the Beatles.”
That opinion solidified the next Sunday when the group sang This Boy on the Sullivan Show and Sr. Karen Marie compared their harmonies to the Everly Brothers’, whose hits of the 1950s had set the standard.
Springfielder Hal Stephenson was caught up in Beatlemania as a year-old boy. His sister Peggy, a huge fan, made him a kind of Beatles poster child, dressing him up in a cartoonish Beatles T-shirt.
Under her influence and theirs, “I used to sing Yesterday as a 2- and 3-year-old,” he said, making him nearly as cute as “Paul.” A decade later, when he mentioned his love of the Beatles to local guitar teacher Randy Setty, “He said, ‘Let me take you to the next room,’” where Stephenson promptly began lessons with Lippolis.
Stephenson is now involved with Mystery Tour, the successor to Lippolis’s defunct Beatles band, Glass Onion – at least one of the songs of which Lippolis says he learned in Springfield from John Lennon.
When the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night came to Springfield’s State and Regent theaters, Lippolis saw the movie four times with the purchase of two tickets.
“Back then, you didn’t have to pay for the second show(ing), he said.
He has two strong recollections from the movie’s local run:
1. “When they showed Paul on the screen, all the girls screamed.”
2. During the showings, “All us boys were together saying ‘Did you see the guitars and the chords?”
From notes scribbled in the theater, he taught himself the ballad “And I love her.”
“When my mom asked me who I learned it from,” he explained, “I told her ‘John Lennon.’”
He still likes to play it on his Liverpool Limited Edition Rickenbacker guitar.
(That Feb. 9, The Beatles performed All My Loving, I Saw Her Standing There, I Want to Hold Your Hand, She Loves You and Till There Was You, a ballad from the Broadway Musical Music Man. That night’s performances and others can be found online.)
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