After releasing several singles in the U.S. earlier in the year—”Please Please Me” and “From Me to You” (under Vee-Jay Records) and “She Loves You” (Swan Records)—Capitol finally signed the Beatles after Ed Sullivan agreed to let the band perform on his show in February 1964. The day after Christmas, 1963, the Beatles released their first single under the label, and what would become their first No. 1 in the United States, “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” and its B-side “I Saw Her Standing There.”
By early 1964, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” went to No. 1 internationally, including in the UK and the U.S., making them an overnight sensation in America. When they heard they had topped the chart in the U.S., the Beatles were in Paris playing a three-week, 18-show residency at the Olympia Theatre before heading to the U.S.
“We were playing in Paris, an engagement at the Olympia Theatre, a famous old theater Edith Piaf played at, and we got a telegram — as you did in those days — saying, ‘Congratulations, No. 1 in U.S. charts,” recalled Paul McCartney. “We jumped on each other’s backs. It was late at night after a show, and we just partied. That was the record that allowed us to come to America.”
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[RELATED: On This Day — George Harrison Becomes First Beatle to Hit No. 1 as a Solo Artist]
Marsha Albert, DJ Carroll James Jr., and the Start of Beatlemania
By the time the Beatles made their way onto The Ed Sullivan Show, Beatlemania was already spreading across the U.S. After seeing a CBS Morning News segment by Walter Cronkite on Beatlemania in the UK that aired on December 10, 1963, and hearing a snippet of “She Loves You,” Marsha Albert, a 15-year-old from Silver Spring, Maryland, wrote to her local radio station, WWDC-AM, and asked: “Why can’t we have music like that here in America?”
“It wasn’t so much what I had seen, it’s what I had heard,” Albert told The Washington Post in 2004. “They had a scene where they played a clip of ‘She Loves You’ and I thought that was a great song.”
Albert continued, “I’d never done anything like that before. We had a crummy little radio, and WWDC was about the only thing we could pick up. We lived not far from the transmitter, and it came in really well so I listened to that every day. I wrote that I thought [the Beatles] would be really popular here, and if [James Jr.] could get one of their records, that would really be great.”
WWDC disc jockey Carroll James Jr. managed to pull some strings and got a copy of the Beatles’ unreleased single, “I Want to Hold Your Hands,” from a British flight attendant. James Jr. became the first DJ to play the Beatles on the radio in the U.S. He even went a step further, inviting Albert to introduce the song on radio on December 17, 1963.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Albert, “for the first time on the air in the United States, here are the Beatles singing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’”
New Release Date
Capitol initially wanted to release “I Want to Hold Your Hand” around the band’s first Ed Sullivan appearance on February 9, 1964, but after its success on WWDC and a steadily growing frenzy, released the song earlier, on December 26. By February 1, 1964, the Beatles had their first No. 1 in America.
Before the Beatles arrived in New York City for the show, they made a stop in Washington, D.C., where they met Albert and James Jr. While on air, the Beatles said “Thank you, Marsha” and gave her their autographs. James Jr., who died in 1997, also gave Albert the first copy he acquired of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which she still owns today.
“Marsha Albert’s actions forced a major record company to push up the release date of a debut single from an unknown band during the holiday season, a time when record companies traditionally released no new product,” said Brian Spizer, author of the 2004 book The Beatles Are Coming! The Birth of Beatlemania in America.
“With ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ coming out the day after Christmas and kids being out of school, hearing it several times a day, having Christmas money, and being able to go to the record store and buy the record at that time,” added Spizer, “all that propelled it up the charts much quicker than would normally have happened.”
Once the Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show two days after their D.C. stop, 73 million viewers tuned in, which was nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population at the time, and Beatlemania was officially here.
Photo: The Beatles” pose for a portrait in 1962, (l to r) Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
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