On the morning of February 10, 1964—the day after the Beatles made their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show before 73 million viewers—four young men from Liverpool sat in their suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel and read their newspaper reviews over lukewarm eggs and toast. What they saw was a tall stack of scorching hot takes. The New York Herald Tribune gave them page-one treatment under the headline “Beatles Bomb on TV,” blasting their “absence of talent” and griping that they “could not carry a tune across the Atlantic.” The New York Times declared them a “fine mass placebo” and nothing but a fad. Newsweek called them “a near-disaster” musically and “a nightmare” visually.
The Price of the Pedestal
The newspapers and magazines weren’t alone. Highbrow music critic Theodore Strongin declared that “The Beatles’ vocal quality can be described as hoarsely incoherent, with the minimal enunciation necessary to communicate the schematic” (a perfect example of how an intellectual can demonstrate his superior vocabulary while also demonstrating his illiteracy.)
Mega-Preacher Billy Graham broke his own rule against watching Sunday TV specifically to see the Fab Four, only to annoint them a “passing phase.” That same sentiment was echoed by virtually every establishment commentator spanning the loony-left to the radical-right.
But Graham was out-prayed by the Reverend David Noebel of the anti-Communist “Christian Crusade”, who took the analysis to its logical extreme, denouncing the band as “anti-Christ beatniks” and publishing pamphlets warning that the Beatles were destroying the morals of America’s youth to facilitate a Communist takeover orchestrated from Moscow. Meanwhile, the Soviet state newspaper Pravda, with perfect ideological symmetry, declared that the Beatles represented “a plot by the ruling classes to distract youngsters from politics.” (Specifically, Moscow’s kind of politics.)
Having already conquered the British tabloids, the Beatles weren’t particularly bothered by the American curmudgeons. “Trying to please everybody is impossible,” John Lennon said. “If you did that, you’d end up in the middle with nobody liking you.”
The Beatles’ sudden cultural explosion invited its own brand of skepticism. “Overnight success” is a perennial target for critics, who often conveniently ignore that such breakthroughs are almost always the result of years of patient, grinding work by those once told they would never amount to anything.
The Beatles were simply a marketing trick that happened to ignite, The Saturday Evening Post declared, “an overnight success story written by press agents.”
Long Hair Has Grown Short
It’s almost impossible to convey today how much the Beatles’ then-outrageously “long” hair mattered. And yet today, the same look is considered mild, even conservative. Milquetoast.
Paul Jones, whose column was syndicated in virtually every newpaper in the United States, wasn’t just unimpressed by the Beatles’ hair and music; he was offended. Grumbling that the band’s shaggy mops made them look like “Moe of the Three Stooges,” Jones went as far as to suggest CBS fire Sullivan for wasting precious prime TV time on such “phony promotion.”
Before they even lit a chord, the Beatles had torched the third rail of American male grooming standards. Ever since “The War” (the Big one), the close-cropped crewcut was the uniform of the day—a visual shorthand for discipline, patriotism, and traditional masculinity. By 1965, schools across America were instituting rules about boys’ hairstyles—the shorter the better. As one headmaster declared: “A sloppy head is indicative of a sloppy mind.”
Revenge of the United Nations
The resistance was not purely American—the Beatles were condemned by politicians worldwide. Israel refused them entry in early 1964, concerned about “attacks of mass hysteria” on the country’s youth. Indonesia burned their records in the streets to “preserve national identity.” East Germany blamed them for a “cultural crisis.”
There was also the question of cultural direction. Britain had spent decades as the recipient of American musical culture—jazz, blues, country, and rock and roll had all flowed west to east across the pond. The idea that a British band could now export that music westward, transformed and electrified, struck many American commentators as pure theft.
The jazz establishment added its own layer of condescension, with noted critic Martin Williams criticizing the Beatles’ music as a “strident imitation of American Negro blues singing.” 🎵
Yesterday is Tomorrow
What the critics in 1964 failed to understand was not the music as it was; good and bad taste is subjective in any age. What they failed to notice was the trajectory. By 1967, the Beatles were universally recognized for their “artistry.” The same establishment that had dismissed them as a fad was now scrambling to explain Sgt. Pepper as a work of genius. The wheel of histrionic hyperbole had turned full circle.
The music was groundbreaking in a different sense in 1964: not in its sophistication but in its energy, its self-sufficiency, and its democratic model. These were four young working-class men from industrial Liverpool who wrote their own songs, played their own instruments, didn’t know how to “read” music, and weren’t managed by the conventional machinery of the pop industry. That was genuinely new. 🌟
The Spin Cycle
The resistance the Beatles met in 1964 isn’t unique to them or to that moment. It’s the oldest story in popular music, and probably in culture generally: something new arrives, and the establishment responds with derision that looks increasingly out of touch as the years pass.
Elvis faced it in 1956—the same establishment contempt, the same hair panic, the same muttering about “obscene” and “animalistic” dancing. Frank Sinatra (who would later denounce the Beatles) had been dismissed as a teenage fad in the 1940s, with parents and commentators alarmed by the screaming bobby-soxers he attracted. The Rolling Stones were refused entry to a hotel in 1964 because the management judged their appearance too shabby. Bob Dylan was booed off stages when he went electric in 1965, with folk purists literally shouting “Judas!” at him.
One thing that never changes is how people grow to dread change. Because change scrambles routines, triggers fear of the unknown, and threatens a sense of control.
Punk faced it in 1977. Hip-hop faced it through the 1980s and 1990s. When a genuinely new cultural phenomenon arrives—one that speaks to a new generation rather than defending the existing taste hierarchy—the people most invested in the existing hierarchy make the loudest, worst noise.
“Every generation finds its own music,” Ringo Starr reflected in an interview for Beatles Anthology. “It’s the one thing that belongs to them and not their parents. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Beatles or whatever comes next—it’s their own discovery.”
In the beginning, the Beatles’ ultimate threat was transatlantic: the foreign-ness of it, the implication that something important had happened somewhere else without America’s permission.
The New York Times critic who warned of “a fine mass placebo” lived long enough to watch the Beatles become the most studied, celebrated, and commercially dominant band in the history of popular music. The Herald Tribune columnist who wrote that the Beatles “could not carry a tune across the Atlantic” wrote that sentence in a newspaper that folded and died two years later.
Meanwhile, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is still on the radio. Yeah! 🎶