The Beatles were not to be missed

The 50th anniversary of the first appearance by the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show has been noted just about everywhere this week, and rightly so. It was a watershed moment for a generation.
But there’s another TV appearance by the Beatles that sticks in my memory, one that might provide even greater evidence of the group’s impact on popular culture in the 1960s.
It came nearly five years after that first appearance on the Sullivan show.
And they were five tumultuous years.
When the Beatles first took to the Sullivan stage, America was still in shock from the assassination of President Kennedy, just a few months before.
Five years later, the country had seen the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, riots in the streets of a dozen major cities, growing disaffection with U.S. policy in Vietnam and a Democratic National Convention that was marked by chaos, confrontation and violence.
So when the Beatles returned to American TV to promote their songs “Hey Jude” and “Revolution,” it was in a strikingly different context, a different America in many ways.
It was December of 1968, just a couple of months shy of the anniversary of that first triumphant performance on Ed Sullivan.
The Beatles had performed the two sides of their latest single on David Frost’s show on the BBC, but they hadn’t performed it in the U.S.
That December, some enterprising person at The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a push-the-censorship-boundaries show that was about as far from Ed Sullivan as possible, had gotten hold of the BBC performance.
One week, the Smothers Brothers would feature “Hey Jude” thanks to the BBC. The next week it would be “Revolution.” My recollection is that Connie and I saw the “Hey Jude” performance; we preferred that song to the other.
But we knew we were going to miss the second performance.
Somehow, I’d scraped up the money to buy us tickets to a concert by Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company in Cincinnati. A group from Earlham had chartered a bus to go down for the show.
Rumors were flying that Joplin and Big Brother were in the process of melting down. Even though she was new to most of us, she was already in full self-destruction mode, killing her amazing voice with Southern Comfort and whatever drugs were available. Later that month, Joplin and Big Brother would part ways.
The concert found the two of us high in the nose-bleed seats of the balcony of Cincinnati Music Hall, but that didn’t matter.
The performance was electrifying, and our hearing today is probably better off because of our distance from the stage.
Joplin was at the top of her game musically. Her voice ripped through songs. Her pain was palpable.
And then, suddenly, after one number, the band put down their instruments.
Janis Joplin was silent. She put the microphone down. And I think she sat down on the stage.
Then some stagehand appeared with a small table. Then a little 12-inch black and white portable TV was brought out.
Someone connected a few wires, and there they were: The Beatles.
It was as if we were all sitting in a giant living room, watching that tiny TV set from a hundred feet away.
The Beatles played “Revolution.” The crowd roared. Big Brother and the Holding Company picked up their instruments. Janis picked up her microphone. And the show went on.
In that few minutes, all of us had been reminded of where the Beatles stood in the rock firmament.
One of the hottest acts of the day and one of the great blues singers of her generation had paid homage.
They didn’t want to miss the show, and they knew their audience didn’t either.[[In-content Ad]]