1963: The Year the Beatles Found Their Voice

Having spent entirely too much of my life studying all matters Beatles-related, I sometimes like to play a parlor game with other fans. I ask them which year was the band’s best, before offering an answer of my own. Many people stump for 1967, when Sgt. Pepper came out, recasting the pop-culture zeitgeist. Others opt for 1964, the first year of stateside Beatlemania. A dark horse sometimes gets a vote, like 1965, the year the Beatles produced their first mature masterwork in Rubber Soul. But when I provide my answer—1963, all the way—I’m usually met with puzzled looks. It’s no wonder. Fifty years have passed since that magical and formative year for the band, yet most of the music the Beatles recorded throughout it remains commercially unavailable. But 1963 is the band’s annus mirabilis.

In 1963, the Beatles were exploding in England. Their debut LP, Please Please Me, came out in March, followed by their megahit single “She Loves You” in August. Their second album, With the Beatles, and another hit single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” followed in the fall. Screaming girls, throngs of fans, bushels of albums being sold—this was when it all started. But the Beatles were also a veritable human jukebox that year. One of their many commitments was to turn up semi-regularly at the BBC, horse around on air, read requests, make fun of each other, make fun of the presenter, and play live versions of whatever people wanted to hear, whether that was their own material or a vast range of covers: Elvis Presley numbers; obscure rhythm-and-blues songs by lost-to-time bands like the Jodimars; Broadway show tunes; Americana; vamps on Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry; rearrangements of girl-group cuts; torch songs. If you wanted to hear what made the Beatles the Beatles, here is where you would want to start.

John Lennon: “We’re more popular than Jesus”

The following article was published in the London Evening Standard newspaper on 4 March 1966. A fascinating portrait of John Lennon‘s home life, it was written by Maureen Cleave, a close friend to The Beatles.

The piece was headlined “How does a Beatle live? John Lennon lives like this”. It grew notorious in later months when Lennon’s comments about Christianity – “We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity” – were republished around the world.

It was this time three years ago that The Beatles first grew famous. Ever since then, observers have anxiously tried to gauge whether their fame was on the wax or on the wane; they foretold the fall of the old Beatles, they searched diligently for the new Beatles (which was as pointless as looking for the new Big Ben).

What was so important about the Beatles’ appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show?

Everybody liked this stuff back then. I remember liking it, too. That’s all there was. There was no concept of an alternative.

That’s why the Beatles were such a big deal. From the moment they strummed those electric chords, wagged their mops of hair, and smiled those beaming, ironic, isn’t-this-cool-but-also-a-bit-absurd smiles, we all knew it was something from a different galaxy. (And, given how rarefied foreign travel was then, England might as well have been in a different galaxy.)

 A slew of clueless scholars and columnists have mused, over the decades, that the Beatles caused such a sensation because they snapped us out of the gloom brought on by the Kennedy assassination, which had taken place the previous November. This is silly sociology. Look at these DVDs or at any footage of a Beatles concert or a Beatles mob. It’s extremely doubtful that any of these teenage girls were cheering, screaming, palpitating, even crying with joy as some sort of catharsis to their anguish over Lee Harvey Oswald’s deed in Dallas. Meanwhile, their parents, who were the ones more likely traumatized by the death of the president, remained tellingly immune to Beatlemania.

Meeting the Beatles

It was, my editors had assured me, a dream assignment. And I, as a 26-year-old trainee in TIME's Washington bureau, was lucky to get it. Maybe so. But then why was I shivering alone on a corner of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue on this cold February night? The subjects I was supposed to be covering were ensconced 12 floors above me in the Plaza Hotel, encircled by a cadre of security gargoyles dedicated to making sure that neither I nor anybody else got anywhere near them. I'd been tracking them all day, but even the few quotes and details I'd gleaned had also been picked up by hundreds of competing journalists. So where was the dream part?

Well, I was looking in the wrong place. The subjects, after all, were the Beatles, the sensational English rockers who currently had the No. 1 album ("Meet the Beatles") and the No. 1 single ("I Want to Hold Your Hand") on the U.S. charts. They'd arrived for their first U.S. tour on that day, Feb. 7, 1964 — the most momentous British invasion, if you believed the hype, since the War of 1812. And the point was not to make intimate contact with the Fab Four themselves — at that point, it would've been easier to line up a chat with the Pope, or even J.D. Salinger — but to enjoy the excitement, the crowds, the hysterical adolescent girls, the sheer exuberant fun that surrounded them. The Beatles certainly enjoyed it all. Ducking into limousines, waving to screeching fans across police barricades, fielding silly questions at press conferences, they mugged and clowned and gagged it up to the delight of us reporters, who quickly wore out the adjectives "cheeky" and "irreverent." (Reporter: "How many of you are bald so you have to wear those wigs?" Beatles, in unison: "Oh, we're all bald." Reporter: "What do you think about the campaign in Detroit to stamp out the Beatles?" Paul McCartney: "We've got a campaign to stamp out Detroit." Reporter: "Who writes the music?" John Lennon: "What music?")

How the Beatles Took America: Inside the New Issue of Rolling Stone

Fifty years ago, the Beatles landed in the U.S., generating the biggest explosion rock & roll has ever seen. In the new issue of Rolling Stone (on stands Friday, January 3rd), contributing editor Mikal Gilmore examines just how the Fab Four arrived in the States facing media disdain and a clueless record label in the wake of the devastating assassination of John F. Kennedy — and still managed to conquer America. 

See where your favorite tracks land on our 100 Greatest Beatles Songs

What the Beatles Meant to America

Irene Katz stood on the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue with her friend Laura Jacknick. It was Saturday, Feb. 8, 1964, and they were outside the Plaza Hotel in New York. The 13-year-old Katz had told her parents she was going somewhere to study, but instead the girls hit the pavement at 7 a.m. and remained there, bubbling with anticipation, for nine hours. John, Paul, George and Ringo were in town and staying at the Plaza. Katz held up a sign she’d made: “Elvis is Dead, Long Live the Beatles.”

“It wasn’t to be mean,” Katz says now, of the sign and the Elvis pronouncement. “Elvis was the past generation and it was over. This was new music and everything was different for a new generation of people.” Katz had high hopes, too: “We were looking up, convinced they would see us with their sign. We believed they would fall in love when they saw us.” That didn’t work out, but Katz and her sign became semi-famous, as camera crews shot footage broadcast all over national TV news.

The Beatles' 50 Biggest Billboard Hits

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' American invasion, we're counting down the Fab Four's biggest Hot 100 smashes, 10 songs at a time.

 It was 50 years ago this week that the Beatles landed at New York's JFK airport and brought their iconic sound to living rooms across the America. On Feb. 9, 1964, John, Paul, George and Ringo made their stateside television debut on "The Ed Sullivan Show," an event that drew 73 million viewers (an astonishing 40% of the entire U.S. population), becoming the largest TV audience in history to that point. Since that momentous evening, the Beatles have continued to exert a massive influence on music and pop culture, their tunes remaining a consistent, indelible part of every generation's soundtrack.