Beatles ’64 Unravels One of Music’s Greatest Turning Points

During the press conference held immediately after the Beatles landed at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport on February 7, 1964, one of the reporters yelled out “What’s your ambition?” George Harrison replied, “To go to America.”

At the time, conquering the U.S. would have seemed like an impossible dream for a band from Liverpool (wherever that was) who had funny haircuts and wrote their own songs. But the new documentary Beatles ’64, directed by David Tedeschi and produced by Martin Scorsese, reminds us that the frenzied response to the group’s arrival changed the trajectory of America, music, and the world.

The title of the film—which premieres on Disney+ this Friday—is a bit misleading. It isn’t a chronicle of that entire remarkable year, which saw them reaching such unimaginable peaks as occupying the top five spots on the U.S. singles chart and sold out shows in places like Hong Kong and New Zealand. Instead, it’s a close look at the 14 days of the Beatles’ first visit to America. After arriving in New York, they traveled to Washington, D.C. for their first U.S. concert, then back to New York to play Carnegie Hall, and finally to Miami.

Fortunately for history, this entire trip was captured by the groundbreaking documentarians Albert and David Maysles (who would go on to make such classics as Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens) for a rarely seen TV special called What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A., which was later reedited for a 1991 DVD release titled The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit. The Maysleses’ footage, restored by Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post and including 17 minutes never seen before, makes up the heart of the movie, alongside new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and fans who witnessed the 1964 invasion.

It can be easy to forget the heights that Beatlemania had already reached in the UK before John, Paul, George, and Ringo arrived stateside. The London Evening Standard had recently declared 1963 “The Year of the Beatles,” writing that “an examination of the heart of the nation at this moment would reveal the word BEATLE engraved upon it.” The sold-out concerts, radio domination, and screaming girls were becoming familiar; hell, they had already sung for the queen.

But America was something else. No British musicians had made any impact on the land where rock ’n’ roll was born. The country was a size and scale beyond European comprehension. And the States had recently gone through a shattering rupture; President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas less than three months before the Beatles touched down at the newly renamed airport.

As Beatles ’64 explores, one theory for the unexpected US Beatlemania phenomenon is that the Fab Four offered a way for young Americans to heal from that tragedy, a signal toward a future that they hadn’t previously imagined. “When we came, America had been in mourning,” says McCartney. “Maybe America needed something like the Beatles to lift them out of mourning and say life goes on.”

The centerpiece of the trip was the Beatles’ February 9 debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, which hit like a tidal wave from across the Atlantic, drawing more than 73 million viewers—the most watched television event of its time. Talk about rising to the occasion; these performances (remixed for the film by Giles Martin) are staggering in their confidence, command, and sheer joy.

Tedeschi (who has been a key collaborator during Scorsese’s ongoing exploration of rock history, including editing the Bob Dylan films No Direction Home and Rolling Thunder Revue and 2011’s George Harrison: Living in the Material World) is wise enough to know that the highlight of their second Sullivan appearance, the next week in Miami, was a stellar version of the ballad “This Boy.” John, Paul, and George singing harmony around one microphone, Lennon exploding into the bridge with an impossibly beautiful vocal—60 years later, it still brings chills.

The film reveals the sheer sweep of the Sullivan show’s impact. Jamie Bernstein, daughter of conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, recounts her insistence that the family television set be wheeled from the library to the dining room so they could watch during dinner, while a memorable sequence shot by the Maysles brothers shows a working-class Latino family in their modest apartment, enraptured by the broadcast.

None of this is new information or especially novel analysis—it’s not a revelation like 2021’s Get Back—and Beatles ’64 gets a bit wobbly when it opens its lens outside of the specific moment. Sananda Maitreya (formerly known as Terence Trent D’Arby) is an interesting enough “son of the Beatles” in his interviews, but he was not yet two years old in February 1964. Record producer Jack Douglas, who later worked with Lennon, tells a lengthy story about traveling to Liverpool that’s entertaining but ultimately an unnecessary digression.

The film is strongest when it sticks close to a real-time sense of the madness unfolding, of a culture trying to process a genuinely shocking transformation—from CBS newsman Eric Sevareid sneeringly comparing the Beatles’ arrival to an outbreak of German measles to pioneering feminist Betty Friedan arguing that long hair was emblematic of an emerging “new man,” more feminine and less aggressive than the crew-cut warmongers that defined American masculinity.

Of course, everything soars anytime the Beatles themselves come onscreen. Barricaded in their hotel rooms, their limos, the train to D.C., they seem to be smiling and laughing in every shot, amused and not in the least bit overwhelmed by the hysteria. The delight of their friendships, the velocity and razor sharpness of their Liverpudlian wit, and the astonishing release whenever they’re making music, is simply magical. (The lone dark cloud is a reception at the British embassy, where they were mocked by the staff and a guest even snipped off a piece of Ringo’s hair.)

“The craziness was going on in the world,” says Harrison in an archival interview. “In the band, we were kind of normal and the rest of the world was crazy.”

And then there are the girls, the real heroines of Beatles ’64. Though it’s easy to make fun of the shrieking and crying the band elicited (and much of the commentary we hear was quick to do so), we are witnessing a moment of young women coming into and embracing not just their sexuality but also their own agency and assuredness. With their teased-up hairdos and magnificent “Noo Yawk” accents, it’s impossible not to love these girls—especially the two who somehow get themselves onto the Beatles’ floor in the Plaza Hotel and don’t break their composure even when a security guard finally stops them and tosses them out.

“Why we were screaming, frenzy, I can’t really understand it now, but then it was a natural thing to do,” says Vickie Brenna-Costa, one of the gang surrounding the Plaza, in a new interview. “We couldn’t contain ourselves.”

The events chronicled in Beatles ’64 are also notable because despite the nonstop hounding by fans, reporters, cameras, and radio DJs like the omnipresent Murray the K, it was also a rare time when the band was still able to breathe; they performed only four times across these two weeks. After the American visit, the whole world wanted a piece of the Beatles, and in the remainder of the year, they would make their first movie, A Hard Day’s Night (with scenes that bear striking resemblance to the Maysleses’ material); perform 90 concerts; and record enough music that between January 1964 and March 1965, they released no fewer than six albums in the U.S. (chopped up and reconfigured from the UK versions—the U.S. albums were reissued last week on vinyl separately and as a box set, all cut from the original mono master tapes).

So Beatles ’64 documents a pivot point in history, a moment that forever shifted the borders—geographic, generational, and gender—of power and possibility. On the train headed to Washington, a reporter asks Paul McCartney a surprisingly thoughtful question: What would the Beatles mean to Western culture? McCartney scoffs at the notion, responding, “Culture? It’s not culture; it’s a good laugh.”

Which may have been accurate in the terminology of the times. But the Beatles knew, even before this fateful trip to the U.S., that what they were doing was unprecedented and important. “This isn’t show business,” said John Lennon in late 1963, as quoted in Michael Braun’s book Love Me Do!, an essential account of this era. “It’s something else. This is different from anything that anybody imagines.”