BoomerZoo Almanac for January 14-20, 2007: Hi, Culture!
I know that not every single Boomer—not even all the Boomers who listened to their transistor radios in the early ‘60s—got a case of Beatle mania when the Fab Four first hit the Billboard charts in January of 1964. So I may not be able to say they “defined a generation,” but they for sure take up a lot of space in the Flower Power dictionary.
Like most Americans with a television set, we watched The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights, so even if we had never heard of a Top Forty radio station, we’d eventually have come across the Beatles. However, my older sister was facing high school in 1964, so she was on top of the current trends in popular music. Since we shared a room, I did hear some of the music she liked—besides the fact that by the end of 1964 there was no way you could turn on a radio, go to a party, or walk past a record store without hearing the Beatles.
I didn’t really get it at first. I had just figured out who Elvis Presley was, and I was getting pretty good at dancing the Twist—which just goes to show how small the town was where I grew up. Interestingly, it was during the week of January 13, 1962, that Chubby Checker’s song about this dance hit the Billboard charts for the second time! The first time was in 1960. Note that I still considered it a hot dance in 1964. Hmm. It’s not like today, where if a band forms in Uzbekistan, they’re performing on YouTube by the end of the day, have 10,000 fans within a week and be on their way out by the end of the month—but with a loyal following of 500 fans who will keep their memory alive online just about forever. Nope. It took a long time to grow a fan base in those days, and it took a lot longer the farther away you lived from , or . And we lived a LONG way from those places, both in space and in time.
I’d seen color televisions by January of 1964, of course, but I don’t think we got one until a couple years later. One of those big-ticket Christmas presents, I believe. I don’t remember spending a lot of time watching TV when I was a kid, but in checking out program listings for January of 1964, I see that’s when That Was the Week That Was first aired. Now that’s a surprise to me. I remember watching that show and enjoying it. Sports and political humor. Those were more in my line than music, I guess, even at my tender age. Still are, though I married a musician and eventually gained an appreciation for a variety of musical styles. OK, I admit that I’m still not too crazy about opera—or truck-driver songs. But I really do love those old Beatles songs.
