The future seemed limitless. The day The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show was also my parents’ 10th wedding anniversary, and all was right with the world. I was eight- and-a-half-years-old and newly alive to the power of music, having just acquired my aqua transistor radio for Christmas. The radio dial was mine. My precious copy of Meet the Beatles was as yet unscratched from countless plays on the cheap portable turntable. And my parents were still happily married. They went out to dinner on their 10th anniversary and left a 15-year-old babysitter named Susan in charge of us kids. And Susan wanted to see The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. That was okay with me.
“Who’s your favorite Beatle?” Susan asked me as I did my homework, just making conversation. I thought it was very cool of her to ask. Not many high-school sophomores at the time would have swapped musical notes with a 3rd-grader. But it was a question that had been much on my mind of late, and even in 3rd grade the battle lines were being drawn. Weeks before The Beatles arrived in the U.S., the radio airwaves were filled with Beatles music, and my classmates and I debated the relative merits of The Greatest Beatle. Ringo was an early frontrunner, probably because of his name, but others thought he just looked goofy, and that it wasn’t that hard to be a drummer anyway. Most of the girls in my class wore “I Love Paul” buttons on their St. Matthew Elementary School uniforms. I wasn’t altogether sure what role Paul played in the band, but he had a nice smile and he seemed like a good bet at the time. But ever the non-conformist, I spent my allowance on a big “I Love George” button at the Super Duper supermarket and proudly wore it to school the week before The Beatles touched down in New York.
So I showed Susan my “I Love George” button, and it turned out that she loved George, too. The evening was going swimmingly. We anxiously waited for eight o’clock to roll around. I couldn’t tell you exactly what songs The Beatles played, although I remember that they played four or five. “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” were undoubtedly two of them. I remember hordes of screaming young women on TV. I thought for a while that the lovely Susan might join them in our living room. I made a mental note that Paul was definitely the guy who elicited the most screams, and briefly considered the merits of purchasing an “I Love Paul” button to augment my earlier choice.
Seven months later my next-door neighbors invited me to accompany them to Public Auditorium in Cleveland to see The Beatles. We paid our $4.50 apiece and sat in the next-to-last row of the balcony. We couldn’t really see much. We couldn’t hear much, either, except the sound of a couple thousand screaming fans. But it didn’t matter. I don’t know what possessed a middle-class suburban family to pile into the station wagon and drive to Cleveland with the nine-year-old kid next door, but I will be forever grateful to The Walkers, wherever they may be. I saw The Beatles, live and in person. You may kiss the official Beatles-Fan-Club ring.
Looking back now it all seems so hopelessly naïve. “All you need is love,” John Lennon told us a few years later, and I wanted desperately to believe him. I wanted my parents to believe him, too. Wanted them to remember what it was like on their 10th anniversary when they still loved each other. Wanted the adultery and the alcoholism to just go away. I never really wanted to learn about the harsh realities of a world where you often need a whole lot more than love, where you need grace and forbearance and the ability to forgive unlovable people. I didn’t want to have to fathom the utter nobility and futility of those sentiments or ever think about the fact, as John Lennon found out, that sometimes you need a bulletproof vest a lot more than you need love.
But I don’t think I understood anything about that on Feb. 9, 1964. It was a special night and I got to stay up late and watch Ed Sullivan. I sat in front of our black-and-white TV in my red choochoo-train pajamas and wore my “I Love George” button and munched on popcorn.
Today would have been my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. My mom committed suicide twelve years ago. My dad lives with a stripper. John and George are in their graves, and Ringo still can’t play the drums. But for a moment, 40 years ago, the future seemed limitless, and we all watched the world change forever. In the end, it didn’t matter who was the greatest Beatle. All of those buttons got it exactly right.