February 9th is a date that belongs to The Beatles and The Beatles only.

On February 9, 1961, The Beatles play the Cavern Club in Liverpool for the 1st of 292 times, the final show coming in August ’63 just after they’d recorded “She Loves You.”. Though they’d performed at the Cavern previously as both The Quarrymen and The Silver Beatles, this was the first show performed there by John, Paul, George & Ringo. Some in the audience thought they were seeing a German band since they were billed as being “from Hamburg.”

3 years later to the day, with 50,000+ ticket requests received for 728 available seats, they performed for 73,000,000 on The Ed Sullivan Show. 60 years ago today.

Some in the press didn’t seem to care much for the band:

“Don’t let the Beatles bother you. If you don’t think about them, they will go away, and in a few more years they will probably be bald.” -Boston Globe

“Visually they are a nightmare, tight, dandified Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near disaster, guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of “yeah, yeah, yeah”) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.” -Newsweek

“The Beatles are not merely awful; I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are god awful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music.” -William F. Buckley, Jr.

The group seemed to pull through.

On February 9, 1972, with ticket’s costing just under $1, Paul McCartney debuted his new band Wings at a college in Nottingham, England.

On February 9, 1982, nearly 11 years after the Concert for Bangla Desh, George Harrison presents a check to UNICEF for $10,000,000.

February 9th is a date that belongs to The Beatles and The Beatles only.

Today’s Playlist, in honor of the 60th anniversary of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, a SomethingIsHappening compendium of solo songs by John, Paul, George & Ringo:

#TheBeatles #EdSullivan #JohnLennon #PaulMcCartney #Ringo #GeorgeHarrison #CavernClub #Liverpool #Hamburg #Wings