When The Beatles Invaded America, Critics Said They Were Terrible

The Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time 50 years ago yesterday. And tomorrow, February 11, marks the 50-year anniversary of the legendary Liverpool lads’ first United States live concert, at the Washington Coliseum in the nation’s capital. See a sample of that historic concert below.

The Beatles arrival half-a-century ago launched a musical and cultural revolution, paving the way for a “British Invasion” of dozens of U.K. rock and roll bands and solo acts such as The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, Dusty Springfield, The Animals, The Zombies and many more.

Culturally, The Beatles and the bands the bands that followed them across the Atlantic, set off an upheaval in fashion and attitudes among America’s youth — a new spirit of optimism and freedom, that inaugurated the turbulent era known as “The Sixties,” whose impact is still felt today.

But there was one group of Americans who simply were not on board with The Beatles back in 1964. Critics.

Proving themselves to have a complete lack of prescience and a total disconnection from the culture around them, most critics dismissed The Beatles as “a fad,” a group of musicians who “could not carry a tune,” and in one line that for some reason particularly irked Beatles lead guitarist George Harrison, “a magic act that owed less to Britain than to Barnum.”

Harrison declared that line, appearing in The New York Herald Tribune 50 years ago today, “f******* soft.”

The other Beatles laughed off the over-the-top attacks, however.

“If everybody really liked us, it would be a bore,” John Lennon said, in an interview that same day. “It doesn’t give any edge to it if everybody just falls flat on their face saying, ‘You’re great.'”

Some of the other extremely short-sighted critical responses to hit the press in February of 1964 included The New York Times declaring The Beatles, “hoarsely incoherent, with the minimal enunciation necessary to communicate the schematic texts.”

Then there was the then-influential weekly magazine Newsweek, which said of the Beatles, “Visually they are a nightmare… Musically they are a near disaster… Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’) are a catastrophe…”

The Chicago Tribune declared The Beatles, “a huge joke,” and The Boston Globe deemed them “a disease,” but took solace in the belief that The Beatles were surely nothing more than a passing fad, and that in a few years their fans would be looking at pictures of “Ringo in a crew cut.”

The Los Angeles Times grudgingly acknowledged “a certain kittenish charm” to The Beatles, while also proclaiming, “not even their mothers would claim that they sing well,” an assertion that was not only demonstrably false, but insensitive to the fact that only two of The Beatles had mothers who were still alive. Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney lost their mothers as teenagers.

And then there was the founder of National Review magazine, William F. Buckley, the most prominent conservative intellectual of his era. To him, The Beatles were, “so unbelievably horribly, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as ‘anti-popes.'”

Well, just two years later John Lennon would observe that The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” so maybe that’s what Buckley was worried about when he came up with his ludicrous “anti-pope” analogy.