Still Fab at 50

IT WAS 50 years ago this week. On Feb. 9, 1964, four moptopped British workingclass lads in matching mod suits and speaking in exotic Liverpudlian accents took a TV studio stage in New York City to the deafening shrieks of teenage girls. And the world changed.

This Sunday marks a halfcentury since The Beatles made their inaugural appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Broadcast in primitive black and white, the program was viewed by a thenrecord audience of 73 million people, some 45 percent of American households with TV sets. In those precable, preYouTube, preTwitter days, when family members actually talked and bickered with one another in living rooms in front of boxy TVs equipped with rabbitear antennas, John, Paul, George and Ringo went viral.

I was a toddler then. But I still remember my older sister screaming and dancing and kissing the TV. Even my operabuff parents didn’t mind. For The Beatles were more than pleasant faces in skinny pants. They wrote and performed their own music, with John Lennon and George Harrison on guitar, Paul McCartney on bass guitar, and Ringo Starr (real name Richard Starkey) on drums. They were endearingly goofy.

Shortly after the band arrived on this side of the Atlantic, John was asked by a reporter, “How do you find America?’’

“Turned left at Greenland,’’ he said in a bit captured in the 1964 movie “A Hard Day’s Night.’’

The Beatles had already conquered Europe. But Paul wasn’t sure of the band’s future in the United States. “They’ve got their own groups,” he was quoted as saying before the band’s first US tour. “What are we going to give them that they don’t already have?”

But people of this country, traumatized by President John F. Kennedy’s assassination 79 days earlier and wrenched by the escalating Vietnam War, looked for distractions. The peppy guys from Liverpool fit the bill. As my family bopped to the music, we had no idea The Beatles would become the most influential band, well, ever.

As if it weren’t enough that The Beatles ignited the British Invasion of American popular music, the Fab Four put their mark on every facet of the culture, from fashion and hairstyles to the way Americans thought about youth and superstardom.

On “The Ed Sullivan Show,” broadcast from Midtown’s CBSTV Studio 50 (now the Ed Sullivan Theater, home of “Late Show with David Letterman”) they sang catchy tunes about love. “All My Loving.” “Till There Was You.” “She Loves You.’’ “I Saw Her Standing There.”

In coming years, The Beatles would grow, with complex tunes on “Rubber Soul,” “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

And was “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” the 1967 hit from “Sgt. Pepper’s,” a cheeky reference to LSD? Paul confirmed it was in 2004. But John, who admitted to using the mindaltering drug, maintained that it was mere coincidence that the first letters of the tune’s title nouns spelled out LSD. The song, he said, was named for a drawing called “Lucy — in the sky with diamonds’’ by his then4yearold son, Julian.

Nat Meguid, 14, of Connecticut wasn’t even a thought when The Beatles first appeared on television. Now she’s a Beatlemaniac, who listens to the band every day on her iPod or vinyl records, which sound infinitely better.

“The Beatles cover all my emotions,” she told me. “I feel like I can just tune out and all my problems disappear. Nobody else comes close to The Beatles. Sometimes I think I was born too late.’’

As George’s song tells us, all things must pass.

In 1970, Paul announced that, 10 years after the band’s formation (Ringo replaced drummer Pete Best in 1962; the late bass player Stuart Sutcliffe left the thenfivepiece act in ’61), The Beatles were finished. Though John’s second wife, Yoko Ono, is blamed by many fans for breaking up the band, pulling John from the group and causing friction among bandmates, the fact is that the lads could no longer stand each other.

In 1980, John Lennon was shot dead outside his apartment at The Dakota on Manhattan’s Central Park West by Mark David Chapman. John was 40. In 2001, George Harrison died of lung cancer at 58.

Then last month at the Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, Paul McCartney, now 71 — or Sir Paul since he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1997 — won a trophy for Best Rock Song for his tune “Cut Me Some Slack.” Then he topped himself by rocking out with a little help from his friend Ringo Starr, 73. Taking the stage together for the first time in five years, they performed Paul’s song “Queenie Eye” with Paul on piano and Ringo on drums. The assembled stars gave the surviving Beatles a standing ovation. Watching from home, I had tears in my eyes.

Fifty years from now, another generation will revere The Beatles. Rock on.