Tomorrow!

...is there ANY moment in history as exciting as those days when the Beatles come to America? I'm floored every time I see footage of this, or read the stories of djs announcing by the minute where their plane is over the Atlantic. The music was over the top great and about to change the world, and then they show up and they're funny to boot. All that black and white footage is exhilarating, and then the timing...New York City looks like it's having one big snow day, right? Unreal. I can not think of a single more exciting moment where culture, media and tomorrow comes together all at once. And when you see the films, knowing that they ended up NOT being little boy band pussies, that they really were the best makes it even better. How unreal must it have been to be on of the very 4 young men at the epicenter of this craziness? Did iut suck being everyone else? - XMASTIME

It will have been 50 years since The Beatles landed in America:

The spontaneous, coast-to-coast outpouring of ecstasy was the precise inverse of the national reaction to an event that took place just 77 days earlier. On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, shaking the country to its core and spreading a kind of fear it hadn’t known in a century. A palpable depression enveloped the nation.

“There wasn’t a lot to cheer about after Nov. 22nd,” recalls Larry Kane, the only reporter to travel with The Beatles on every date of both the ’64 and ’65 tours, and the author of “When They Were The Boys.”

“There was concern about the escalation of the Viet Nam war, the civil rights movement was escalating, inflation was high. There was a tension,” Kane said. “When the Beatles arrived in February they started to distract everyone from all that.”

By their talent, charm and energy, the boys made pleasure once again a part of the public conversation. If that was the effect they had on the mass consciousness, they had an even deeper, and more lasting, effect on an individual level. The maiden performance by the Fab Four captured the imagination of young people so profoundly, it helped them envision entirely different lives for themselves.