We were in our twenties, living in Falmouth on Cape Cod, with two young kids and a 60 hour week job... and considered ourselves "sophisticated" about music. We were put off by the smarmy longhairs from England and couldn't understand why they should be popular. At the time 1963, perhaps, no one in the US had ever heard the music, so it was just reputation that preceded their first trip to the US.
The big thing at the time, was to listen to the radio for current music. I can remember listening to WBZ in Boston... DJ , or announcer Gary La Pierre, talking about an impending visit. Now, this may sound strange, but I recall the station playing a purported few songs from an album that had not been released... with the sound masked by a baackground Buwaa Buwaa sound that meant the song couldn't be recorded. If it weren't so clear in memory, I'd say it didn't make sense. The lead in to these unintelligible clips started several days earlier, so the airing had a huge listening audience.
Sometime thereafter, we bought what I'd describe as an "el cheapo" album with the four Beatles in suits on the cover. As I recall, it was on a VJ album. We had that until 1990's, when it became watersoaked in a flood along with a hundred or so other LP's.
Can remember waiting for the first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, as well as the to-do that surrounded the Beatles' landing at Logan International. I am sure that we had no appreciation for these hippies at the time, and didn't consider their noise, to be music. We were pretty snobby I suppose... more into Johnny Mathis and Jackie Gleason. The Beatles would fade into history, (we thought)... and didn't want our kids to be influenced by anyone who took drugs. It wasn't until many years later that we found out about "Lucy in the Sky". Drugs were something in the news, that we talked about, but never came into our lives.
Thinking of the Beatles as "history" makes us feel ancient.
