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The Beatles · S5 E6
February 7, 1964
JFK Airport. Pan Am Flight 101 lands. 3,000 screaming fans are waiting on the tarmac. Four lads from Liverpool step off the plane, and America will never be the same
February 7, 1964. Pan Am Flight 101 from London touches down at JFK Airport, and the sound that greets it is louder than the engines.
The Beatles, Get Back, live from the rooftop of Apple Corps (1969). Their career in front of live audiences began with screaming at JFK Airport and ended here, on a London rooftop, with police climbing the stairs. Five years between the two performances changed everything.
Get Back, The Beatles (1969)
Paul wrote 'Get Back' as a stripped-down rock and roll song, deliberately pulling the band back to their roots after the experimental complexity of the White Album. Billy Preston's electric piano gives the track its warm, rolling groove, and his contribution was significant enough that the single was credited to 'The Beatles with Billy Preston,' the only time an outside musician received co-billing. The rooftop concert captures the song at its most alive: four men playing together on a freezing January afternoon while London looks up and the police try to shut them down.
Sources
Lewisohn, Mark. "The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions." Hamlyn, 1988/2018.
Sulpy, Doug and Schweighardt, Ray. "Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of The Beatles' Let It Be Disaster." St. Martin's Griffin, 1997.
The Loudest Airport in the World
Three thousand fans are waiting on the tarmac when the plane door opens. The Beatles step into a wall of noise that none of them have experienced before, not even at the height of British Beatlemania. At the airport press conference, American journalists try to trip them up with sharp questions, and the Beatles answer every one with the same quick Liverpool humor that has won over everyone who has ever underestimated them.
Sources
The Beatles. "The Beatles Anthology." Chronicle Books, 2000.
Norman, Philip. "Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation." Simon & Schuster, 2003.
“Great. Especially his poems.”
— Ringo Starr, when asked what he thought of Beethoven, JFK Airport press conference, February 7, 1964
TAP TO REVEAL: How did American teenagers actually discover the Beatles?
John F. Kennedy International Airport, Queens, New York
On February 7, 1964, three thousand fans gathered here to greet Pan Am Flight 101. The airport had been renamed JFK just two months earlier, after the assassination that left America searching for something to believe in.
It Won't Be Long, The Beatles (1963)
The opening track of With The Beatles: urgent, driving, and drenched in harmonies that hit like a wall. The title feels prophetic: 'it won't be long till I belong to you.' Every label rejection, every skeptic, every British act that failed to break America was answered the moment Pan Am Flight 101 touched down.
It Won't Be Long, The Beatles (1963)
Read the lyrics while you listen. John sings 'every night when everybody has fun, here am I sitting all on my own.' By February 1964, he was never alone again. Sixty million Americans made sure of that.
Where did the Beatles stay during their first visit to New York in February 1964?
Three thousand fans at the airport was just the opening act. Two days later, 73 million Americans tune in to the Ed Sullivan Show, and the Beatles step in front of the largest television audience in history.
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