The remarkable rise of rock music demonstrated the power of the global youth movement. By the early 1970s, rock records made up 80 percent of all U.S. music sales and dominated the charts in Europe. In rock and roll, young people found a cultural medium that allowed them to rebel against traditional values. Rock music provided a rebellious soundtrack for the Vietnam War, both at home and in-country. Young Vietnamese who grew up surrounded by American adopted rock music and founded popular bands. Rock music became a powerful transnational “sonic space” transcending old cultural and political boundaries. These global connections were reflected in the “British Invasion” of the 1960s.
On February 7, 1964, the Beatles landed at Kennedy International Airport in New York and were greeted by several thousand screaming teenage girls. Two days later, the band from Liverpool, England, played to a hysterical studio audience on CBS’s The Ed Sullivan Show. Seventy million people-still reeling from John Fl Kennedy’s assassination-tuned in to watch John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr perform on television, which equaled more than 60 percent of the nation’s television viewers. A similarly enormous television audience watched the Beatles’ follow-up performance in Miami on the next week’s Ed Sullivan Show. Before returning to England, where they were already adored, the band also played two sold-out concerts in New York and Washington, DC. In the span of nine days, Americans bought more than two million Beatles records and spent over 2.5 million on Beatles merchandise.
“Beatlemania” erupted in the United States in early 1964. Millions of Americans, particularly teenage girls of the baby boom generation, were smitten with the band’s catch songs; romantic lyrics; fashion sense; and wholesome but sexualized image, wit, and charm. Young men started growing their hair longer to copy their new idols and began wearing “Beatle boots.” A Hard Day’s Night, a film starring the band released in the summer of 1964, furthered their already extraordinary popularity and their reputation as likable young men. The Beatles seemed to represent freedom and fun to a generation of youth. For their part, the Beatles had found American music, especially Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, rhythm and blues, and rockabilly, an escape from working-class life in postwar England.
The Beatles’ popularity, paving the way for many other British rock bands, opened the insular American music market and initiated the “British Invasion.” Throughout the decade, British bands thrived in the United States. Some drew their inspiration from Chicago blues artists such as Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon. The Rolling Stones, who took their name from a Waters song, became the most famous of these blues-based groups. Encouraged by their manager, who wanted people to think “the Stones were threatening uncouth, and animalistic,” the adopted a rougher more rebellious image than the Beatles. Another band the Who, brought London’s “mod” fashion scan to Americans, and the Animals had a number one hit in the United States and Great Britain with a reworked version of an American folk song, “The House of the Rising Sun.” Ironically American guitarist Jimi Hendrix had to establish himself in England before he gained recognition in the United States.
British and American musical artists fueled each other’s creativity. American folksinger Bob Dylan decided to “go electric” after hearing the Beatles. Dylan introduced the Beatles to marijuana and encouraged them to branch out musically and write more introspective lyrics. The result was the album Rubber Soul (1965), which inspired Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys to create the musically experimental Pet Sounds (1966). That album, a departure from the Beach Boys’ earlier, more innocent songs in turn pushed the Beatles to produce their psychedelic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. It was popular worldwide. A journalist reported that “in every city in Europe and America the stereo systems and the radios played [‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ from the album]. For a brief while the irreparably fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young.” Stg. Pepper became part of the soundtrack of the so-called Summer of Love for the counterculture in San Francisco.
This artistic competition, as well as the growing influence of older blues and rock-and-roll musicians, created an international music scene that deeply affected popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic and around the globe. The historian Terry H. Anderson has noted that the British Invasion “demonstrated that rock and roll-although a uniquely American invention-was becoming the music of the international postwar baby boom: The sixties would not just be an American phenomenon.”
Schaller, et. al., American Horizons: U.S. History in a Global Perspective, 3rd Edition, University of Oxford Press.
