Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

It was on this evening February 9, 1964, 39 years ago, that I was first introduced to a Rickenbacker when watching The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah! Time jangles on.

I remember that night well Peter. Convincing my dad to put on the Sullivan show to see the Beatles for the first time was not a easy task.
If Al Jolsen or the Mills Brothers weren't on, he wasn't interested. My older brother helped convince him that we should watch the show which was in B&W.
That night changed my life and i'm sure, alot of other peoples lives too. I was hooked big time!
Beatlemania was everywhere! It was a great thing to experience first hand.
What a great time to be a 11 year old kid!

I wasn't born till '78---long after that immortal day. However, when I see the video footage from that show and think (other than Buddy Holly, Elvis and Chuck Berry) these guys had something so fresh, so unique, so unlike anything before or since in 20th Century history, it blows the mind. It is the beginning of a new era, both good and bad. Being a minister of Christ, I'd hate to say it, but they truly did save music and gave the youth of that day something to be thankful for. It was a fire of musical of revival sweeping the entire western world. Everything that has happened in pop trends the past 40 years pales in comparison to the dawn of those four happy Liverpudlians on that cold February night. God Bless and Save Our Beatles! In the words of Brian Wilson and Mike Love "Let's get together and do it again!"

I was nine years old at the time, and I remember that night also. I never did notice what brand of guitars those guys were slinging, but I do remember being told they were from England and I couldn't help noticing that they had strange haircuts. I liked their music alright, but I thought it odd that the teenage girls in the audience were going absolutely ape, pulling their hair, screaming and yelling, and acting like nothing I had ever seen. The importance of that event would dawn on me later.

This past December, I was driving home after work having just left the liquor store with my week's supply of dinner wine. Bing Crosby came on and started singing about dreaming of a white Christmas. I mean, Bing is an OK singer and all, but as I listened to the song, I remembered that he was one of the top pop singers in the decade before the Beatles. And while his singing was technically OK, the music was DULLSVILLE with a capital DULL. And I remember that the song fit the style of the era before Elvis and the Beatles, and I said to myself, "No wonder people went crazy when they saw Elvis and the Beatles for the first time. It was like the musical equivalent of the liberation of Paris or VJ Day. IT'S PARTY TIME!"

I was awash in Beatles music for the rest of the 60's and into the 70's, and never appreciated them as much as I should have at the time. I never bought their records then, although I liked their music just fine, because they were always on the airwaves. But recently, as I listen to my old White Album LP, I get the urge to just go out and buy up all their recordings.

And I probably will. The Beatles are timeless. Their music is Classic.