In 1963, the Beatles couldn't get their chart topping, million selling, international hit records released in America by their own record company. ("Not suitable for an American audience," declared one brilliant exec.) On Friday, November 22, the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite was scheduled to end the week with a report on the phenomenal British pop group sociologists were calling, "the authentic spirit of youth," showing them performing their recent smash, "She Loves You," (yeah yeah yeah) to a delirious crowd. But a big news story kept the piece from running that day...
A couple weeks later, on December 10, Walter Cronkite declared we'd mourned enough and needed something uplifting, and ran the story on the lads from Liverpool. Marsha Albert, a 14 year old girl in Silver Spring, Maryland, saw this thrilling group on TV and wrote a letter to Washington, DC disc jockey Carroll James asking, "Why can't we have music like that in America?" James had also seen the piece, and arranged for a British Airways stewardess to bring him an import copy of the Beatles' latest single, "I Want to Hold Your Hand." And, though it could have gotten him fired, not being on the management-approved playlist (the late 50s control to keep rock and roll off the American airwaves), on December 17 he played the Beatles on American radio for the first time, bringing Marsha Albert down to the studio to introduce it herself. The rest is history.
When the Beatles arrived in February to play the Ed Sullivan Show, their back catalog released to universal acclaim, they were received like conquering heroes, like space ships landing from another galaxy to show us a better way. They went down to DC to play a thank you concert, and Marsha Albert sat in the limo between John's wife and George's sister. They opened the show not with one of their hits, but with a Chuck Berry song, "Roll Over Beethoven," 20 year old George Harrison singing lead:
"I'm gonna' write a little letter, gonna' mail it to my local DJ..."
God bless Marsha Albert.
