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When the Beatles took the stage on "The Ed Sullivan Show" on Feb. 9, 1964, they grabbed the bland mid-'60s by the throat, kicked out the Frankie Avalons and Paul Ankas and changed rock 'n' roll for good.
Popular culture is still reeling.
Out went the pomade; down came the hair in bangs - long hair, it was considered then, even touching the ears.
"I remember the 45 of 'I Want to Hold Your Hand,'" recalled John Flanders of Portsmouth. "My friend Brad Watterson had it. It had a picture of these four guys, one of them sitting in a chair. They had what we thought was long hair at the time. And they wore these shirts with no collars. It was the oddest thing I'd ever seen."
And it was the greatest thing he ever heard. Flanders, who grew up in Newport, was just learning to play guitar, playing around with some surf-styled numbers and instrumentals by the Ventures. But, he said, "After hearing the Beatles, I didn't want to play the Ventures anymore."
Forty years later, for many fans and musicians, there's still no one else who compares. Flanders owns 27 Beatles neckties, among other memorabilia, and plays guitar in a newly formed Beatles cover band, which carries the tentative name of Abbey Rhode. The group consists of fellow Beatles fans Kevin Sullivan on guitar and vocals, Ray Davis on bass and Irish drummer Paddy Higgins. It will debut March 27 at Billy Goode's in Newport.
Flanders, an Internet consultant, remembers watching his parents' 13-inch, metal-frame, black-and-white TV in 1964, when the Beatles played on "The Ed Sullivan Show." "To think it's 40 years, that's unbelievable to me," he said. "And two of them (John Lennon and George Harrison) are gone. It felt back then like they would live forever. Unfortunately, they were just like everyone else."
Mortal in life, but immortal in music, as it turned out. To get a sense of how big the Beatles were 40 years ago, look at these numbers: They sent 18 singles into the Billboard Top 40 in 1964, and five of which hit No. 1. At one point that year, five of the Top 10 songs in a given week were Beatles hits.
Flanders, who also plays in the longtime band Fourplay, remembers the tenor of the times. President John F. Kennedy had been gunned down in Dallas less than three months earlier.
"There was this kind of dark cloud hanging over the country at the time," he said. "It was really a period of mourning. But when the Beatles came to America, the mourning was over."
For Bob Cowsill, the Beatles changed the course of his life - as a fan and a musician. Now living in California, Cowsill grew up in Newport and Middletown. Three years after the Beatles broke open on these shores, Cowsill's family band, the Cowsills, hit the pop charts and ended up on "The Ed Sullivan Show."
"I remember being on that stage and wanting to stand where John Lennon stood, to see what he saw," Cowsill said.
An early version of the Cowsills already was under way in 1964, with Bob and brothers Bill and Barry. They were into Ricky Nelson and the Everly Brothers, and All-American acts like that, during a period of the 1960s that felt like the late 1950s.
But when the Beatles hit the airwaves, the Cowsills stopped playing "Poor Little Fool" and said goodbye to "Bye Bye Love." Cowsill's family lived on Indian Avenue in Middletown and could pick up WINS in New York City. Stations in New York were frantically trying to outdo each other in breaking any and all news about the Beatles arrival.
Blustery deejays like Cousin Brucie and Murray the K worked overtime to cozy up to the four young Liverpudlians, and screaming girls threw themselves onto the Beatles' limousines. And it all sent a power surge to Bob Cowsill and his brothers.
"We added John on drums and moved Barry to bass and that was it," he said. "We got rid of the butch wax and combed our hair dry and down. Dad got pretty upset."
Like thousands of kids playing in cellars and garages, the Cowsills learned every Beatles song put on vinyl. "It gave us a lot of material," he said. "If you were in a band, you had to know the Beatles songs. And it got us a lot of work."
The Cowsills - who would eventually include mom Barbara, sister Susan and brother Paul during their heyday - landed four Top 40 hits between 1967 and 1969. Bob Cowsill still wonders if any of it would have happened without the Beatles.
"What they did eventually allowed us to succeed and to do what we did. I think that was the same for so many groups," he said.
While the Beatles formed in the late 1950s, the peak period of John, Paul, George and Ringo ran from 1964 to 1970, before any of the members hit 30. They ushered in the album-rock era with "Revolver" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," and the group added sitars, strings and psychedelia.
"It became music to listen to, not dance to," Cowsill said.
Lisa Firda of Middletown, who plays in the local band Beyond Blonde, grew up influenced more by hard rockers, but she said the Beatles had an effect on everyone. "I was probably leaning more to the Stones side," she said. "But the Beatles have definitely influenced my writing. There's kind of a simplicity that I like, the arrangements and harmonies. It stays with you."
It's also stayed with Chuck Ciany of Newport, for 40 years. He was a seventh-grader attending school outside Baltimore in 1964. Some girls were talking up the Beatles in the schoolyard, and Ciany had no idea what they were talking about.
"But I wanted to be into it because the girls were into it," he said. "You wanted to follow what the girls followed at that age."
He watched the famous Ed Sullivan show with his family and was awestruck. "It changed everything for me," he said. "This was what I wanted to do."
Ciany makes his living as an engineer, but his passion remains music. He spends his weekends in the group Doin' Time and has played in a variety of local bands since the 1980s.
"There was something about the Beatles," he said. "It was the singing, the harmonies. It was unique. There really was no one else like that."
Ciany grew up playing sax and clarinet, even singing Beatle songs with clarinet accompaniment. But he eventually tossed that aside for the guitar. Ciany also carried a transistor radio wherever he went.
"You marked time with the release of every new Beatles record," he said. "There was other music before that I enjoyed. But nothing like that. And the Beatles taught us about American music. I'd never really heard Chuck Berry before the Beatles did his songs. There was kind of that racial divide on the radio."
Is the Beatles' influence alive today? While there's little evidence in rap or heavy metal, bands like Coldplay and Blink 182 keep alive the tradition of short, melodic, guitar-based rock songs. "I've always been a sucker for that stuff," Ciany said, "that power-pop sound."
Not only does Ciany still listen to the Beatles and know all their songs ("They're harder to play than people think") but his hairstyle is a long-running British Invasion homage. The mop-top Beatles cut is a Ciany trademark, no matter how much ribbing he endures.
On a trip a while back, he changed it, to good reviews. But he resumed the "Hard Day's Night" style when he returned home.
"I had to go back to it," he said with a chuckle. "And now it's the 40th anniversary. How can I change it now?"
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