The Beatles Come to America (Turning Points in History) [Hardcover]

Martin Goldsmith (Author)

Book Description

Series: Turning Points in History | Publication Date: January 26, 2004

When the Beatles touched down in New York on February 7, 1964 for their first visit to America, they brought with them a sound that hadn't been heard before. By the time they returned to England two weeks later, major changes in music, fashion, the record industry, and the image of an entire generation had been set into motion. Coming less than three months after the assassination of President Kennedy, the Beatles' visit helped rouse the country out of mourning. A breathless and condescending media concentrated on the band's hairstyles and their adoring fans, but their enduring importance lay in their music, their wit, and style, a disconnect that signaled the beginning of the generation gap. In this intriguing cultural history, Martin Goldsmith examines how and why the Beatles struck such a lasting chord.
Martin Goldsmith (Kensington, MD), the author of The Inextinguishable Symphony (0-471-35097-4), is a program director for XM Satellite Radio in Washington, D.C. From 1989 to 1999, he hosted Performance Today, NPR's daily classical music program.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For this latest installment in Wiley's Turning Points series of personal perspectives on defining American issues, music writer Goldsmith (The Inextinguishable Symphony) looks at the 1964 arrival of the Beatles in America to show how the "unleashed, unbridled joy and unparalleled excitement" of Beatlemania "was an earthquake, and we continue to feel its aftershocks forty years later." Goldsmith clearly expresses his love of the Fab Four and is especially good at detailing their famous appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. However, while Goldsmith unassailably argues that the group that appeared on TV in 1964 was an act that had been honed during four previous years of hard work, he devotes the first half of the book to proving that point by giving a short history of their entire early career, including childhoods as well as the tough tours of Hamburg and England, where they forged their style. For someone who has never heard of the Beatles (if such a person exists), this may be necessary, but this material has been covered more thoroughly and with more detail in many other works. The book does offer many fascinating details related to their arrival (such as negative reviews of the band from mainstream newspapers including the New York Times and the Washington Post). Goldsmith never explores in-depth some of the "lasting changes" that he says the Beatles' arrival made in "music, broadcasting, journalism and fashion." A little less Beatles history and more material on their actual arrival would have made this a more effective narrative.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Despite his book's title, Goldsmith devotes more than half of it to the Beatles' early years. Once he reaches the pivotal year of 1964, he explains how, arriving in New York 11 weeks after President Kennedy's assassination, the Beatles filled, perhaps surprisingly, a cultural need of a mourning nation. He notes that, as the young fans grew older, they realized their elders had been wrong on the two most important calls of the 1960s, the Beatles and Vietnam. There is little new here. The Beatles' story has been recounted countlessly, and Goldsmith, former host of NPR's classical-music program, Performance Today, offers surprisingly little musicological insight. His concise, useful account of the Beatles' career and impact should, however, find ready homes in libraries that somehow avoided acquiring many of the multitude of Beatles books published during the last few decades. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (January 26, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471469645
• ISBN-13: 978-0471469643
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,337,506 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So good it made me cry!, February 6, 2004

By 

Lovely Rita (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Beatles Come to America (Turning Points in History) (Hardcover)

I thought I knew a fair amount about the Beatles but this wonderful book filled in so many gaps in my knowledge of the band's early years. The story of those magical two weeks in February '64 is told compellingly and with fine detail but also with deep emotion. And the book's concluding pages, with the author sitting in the churchyard in Liverpool where it all began, moved me to tears. A great book worthy of its subject!

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Beatles Come to America, February 2, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Beatles Come to America (Turning Points in History) (Hardcover)

I loved this book. It's a cool look at the Beatles' musical and cultural influence on America in the 60's, and how their magic is still appreciated today. The author does a great job of picking out fun anecodotes and details about the band, inspiring me to pull out and listen to all of my Beatles' CDs.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Can It Really Be 40 Years?, January 25, 2004

By 

Glen S. Howard (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Beatles Come to America (Turning Points in History) (Hardcover)

Although generally known for his encyclopedic knowledge of classical music (as host of NPR's "Performance Today" and now of XM Radio's Classics channel), Martin Goldsmith seems equally knowledgeable in the world of rock music -- as Washington, D.C. fans of his "Songs for Aging Children" radio program already recognize. Combining this broad, cross-genre musical perspective with a wonderful gift for storytelling (compellingly demonstrated in his first book, "The Inextinguishable Symphony"), Goldsmith's highly readable account of the Beatles' early years and their coming to America is both journalistic in style and insightful cultural commentary.

"The Beatles Come to America" is part of the publisher's "Turning Points in History" series -- which includes such other seminal events as Columbus discovering America, the Louisiana Purchase, the Declaration of Independence, D-Day, Jackie Robinson's integrating major league baseball, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (by William F. Buckley). Reasonable minds may well differ as to whether the Fab Four's arrival in America belongs in the same league as those other events, but Goldsmith does an excellent job relating this event's impact not only on American *cultural* history, but on our history generally. Few would dispute, of course, that President Kennedy's assassination was a watershed event in U.S. history; and Goldsmith observes persuasively how America's multi-faceted reaction to the Beatles -- less than three months after the assassination -- was not only part of our emergence from national mourning, but also the first evidence of a new generational/cultural "Berlin Wall."

But don't let the publisher's "turning point" designation turn you off. This isn't some stodgy exegesis on "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." Above all, it's a fun read -- reminding us of those days when we stayed glued to the radio, eagerly awaited each new Beatles single, and got exasperated with our parents and the press for talking only about their haircuts!

Still, as much as I enjoyed the book's by-now familiar stories of the Beatles' appearances here in Washington, D.C. and on the Ed Sullivan Show, my favorite parts of "The Beatles Come to America" are in Goldsmith's telling of the Beatles' pre-stardom gigs in Germany where, under miserable conditions, they truly honed their music and performance skills -- and John and Paul really learned how to create wonderful music together.

There may not be a great deal that's new here for the rabidly devoted and knowledgeable Beatlemaniac, but for the rest of us mere then-and-now Beatle fans, this is a book that will bring warm smiles of remembrance and recognition. Not to mention shock and awe that it really has been 40 years.