7th February 1964: The Beatles break America. And badly.

 

Some anniversaries are unforgettable, indeed the 6th of February to a Manchester United supporter of a certain age would always be a date as memorable as one’s own birthday, but fused with those dismal images of the stricken Elizabethan airliner and the accompanying pictorial roll call of the victims. The 9/11 disaster, without the Americanised mnemonic would be probably be recalled as another iconic image, rather than a particular day, that signified abysmal loss.


An anniversary whose date won’t mean much, but whose picture certainly will, involves another aircraft. This time it’s a Boeing 707 that, as far as we know, goes on to fly many more trouble-free miles as a transatlantic clipper. Just over forty-seven years ago Flight 101 lands at New York and on board are a British rock and roll band. They are photographed descending those Pan-Am steps whose blue confident logo was irretrievably and fatally stamped on the hellish images from Lockerbie in 1988. To a wage-earning musician in America in those days, from lounge jazz trios, doo-wop groups to bourbon-laced crooners, it was a day that would profoundly affect their collective futures.
America, the home of jazz and rock and roll, had managed, by its sheer wealth of material, talent and entrepreneurial chutzpah, to turn entertainment into an industry.