Eight Thousand Screams: The Beatles' First American Concert
Two nights after Ed Sullivan, the Beatles played their first real U.S. concert for 8,092 screaming fans at Washington, D.C.'s Washington Coliseum.
An East Coast snowstorm had grounded every flight south, so on the morning of February 11, 1964, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr boarded a Pennsylvania Railroad express in New York with a private sleeper car hitched to the back. Their manager, Brian Epstein, had arranged the train at the last minute. The Beatles had a date that night in Washington, D.C. — the first ticketed concert they would ever play in the United States — and nothing, not even the weather, was going to stop them.
The band had landed at New York's Kennedy Airport only four days earlier, mobbed by some 3,000 screaming fans. On Sunday the 9th they had played The Ed Sullivan Show before an estimated 73 million television viewers, one of the largest audiences in American history. But television was not the same as a crowd. The Washington Coliseum, a barrel-roofed concrete arena at 3rd and M Streets NE, would be the first time the Beatles stood face to face with an American audience.
Washington got the honor for a simple reason. Weeks before Capitol Records officially released "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in America, a local disc jockey named Carroll James had gotten an import copy from a flight-attendant friend and played it on WWDC. Requests exploded, other stations followed, and by the time Epstein was choosing a first concert city, Washington was already primed.
At 8:31 that evening, the Beatles took the stage before 8,092 adoring fans and played twelve songs, from "I Saw Her Standing There" to "Twist and Shout." The venue was a boxing arena, so the stage sat in the center and the band kept turning to face each section of the crowd — Ringo's drums were mounted on a special rotating circular platform to make it possible. The sound was primitive and the screaming was deafening; according to some accounts in the audience, fans even pelted the stage with jelly beans. CBS cameras filmed the whole thing, and the footage was shown in movie theaters a month later.
The next night the Beatles played two shows at Carnegie Hall in New York. But it was the Coliseum — the snow, the train, the rotating drums, the sheer wall of noise — that proved Beatlemania was not a television trick. Four young men from Liverpool had conquered the American capital in person, and the British Invasion had truly begun.
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