The Beatles' first excursion to the United States, from February 7 to February 21, 1964, was an epochal moment in American culture. It was a musical earthquake that defined music going forward and a cultural youth quake that defined generations to come. That fourteen day window not only solidified the Beatles' careers, it reshaped our culture, and nothing thereafter was ever the same. It was as if someone flipped a switch, and from February 7 on, the Beatles dictated how we looked, felt, thought, and acted.
Now, Bob Spitz, the
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Beatles: The Biography
takes readers through those dizzying four days - from "The Ed Sullivan Show," to Carnegie Hall, you get a sense of how America fell in love with the Beatles and moved from the button-down Eisenhower era to the go-go Sixties almost overnight.