Today's The 50th Anniversary Of The Beatles First U.S. Concert At Washington Coliseum

While The Beatles' NYC appearance on THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW gets most of the attention for their American debut, the Fab Four's first live concert for a paying audience took place in Washington DC. Two days after being seen by nearly 75 million Americans, the group played for 8,000 screaming fans at the Washington Coliseum a few blocks from Union Station, where they arrived by train in a snowstorm.

Today's Washington Post has a fantastic oral history of that first Beatles show, with attendees like Al Gore (who grew up in DC) and Albert Maysles (who shot the concert) and Sir Paul reminiscing about it all. There are some great details, like the chat Ringo had with a child on the train and the teen screaming which had police officers putting bullets in their ears. You can also watch footage from that show on iTunes new Beatles channel, along with two of The Beatles SULLIVAN segments.  I watched these uncut broadcast segments after the CBS tribute on Sunday kept showing tantalizingly short clips. They are really remarkable...the screaming is annoying but also electric, especially during "I Wanna Hold Your Hand". At one point, Ed himself cannot quiet the audience down to speak in intro'ing the second segment.

Finally, a live celebration of the anniversary is happening tonight at the old Coliseum itself (which now goes by its original name U Line Arena). It's been brought back to life for a one night only restaging of that first show with a Beatles tribute band. They will play the exact same set list and the show will start, as it did then, at exactly 8:31pm.  And just like the original, it is also sold out.

The Top 250 Movies On IMDB Get Mashed Up

This is a fun mega-edit of the top 250 ranked films on IMDB.  I found it on the IMDB home page last week and quite liked it for the editing as well as the challenge of trying to identify the source of most of these micro clips. But overall all it's just fun to watch some great movie classics mixed to some seriously hot beats--Joan Jett meets the Beatles meets Cypress Hill. The editor is Jonathan Keough and this is his third clips compilation on YouTube but the first one to go truly viral and get more than 2 million hits. Enjoy!

MAD MEN Makes Some Musical History

On this week's MAD MEN, the episode ended with Don Draper in his empty living room playing a cut from the "new" Beatles album REVOLVER, the proto-trippy "Tommorow Never Knows".  It was a cool and poignant moment for Don which transitioned into a montage of other characters at their own crossroads. But what was ever cooler is that it was the first use of a Beatles song on a dramatic television show.  Ever.

The Beatles licensing group Apple Corps are notoriously stingy about selling the songs for use in programming on TV and films.  Actually, I remember being told in film school there were two artists whose songs were essentially off-limits: the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen.  And it's not because the cost would be astronomical. It's because both the Beatles and Bruce didn't want to dilute their unique musical brands. While this sort of licensing can make a band enormous amounts of money (hello Journey!), it also can make songs less special.

There's an article in the TIMES this week about the process of getting the Beatles to agree to the MAD MEN use. It was not easy, according to creator Matthew Weiner. And it did cost a reported $250,000.

Remembering John Lennon & The Beatle's First US Concert

For years, the Kennedy family has been fighting the continuing commemorations of JFK & RFK on the respective days of their assassinations.  They'd prefer that people recall the Kennedy's for their lives rather than their tragic deaths and have tried to turn the focus towards celebrating their birthday's instead of their death-days.  Afterall, this is how it works with President Lincoln and Dr. King, whose birthday's are holidays not the date of their untimely deaths.

Anyway, today is the 30th anniversary of John Lennon's death and the news is filled today with remembrances of the horror of his shooting outside the Dakota.  Well, I'm going to try and buck the trend and focus on John Lennon's life a bit here.  To that end, I read a really wonderful piece of oral history in the Washington POST last weekend about the Beatles first concert in the US. It all happened the day after their legendary appearance on the Ed Sullivan show as they took the train to the Nation's Capital during a blizzard for a gig at the old Washington Coliseum.

The POST story was presented in conjunction with Paul McCartney's being one of the recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors. But it's a wonderful remembrance of the whole band on their first strange and lovely trip to America.  There are some great details, like the band being pegged with jelly beans (their favorite candy) and the fact that a teenage Al Gore was in attendance with some St. Alban's classmates.  There are some interesting descriptions of all the girls' screaming too.  The whole thing sounds surprisingly innocent for a concert; no sex or drugs...just some good old rock'n'roll.  Then again, 1964 seems like a century ago.

So here's a clip of their DC concert from YouTube. If you want, you can watch the whole thing (shot by documentarian Albert Maysles) streaming/screaming on the iTunes website.