Let Me Take You Down, 'Cause I'm Going to...

Forty-four years ago today an event occurred that changed the world.

No government was overthrown, no leader assassinated, no conflict was sparked. Quit simply four kids from Liverpool stepped on to the stage at CBS Studio 50 in New York City and sang a song.

The kids were John, Paul, George, and Ringo. The Stage was the set of the Ed Sullivan Show and the impact was immeasurable.

No I'm not talking about the end of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey where the Wylde Stalynz song saves the world. The Beatles impact was much more subtle. After all Sullivan was the moral censor of America, a one man television network (kinda like a 1950s Oprah that didn't give cars away but also wasn't bugging you to read all the time) . You tell our buddy Eddy-S you want a Revolution and he's going to tell you to cut you hair and get a job in the Asbestos Plant.


Ed Sullivan Says...

"If you don't like the modern miracle that is Asbestos your a dirty filthy Communist!"





No the Beatles didn't play Happiness is a Warm Gun or anything even remotely inflammatory that night, in fact the evenings most risque number was probably I Want to Hold Your Hand. The songs the Beatles played that night didn't change the world but it did create the most profound connection between an artiest and a generation popular culture has ever known. Its difficult to find anything to comparable to it. Nirvana's Smells like Teen Spirit?, Springsteen's Born in the USA? Grandmaster Flash's The Message? They're all ground breaking but they can't hold a candle to the moment the Baby Boomers met The Beatles.

On Sunday February 9th, 73,700,000 people watched a band sing " She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah:. On Monday February 10th the youth of America began picking up guitars and growing their hair out like the Fab Four. What would Ed Sullivan have said if he had known that the simple act of letting a couple of Britts preform on his weekly show would be the first shot of a cultural revolution?

Only a few years later many of the kids that watched a harmless band preform on the most holy bastion of 1950's American culture, The Ed Sullivan Show, would be taking part in some of the great moments of the 20th century. These youth would walk with King and Bobby Kennedy in the spring of 1968, they would accompany Timothy Leary on his Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, they would close down the administration building at Howard University, and face the brutal force of the establishment on the the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention

Not bad for four kids from an English port town singing about holding hands


On a related note ...

The DVD for Across the Universe was released this week. It's a musical made up entirely of Beatles song set in 1960's New York. I caught it when it was in theaters and I highly recommend it.

Also...
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi the man The Beatles studied under on their 1968 trip to India passed away this week. He was responsible for the development of Transcendental Mediation

Transcendental Meditation attempts to settle down the thinking process until the subject experiences “pure consciousness.” I actualy taught a lesson on the subject this fall and along with being a very healthy practice for mind and body the technique dose in fact create altered brain waves in some subjects. So yea, at least in my opinion, it is possible to reach an altered state of consciousness using the technique.

Alright maybe I'll go meditate. On second thought I'm going to go watch Cartoons instead.

peace out yo