ON THIS DATE (51 YEARS AGO) December 26, 1963 – The Beatles: I Want To Hold Your Hand b/w I Saw Her Standing There (Capitol 5112) is released in the US. I Want to Hold Your Hand was the bands first number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, starting the British Invasion of the American music charts. The song entered the chart on 18 January 1964 at #45; by 1 February, it held the #1 spot — for seven weeks — and ended up charting for 15 weeks. It also held the top spot in the British charts. A million copies of the single had already been ordered on its release. I Want to Hold Your Hand became the Beatles best-selling single worldwide. By this time, Beatlemania was peaking in the UK; during the same period, the Beatles set a record by occupying the top two positions on both the album and single charts in the UK. EMI and Brian Epstein finally convinced American label Capitol Records, a subsidiary of EMI, that the Beatles could make an impact in the US, leading to the release of I Want to Hold Your Hand with I Saw Her Standing There on the B-Side as a single on 26 December 1963. Capitol had previously resisted issuing Beatle recordings in the US. This resulted in the relatively modest Vee-Jay and Swan labels releasing the groups earlier Parlophone counterparts in the US. Seizing the opportunity, Epstein demanded US$40,000 from Capitol to promote the single (the most the Beatles had ever previously spent on an advertising campaign was US$5,000). The single had actually been intended for release in mid-January 1964, coinciding with the planned appearance of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. However, a 14-year old fan of the Beatles, Marsha Albert, was determined to get hold of the single earlier. Later she said: “It wasnt so much what I had seen; its what I had heard. They had a scene where they played a clip of She Loves You and I thought it was a great song ... I wrote that I thought the Beatles would be really popular here, and if [deejay Carroll James] could get one of their records, that would really be great.” James was the deejay for WWDC, a radio station in Washington, DC. Eventually he decided to pursue Alberts suggestion to him and asked the stations promotion director to get British Overseas Airways Corporation to ship in a copy of I Want to Hold Your Hand from Britain. Albert related what happened next: Carroll James called me up the day he got the record and said If you can get down here by 5 oclock, well let you introduce it. Albert managed to get to the station in time, and introduced the record with: Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time on the air in the United States, here are the Beatles singing I Want to Hold Your Hand. The song proved to be a huge hit, a surprise for the station, as they catered mainly to a more staid audience, which would normally be expecting songs from singers such as Andy Williams or Bobby Vinton instead of rock and roll. James took to playing the song repeatedly on the station, often turning down the song in the middle to make the declaration, This is a Carroll James exclusive, to avoid theft of the song by other stations. Capitol threatened to seek a court order banning airplay of I Want to Hold Your Hand, which was already being spread by James to a couple of deejays in Chicago and St. Louis. James and WWDC ignored the threat, and Capitol came to the conclusion that they could well take advantage of the publicity, releasing the single two weeks ahead of schedule on 26 December. The demand was insatiable; in the first three days alone, a quarter million copies had already been sold (10,000 copies In New York City every hour). Capitol was so overloaded by the demand; it contracted part of the job of pressing copies off to Columbia Records and RCA.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 17:54:47 +0000
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