The strange tale of the first time The Beatles were played on US radio
When The Beatles came along in the early 1960s, it really can’t be stressed just how much people were still figuring out this whole pop music thing, especially on a global scale. Pop culture was still in a resolutely local frame of mind, and the idea of the radio playing music that wasn’t from your country or maybe the United States was patently ridiculous.
If you did hail from the US of A, then it was even simpler. Unless you had regional access to specific stations, your musical diet was going to be as American as heated arguments over how your state’s brand of barbeque is superior.
Despite this monoculture, radio stations, newspapers and TV stations were often a lot more accessible than they are today. Case in point, the very reason that radio stations in the States started playing The Beatles in the first place. It wasn’t a label mandate. It wasn’t scouts that were sent over the world to pick up any new trends they could bring back to the land of the free. It wasn’t even a DJ who kept track of the international music press. It was all down to a letter, one sent from a listener to show to its host.
The Fabs did have a few more regional radio appearances in the US before their big break on the airwaves. A study conducted by Kent Kotal’s website Forgotten Hits found that the station WLS in Chicago was the first radio station in the US to play The Beatles. They put ‘Please Please Me’ in rotation for a few weeks in March 1963. Then, a few stations picked it up in San Bernadino, Miami and Houston shortly afterwards. This all-important letter, though, was to a station in West Frankfurt, Illinois.
The writer, Louise Harrison, was passing along a copy of ‘Please Please Me’ to the station, as she thought they might like it. She came across the record because her mother, who lived in Liverpool, had sent it over so she could see what how successful her brother George had been in his new band!
However, ‘Please Please Me’ didn’t go into heavy rotation at any of these stations. It wasn’t an immediate success in the States the way it had been at home. That wouldn’t come until a teenager in Washington DC named Marsha Albert sent a letter to DJ Carroll James, asking him to play some tracks by The Beatles.
The story of the vice grip the band held their native country in had started to make local news in the United States, so James asked around and secured an advance copy of the Fabs’ next single. That number, a doozy of a track called ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, was the spark that lit the tinder laid by local radio stations the country over. It was the hit that caused Beatlemania to cross the Atlantic and become a worldwide phenomenon.
It’s a sign of the times that something so seismic could essentially come from a letter-writing campaign, and we can but hope that something grassroots can come around again at a time when the world is a much smaller but much more divided place.
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