british invasion essay

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Revisit: The British Invasion: How 1960s Beat Groups Conquered America

ABOUT THE EXHIBIT

American popular music experienced a seismic shift in 1964.  That year, British bands launched what became commonly known as an “invasion” of the American pop charts and culture.  Led by The Beatles, other British bands and artists such as the Rolling Stones, Donovan, the Dave Clark Five, the Kinks, the Yardbirds, the Searchers, the Animals and many more completely and dramatically affected the course of rock & roll in America.  At no other time in the 20 th century had American popular music been so jolted by foreign sounds and influences.

What many young Americans in 1964 didn’t realize was that these “new” sounds coming from across the Atlantic weren’t new at all.  Many of the British Invasion bands and artists claimed America and its remarkably rich pop music tradition as their primary influence.  What made the re-invention of American music by the British acts so alluring was the fresh and innovative ways they interpreted it and then the manner by which they made it their own.  Coupled with intriguing accents, radically new fashion ideas and hairstyles, and a genuine artistic excellence, the British Invasion ignited a music renaissance in America and permanently and prominently established the U.K. on the rock & roll map.

Blues, Folk, and Skiffle

American blues and folk music were both roots of rock & roll and main inspirations for the British Invasion.  Folk musicians such as Josh White, Woody Guthrie (who wrote the great American folk classic, “This Land Is Your Land”), and Lead Belly helped give rise to a pre-rock & roll sound in the U.K. called skiffle.  In 1956 Lonnie Donegan, a young British musician deeply influenced by Lead Belly, recorded his version of “Rock Island Line,” a popular Lead Belly tune.  The hit song sparked the skiffle craze in the U.K.  In Liverpool a young John Lennon formed a skiffle band called the Quarrymen and recruited guitarists Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The band led to the formation of The Beatles.

Rhythm & Blues, Rock & Roll, and Soul

America’s music landscape in the late 1950s and early 1960s contained numerous music styles, among them rhythm & blues, rock & roll, and soul.  Rhythm & blues, a precursor to rock & roll, came of age right after World War II.  Ray Charles and James Brown were R&B stylists who helped this predominantly African-American sound find its way to white audiences.

Soul music evolved from R&B.  It owned a smoother, more pop-friendly groove than R&B.  The Motown Sound that came from Detroit featured such soul artists as Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, and the Supremes—all regular visitors to the pop charts in the early 1960s and collectively, a main influence on British Invasion groups. Out in California, the Beach Boys created surf music that reflected the sunny sound of Los Angeles.

The Beatles Visit America

The Beatles’ first visit to America lasted only two weeks, but it was enough time to ignite Beatlemania in this country and to usher in new eras in pop culture and pop music.

The Beatles arrived in New York on February 7; fifteen days later, they returned to England.  During their brief stay in the States, The Beatles did dozens of interviews, visited three cities and played three concerts, and appeared three times on The Ed Sullivan Show.   Their single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” was firmly entrenched in the number one slot on the pop charts, and nearly every teen who had seen The Beatles perform on television anxiously awaited their return.

Courtesy of Chuck Gunderson

The British Invasion

Once The Beatles paved the path to America, dozens of British acts followed.  Solo artists, duos, and a slew of bands, some from Liverpool, and others from London, Glasgow, Birmingham and nearly everywhere else in the U.K., flooded the American pop charts with hit songs.

Suddenly America was awash with new sounds and styles from across the Atlantic.  Part of the mania was cultural: American teens fell hard for British accents, hip fashions, and new hairstyles.  But much of it was musical.  Though the early British Invasion sounds clearly had American antecedents, U.K. rock sounds became increasingly original as the invasion wore on.

A Fan’s Bedroom

In the 1960s, many middle-class suburban homes in America featured separate bedrooms for the teens in the family.  Such household space afforded them privacy unavailable to previous generations of young Americans.  Many teens turned their bedrooms into private domains, decorating them with photos and posters of The Beatles and other British Invasion artists.  Phonographs and record collections competed for space with scrapbooks, schoolbooks, diaries, trophies, and stuffed animals. Private telephones were an added luxury.

In the mid-‘60s, at the height of the British Invasion, many teen bedrooms in America celebrated their new love of British pop culture and music.  This example of a teen bedroom from suburban California circa 1965 includes many Beatlemania and British Invasion objects popular at the time.

Bob Bonis Photo Gallery

Bob Bonis was the U.S. tour manager for the Rolling Stones and The Beatles from 1964 to 1966.  A camera buff that often had his Leica M3 around his neck, Bonis took hundreds of photos of the Stones and The Beatles during the three-year period, many of which had never been presented publicly before and are featured in this exhibit.  With unlimited access to both groups backstage as well as on tour and onstage, Bonis has provided history an extraordinary glimpse of the British Invasion of America.

The American Response

The British Invasion unleashed a creative music explosion in America in the mid-‘60s.  Guitar sales soared.  Longer hair for young men became instantly popular.  The British flag became a fashion statement.  A music press was born.  New bands formed all across America.

In Los Angeles, the Byrds based its early sound on The Beatles.  The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson used The Beatles’ albums Rubber Soul and Revolver as inspiration for his masterpiece, Pet Sounds.   The Monkees created their own mania.  In San Francisco, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead had early roots in the British Invasion.

In Boston the Standells reflected the rawness of the Rolling Stones. In New York, Bob Dylan’s transition from folk to rock owed something to The Beatles.  In Detroit, Motown acts were interpreting Beatles songs. Even in Texas, where the Sir Douglas Quintet looked and sounded more British than Texan, the effects of the British Invasion were felt.

The Second Wave

There was no official end date to the British Invasion of America’s pop charts.  However, many music historians point to The Beatles’ final concert in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August 1966 as the invasion’s most logical conclusion.  After that, The Beatles became a studio-only band and broadened rock’s creative reach with singles such as “Strawberry Fields Forever” and the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.   The Beatles also inspired a second British Invasion.

Coming to America in the late 1960s was a legion of new bands, all following in the footsteps of The Beatles.  Packed with new ideas and sounds, Cream, Pink Floyd, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Led Zeppelin, the Small Faces, the Moody Blues, Procol Harum, and others, along with holdovers the Rolling Stones, The Who, and the Kinks, made the second British Invasion as influential, musically exciting, and memorable as the first.

Shown here is a gold Premier drum kit played by The Who’s drummer, Keith Moon. Moon’s celebrated bashing of his drums was only part of his British rock legacy.  In the late ‘60s, Moon catapulted the drummer out of the background and into the spotlight, turning the drums into what had previously been a part of the band’s rhythm section into, at times, a lead instrument.  Other drummers from the period – most notably Cream’s Ginger Baker and Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham – also elevated the importance of the drums in hard rock and heavy metal and matched Moon’s intensity and close-to-the-edge lifestyle.

British Invasion

by Meagan Paese | History , Pop , Rock and Roll

The British Invasion was a phenomenon that occurred in the mid-1960s when rock and pop music acts from the United Kingdom, as well as other aspects of British culture, became popular in the United States, and significant to the rising “counterculture” on both sides of the Atlantic. Pop and rock groups such as the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, the Animals, and the Who were at the forefront of the invasion.

The rebellious tone and image of US rock and roll and blues musicians became popular with British youth in the late 1950s. While early commercial attempts to replicate American rock and roll mostly failed, the trad jazz–inspired skiffle craze, with its ‘do it yourself’ attitude, was the starting point of several British Billboard singles. Young British groups started to combine various British and American styles, in different parts of the U.K., such as a movement in Liverpool during 1962 in what became known as Merseybeat, hence the “beat boom”. That same year featured the first three acts with British roots to reach the Hot 100’s summit, including the Tornados’ instrumental “Telstar”, written and produced by Joe Meek, becoming the first record by a British group to reach number one on the US Hot 100.

Some observers have noted that US teenagers were growing tired of singles-oriented pop acts like Fabian. The Mods and Rockers, two youth “gangs” in mid-1960s Britain, also had an impact in British Invasion music. Bands with a Mod aesthetic became the most popular, but bands able to balance both (e.g. the Beatles) were also successful.

On October 29, 1963, The Washington Post published the first story in the USA about the frenzy surrounding the rock group the Beatles in the United Kingdom.

The Beatles’ November 4 Royal Variety Performance in front of the Queen Mother sparked music industry and media interest in the group. During November a number of major American print outlets and two network television evening programs published and broadcast stories on the phenomenon that became known as “Beatlemania”.

On December 10 CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, looking for something positive to report, re-ran a Beatlemania story that originally had aired on the 22 November 1963 edition of the CBS Morning News with Mike Wallace but shelved that night because of the assassination of US President John Kennedy.

After seeing the report, 15-year-old Marsha Albert of Silver Spring, Maryland, wrote a letter the following day to disc jockey Carroll James at radio station WWDC asking, “Why can’t we have music like that here in America?”

The group’s massive chart success, which included at least two of their singles holding the top spot on the Hot 100 during each of the seven consecutive years starting with 1964, continued until they broke up in 1970.

One week after the Beatles entered the Hot 100 for the first time, Dusty Springfield, having launched a solo career after her participation in the Springfields, became the next British act to reach the Hot 100, with “I Only Want to Be with You.” Released in late 1963, this successful hit peaked at number 12 on the Hot 100 right around the time The Beatles began to dominate the U.S. airwaves. She soon followed up with several other hits, becoming what AllMusic described as “the finest white soul singer of her era.”

On the Hot 100, Dusty’s solo career lasted almost as long, albeit with little more than one quarter of the hits, as the Beatles’ group career before their breakup. During the next two years or so, Peter and Gordon, the Animals, Manfred Mann, Petula Clark, Freddie and the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Herman’s Hermits, the Rolling Stones, the Dave Clark Five, the Troggs, Donovan, and Lulu in 1967, would have one or more number one singles in the US. Other Invasion acts included the Searchers, Billy J. Kramer, the Bachelors, Chad & Jeremy, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Honeycombs, Them (and later its lead singer, Van Morrison), Tom Jones, the Yardbirds (whose guitarist Jimmy Page would later form Led Zeppelin), the Spencer Davis Group, the Small Faces, and numerous others.

The Kinks, although considered part of the Invasion, initially failed to capitalize on their success in the US after their first three hits reached the Hot 100’s top 10 (in part due to a ban by the American Federation of Musicians) before resurfacing in 1970 with “Lola” and in 1983 with their biggest hit, “Come Dancing”. On May 8, 1965, the British Commonwealth came closer than it ever had or would to a clean sweep of a weekly Hot 100’s Top 10, lacking only a hit at number two instead of “Count Me In” by the US group Gary Lewis & the Playboys. That same year, half of the 26 Billboard Hot 100 chart toppers (counting the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” carrying over from 1964) belonged to British acts.

The British trend would continue into 1966 and beyond. British Invasion acts also dominated the music charts at home in the United Kingdom.

As 1965 approached another wave of British Invasion artists emerged which consisted usually of either of groups playing in a more pop style, such as the Hollies or the Zombies or with a harder-driving, blues-based approach such as the Who. The musical style of British Invasion artists, such as the Beatles, had been influenced by earlier US rock ‘n’ roll, a genre which had lost some popularity and appeal by the time of the Invasion.

However, a subsequent handful of white British performers, particularly the Rolling Stones and the Animals, would appeal to a more ‘outsider’ demographic, essentially reviving and popularizing, for young people at least, a musical genre rooted in the blues, rhythm and black culture, which had been largely ignored or rejected when performed by black US artists in the 1950s.

Such bands were sometimes perceived by American parents and elders as rebellious and unwholesome. This image marked them as separate from artists such as the Beatles, who had become a more acceptable, parent-friendly pop group. The Rolling Stones would become the biggest band other than the Beatles to come out of the British Invasion,[60] topping the Hot 100 eight times.

Sometimes, there would be a clash between the two styles of the British Invasion, the polished pop acts and the grittier blues-based acts due to the expectations set by the Beatles. Eric Burdon of the Animals said “They dressed us up in the most strange costumes.

They were even gonna bring a choreographer to show us how to move on stage. I mean, it was ridiculous. It was something that was so far away from our nature and, um, yeah we were just pushed around and told, ‘When you arrive in America, don’t mention the [Vietnam] war! You can’t talk about the war.’ We felt like we were being gagged.”

“Freakbeat” is a term sometimes given to certain British Invasion acts closely associated with the mod scene during the Swinging London period, particularly harder-driving British blues bands of the era, that often remained obscure to US listeners, and who are sometimes seen as counterparts to the garage rock bands in America. Certain acts, such as the Pretty Things and the Creation, had a certain degree of chart success in the UK and are often considered exemplars of the form.

The emergence of a relatively homogeneous worldwide “rock” music style marking the end of the “invasion” occurred in 1967, but not without one final comment from America, when one-hit wonder The Rose Garden’s “Next Plane to London” peaked at #17 during the last week of that year

Mary Poppins, released on August 27, 1964, and starring English actress Julie Andrews as the titular character, became the most Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated Disney film in history, and My Fair Lady, released on December 25, 1964, starring British actress Audrey Hepburn as Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle, won eight Academy Awards.

Besides the Bond series which commenced with Sean Connery as James Bond in 1962, films with a British sensibility such as the “Angry Young Men” genre, What’s New Pussycat? and Alfie styled London Theatre. A new wave of actors such as Peter O’Toole and Michael Caine intrigued US audiences.

Four of the decade’s Academy Award winners for best picture were British productions, with the epic Lawrence of Arabia, starring O’Toole as British army officer T. E. Lawrence, winning seven Oscars in 1963.

Fashion and image marked the Beatles out from their earlier US rock and roll counterparts. Their distinctive, uniform style “challenged the clothing style of conventional US males,” just as their music challenged the earlier conventions of the rock and roll genre. “Mod” fashions, such as the mini skirt from “Swinging London” designers such as Mary Quant and worn by early supermodels Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton and other models, were popular worldwide.

John Crosby wrote, “The English girl has an enthusiasm that American men find utterly captivating. I’d like to import the whole Chelsea girl with her ‘life is fabulous’ philosophy to America with instructions to bore from within..

Even while longstanding styles remained popular, US teens and young adults started to dress “hipper”. The evolution of the styles of the British Invasion bands also showed in US culture, as some bands went from more clean cut to being more hippies

In anticipation of the 2013 50th anniversary of the British Invasion, comics such as Nowhere Men, which are loosely based on the events of it, have gained popularity.

The British Invasion had a profound impact on popular music, internationalizing the production of rock and roll, establishing the British popular music industry as a viable center of musical creativity,[80] and opening the door for subsequent British performers to achieve international success.

In America the Invasion arguably spelled the end of the popularity of instrumental surf music,[81] pre-Motown vocal girl groups, the folk revival (which adapted by evolving into folk rock), and (for a time) the teen idols that had dominated the American charts in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Television shows that featured uniquely American styles of music, such as Sing Along with Mitch and Hootenanny, were quickly canceled and replaced with shows such as Shindig! and Hullabaloo that were better positioned to play the new British hits, and segments of the new shows were taped in England.

It dented the careers of established R&B acts like Chubby Checker and temporarily derailed the chart success of certain surviving rock and roll acts, including Ricky Nelson, Fats Domino, and Elvis Presley. It prompted many existing garage rock bands to adopt a sound with a British Invasion inflection and inspired many other groups to form, creating a scene from which many major American acts of the next decade would emerge.

The British Invasion also played a major part in the rise of a distinct genre of rock music and cemented the primacy of the rock group, based around guitars and drums and producing their own material as singer-songwriters.

Though many of the acts associated with the invasion did not survive its end, many others would become icons of rock music. The claim that British beat bands were not radically different from US groups like the Beach Boys and damaged the careers of African-American and female artists was made about the Invasion. However, the Motown sound, exemplified by The Supremes, The Temptations, and the Four Tops, each securing its first top 20 record during the Invasion’s first year of 1964 and following up with many other top 20 records, besides the constant or even accelerating output of The Miracles, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Marvin Gaye, Martha & The Vandellas, and Stevie Wonder, actually increased in popularity during that time.

Other US groups also demonstrated a similar sound to the British Invasion artists and in turn highlighted how the British ‘sound’ was not in itself a wholly new or original one.[91] Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, for example, acknowledged the debt that American artists owed to British musicians, such as The Searchers, but that “they were using folk music licks that I was using anyway. So it’s not that big a rip-off.”

The US sunshine pop group the Buckinghams and the Beatles-influenced US Tex-Mex act the Sir Douglas Quintet adopted British-sounding names, and San Francisco’s Beau Brummels took their name from the same-named English dandy. Roger Miller had a 1965 hit record with a song titled “England Swings”.[96] Englishman Geoff Stephens (or John Carter) reciprocated the gesture a la Rudy Vallée a year later in the New Vaudeville Band’s “Winchester Cathedral”.

Even as recently as 2003, “Shanghai Knights” made the latter two tunes memorable once again, in London scenes. Anticipating the Bay City Rollers by more than a decade, two British acts that reached the Hot 100’s top 20 gave a tip of the hat to America: Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas and the Nashville Teens.

The British Invasion also drew a backlash from some American bands, e.g., Paul Revere & the Raiders and New Colony Six dressed in Revolutionary War uniforms, and Gary Puckett & The Union Gap donned Civil War uniforms. Garage rock act the Barbarians’ “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl” contained the lyrics “You’re either a girl, or you come from Liverpool” and “You can dance like a female monkey, but you swim like a stone, Yeah, a Rolling Stone.”

The Easybeats drew heavily on the British Invasion sound and had one hit in the United States during the British Invasion, the #16 hit “Friday on My Mind” in May 1967.

According to Robert J. Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, the British invasion pushed the counterculture into the mainstream.

It’s unclear when the British Invasion can be said to have “ended,” if it ever ended at all. American bands regained prominence on the charts in the late 1960s in the face of changing cultural norms; even so, British bands continued to have consistent success alongside their American counterparts on the U.S. charts throughout the decade. Into the 1970s, bands such as Badfinger,

The Raspberries, and Sweet were playing a heavily British Invasion-influenced style deemed power pop. In 1978 two rock magazines wrote cover stories about power pop and championed the genre as a savior to both the new wave and the direct simplicity of the way rock used to be.

New wave power pop not only brought back the sounds but the fashions, be it the mod style of the Jam or the skinny ties of the burgeoning Los Angeles scene. Several of these groups were commercially successful, most notably the Knack, whose My Sharona was the number 1 U.S. single of 1979. A backlash against the Knack and power pop ensued, but the genre over the years has continued to have a cult following with occasional periods of modest success. Another wave of British artists, dubbed the “Second British Invasion”, became popular in the 1980s as music video showcases began to appear on American television.

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The British Invasion

By David Kamp

This much is familiar: On January 25, 1964, the Beatles’ single “I Want to Hold Your Hand” entered the American Top 40. On February 1 it reached No. 1. On February 7 the Beatles arrived in New York for their inaugural U.S. visit, and two days later played on The Ed Sullivan Show to hysterical response and record viewership, thereby effecting a cataclysmic cultural shift and triggering a musical movement that would come to be known as the British Invasion. Cue screaming girls, fringe haircuts, Murray the K, etc.

What’s less remembered are the specifics of precisely what and whom this invasion encompassed. Today, the term “the British Invasion” is usually employed to describe (and market) the triumphal epoch of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who, with honorable mentions to the Kinks and the Animals. In hindsight, and on merit, this sounds about right—these are the best and most revered of the English bands who came of age in the 1960s—but the reality of the British Invasion, which was at its most intense in the two years immediately following the Beatles’ landfall, was somewhat different. Far from being solely a beat-group explosion, the Invasion was a rather eclectic phenomenon that took in everything from Petula Clark’s lushly symphonic pop to Chad and Jeremy’s dulcet folk-schlock to the Yardbirds’ blues-rock rave-ups. And while the Beatles were unquestionably the movement’s instigators and dominant force, the Rolling Stones and the Who were, initially, among the least successful of the invaders—the former group struggling throughout ’64 to gain a foothold in America while the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, and even Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas vaulted ahead of them, the latter group struggling even to get its terrific run of early singles (“I Can’t Explain,” “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere,” “My Generation,” “Substitute”) released in the United States. (Arguably, given that they didn’t perform in America or chart in its Top 40 until 1967, with “Happy Jack,” the Who don’t even qualify as an Invasion band.)

The British Invasion was, nevertheless, a very real phenomenon. Prior to 1964, only two British singles had ever topped *Billboard’*s Hot 100 chart—Acker Bilk’s “Stranger on the Shore” and the Tornadoes’ “Telstar,” both instrumentals—and between them they held the No. 1 spot for a total of four weeks. In the 1964–65 period, by contrast, British acts were at No. 1 for an astounding 56 weeks combined. In 1963 a mere three singles by British artists cracked the American Top 40. In 1964, 65 did, and in 1965, a further 68 did. Beyond all the statistics, the English musicians who came to America between 1964 and 1966 found themselves in the grip of a rampant, utterly unanticipated Anglophilia that made them irresistibly chic and sexy no matter what their background—London or Liverpool, middle class or working class, art school or tradesman’s apprentice, skiffle or trad jazz. Anything English and sufficiently youthful was embraced, exalted, fondled, and fainted over. This applied not only to the important bands whose music would stand the test of time, like the Beatles, the Stones, and the Kinks, but also to such confectioners of engaging period work as the Hollies and Herman’s Hermits, and to such one-hit wonders as Ian Whitcomb (“You Turn Me On”) and the dubiously named Nashville Teens (“Tobacco Road”). America lapped it all up, and the cultural exchange proved beneficial to both sides: the Brits, still very much in the throes of postwar privation, saw their nascent “swinging” youth culture further buttressed, their country abruptly transformed from black-and-white to color; the Americans, still very much in mourning for John F. Kennedy, were administered a needed dose of fun, and, thus re-invigorated, resumed the youthquake that had lapsed into dormancy when Elvis joined the army, Little Richard found God, and Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran met their makers.

Here, a variety of figures who witnessed and participated in the British Invasion in the Beatles’ wake—musicians, managers, industry folk—recount the era as they experienced it, from its arrival in the form of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to its dénouement in the hairier, heavier year of 1967, by which time American bands had begun to redress the imbalance, and the pheromonal hysteria had worn off.

Britain’s postwar era, the formative period of the future invaders, was marked by an unbridled, condescension-free love of America that hadn’t been witnessed before and hasn’t been witnessed since. To British youth of this time, America was the antithesis of their rain-sodden existence—a promised land of big Cadillacs, rock ’n’ roll, authentic Negro bluesmen, Brando and Dean delinquent pics, and muscular Burt Lancaster movies.

By Bess Levin

By Chris Murphy

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM, MANAGER, THE ROLLING STONES: You sucked up America as energy, to get you out of the cold, gray, drab streets of London. Before global warming, I doubt that England had more than three sunny weeks a year. Which is one of the reasons that England fell in love with the Beach Boys, to a certain degree, more than America did.

IAN WHITCOMB, SINGER: I think history shows that it rained a tremendous amount in Britain in those days, much more than it does now. And there were no sweets; they were rationed. World War II didn’t end in Britain until about 1955, because that’s when rationing stopped. And everybody in Britain looked pale and ugly and flaccid, whereas Americans, at least on the screen and in the pictures in magazines that we got, looked in great shape.

PETER NOONE, HERMAN’S HERMITS: I grew up thinking that all American music was good and all English music was crap. I was a Yankophile. All the TV shows I liked were American—you know, [the sitcom] Sergeant Bilko and so on. You have to imagine that these poor English guys were living in miserable, provincial, rainy, dreary cities, and saw posters with James Dean standing in the boots and the jeans and the T-shirt, with the cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. I mean, if you look at Keith Richards, he still dresses like James Dean in that movie.

__RAY PHILLIPS, NASHVILLE TEENS:__I grew up in Surrey. We used to do a song by the Everly Brothers called “Nashville Blues,” and we were all teenagers, so we called ourselves Nashville Teens.

__ERIC BURDON, THE ANIMALS:__I remember flipping through the pages of this jazz magazine with John Steel, the original drummer with the Animals, in art school. We came across this photograph of a bass player walking past the Flatiron Building after an all-night session in New York City, carrying his bass. We turned around and said, “Yeah! We’re gonna go to New York, and we’re gonna be junkies!”

For all its allure, though, America was, prior to 1964, thought to be impregnable—more a fantastical construct than a practical ambition.

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: America was not even a possibility for anybody before the Beatles. As a place to practice your business, it wasn’t even a consideration. Before the Beatles, what were the possibilities? Scandinavia, maybe. The toilets of Belgium—the way the Beatles had done Hamburg. France for holidays. Even the French stars, they used to say, “We’re touring America” . . . really, they were shopping. You know, they might play Canada, but America wasn’t open to them.

PETULA CLARK, SINGER: It was all one-way traffic. For instance, the London Palladium—most of the big stars were American. Danny Kaye and Johnnie Ray and Frankie Laine, those sort of people. Everything was coming from America.

PETER ASHER, PETER AND GORDON: The big thing was, Cliff Richard had never made it in America. He’s so huge to us. He was our Elvis, our idol. Him not making it in America made it look impossible.

True enough—America just couldn’t be bothered with English acts, including, as late as the end of 1963, the Beatles, who were already huge stars in the U.K. and on the European mainland. In autumn of that year, the famous disc jockey Bruce Morrow, a.k.a. Cousin Brucie, joined several other D.J.’s and executives at his station, WABC New York, to listen to a test pressing of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

BRUCE MORROW: All the geniuses got together, including this one here. The first time we heard the record, all of us gave it the thumbs-down. I think most of us had the feeling of “How dare these Brits, these upstarts, take the American idiom of rock ’n’ roll and do what they did to it?” I think it took over three meetings for us to realize that there was something more to this than protecting the American rock ’n’ roll industry and community. We started reading what was going on all over the Continent and we figured, “Well, we’d better give this a listen again.”

When “I Want to Hold Your Hand” finally made the American playlists, its shocking success abruptly changed the game for everyone in American music. Kim Fowley, a promising young Los Angeles record producer with a No. 1 hit to his credit (the Hollywood Argyles’ “Alley-Oop”), was riding high in January of ’64 with another of his productions, the Murmaids’ “Popsicles and Icicles,” when reality walloped him.

KIM FOWLEY: There were three trade papers in those days, Billboard and Cashbox —we were No. 3 in both—and the Murmaids were No. 1 in the third one, Record World. All of a sudden, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” comes along, and I was No. 1 no more. From, let’s say, February 6, which was when my record ceased to be No. 1, up to May, the only American hits were “Hello, Dolly!,” by Louis Armstrong, “Dawn,” by the Four Seasons, and “Suspicion,” by Terry Stafford. That was it—those were the only three records that got in the first five months of the year. Everything else was British.

FRANKIE VALLI, THE FOUR SEASONS: At the beginning of our career, we had “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” and “Walk Like a Man”—all No. 1s, one right after the other. And then came “Dawn,” and it was No. 3. It was a big letdown.

BRUCE MORROW: The Four Seasons and the Beach Boys did O.K. and carried the American flag for a few years, but the solo artists had a very rough time. I’m talking, like, Neil Sedaka and Chubby Checker. Because, suddenly, everybody was putting their money and attention and production values behind the British groups. Suddenly there was a flood of British groups—a flood.

KIM FOWLEY: America just laid there, spread its legs, and said, “Come on in, guys. Come over and violate us with your Englishness.” Everybody suddenly wanted an English band, an English song, or something that could be sold or classified or categorized or manipulated into that area.

Indeed, as the winter of ’64 progressed into spring and summer, the American charts were inundated with British product—not just the Beatles’ hastily issued ’62–’63 back catalogue (“She Loves You,” “Love Me Do,” “Twist and Shout,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” “Please Please Me”), but singles by the Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Peter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy, Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, the Animals, the Kinks, the Searchers, and Manfred Mann. With all these chart-storming acts came an attendant, and often ridiculous, American Anglophilia.

BRUCE MORROW: Kids would call me for dedications and talk to me with British accents. Some kid from the Bronx would all of a sudden speak the King’s English: “’Ello? Sir Brucie, this is Sir Ivan . . . ” Literally, they gave themselves knight titles.

MARK LINDSAY, PAUL REVERE AND THE RAIDERS: I learned to speak with an English accent, or my best facsimile, as soon as I could. Because I found out that’s what chicks wanted. They didn’t care about the American guys. They were looking for the Brits.

Of all the early Invasion acts, the Dave Clark Five, from the dismal North London neighborhood of Tottenham, were the most serious challengers to the Beatles’ supremacy—far more serious, initially, than the Rolling Stones, who were still playing blues and R&B covers on the U.K. circuit.

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: It should be remembered that the Dave Clark Five were the next God for more than a few minutes. In March and April of 1964, with “Glad All Over” and “Bits and Pieces,” they hit the U.S. Top 10 twice. “Glad All Over”? The Stones and I thought it was sad all over. London was as big as the world in those days, very territorial, and Dave Clark came from no-man’s-land, according to our New Wave elitism. But we did not laugh at his business acumen and ability to get it right in America.

SIMON NAPIER-BELL, MANAGER, THE YARDBIRDS: I have more respect for Dave Clark than anyone else in the whole business. If you were hanging around the fringes of show business in those days, you were obviously thinking, Hey, I’d like to be the Beatles’ manager. And since you couldn’t, you had to find another Beatles for yourself. Dave Clark was the best of all—he said, “I’d like to be the Beatles’ manager. I think I’d like to be the Beatles too.”

DAVE CLARK: When people talk about my business acumen, I have to laugh. I left school when I was 15. My dad worked for the post office. Looking back, I think I was just streetwise.

Clark, the band’s drummer and chief songwriter, was a preternaturally driven young jock, aspiring actor, and stuntman who had first organized his band to finance his youth soccer club’s trip to Holland for a tournament (which they won). He also managed the band and produced its records, securing a royalty rate exponentially higher than the Beatles’ and becoming a millionaire at 21. Clark attracted Ed Sullivan’s attention when “Glad All Over,” a No. 1 hit in the U.K., started climbing the U.S. charts, portending another Brit sensation.

DAVE CLARK: When Ed Sullivan first asked us to do his show, we were still semi-professional—the boys still had day jobs—and I said we wouldn’t go professional until we had two records in the top five. This was before “Bits and Pieces.” I turned him down, but then he offered us an incredible amount of money, so we came over. We did the show, and Sullivan liked us so much he said, “I’m holding you over for next week.” But we were already booked in England for a sold-out show. I said we couldn’t do it. So he called me up to his office and said, “I’ll buy the show out.”

For some reason, without thinking, I said, “Well, I don’t think I can stay in New York for the whole week.” And he said, “Where do you want to go?” Well, on the way in from the airport, they had these billboards out, and one of them said, “Montego Bay, Island Paradise.” So I said to him, “Montego Bay”—I’d never heard of it! And so we went to Montego Bay just for the week, all expenses paid. Went on the Monday and came back on the Friday, and there were 30,000 or 35,000 people waiting at the airport.

By that May, we were touring America, every show sold out, in our own private plane, which we leased from the Rockefellers. It had “DC5” painted on the nose. I just said, “If we are going to do it, let’s do it in style.”

The Dave Clark Five’s tour was the first by an Invasion band, pre-dating even the Beatles’ first tour proper. With an innate grasp of the American marketplace and a gift for writing peppy, stadium-friendly stomp-alongs (the propulsive “Bits and Pieces” virtually invented glam rock), Clark scored seven straight Top 20 singles in the U.S. in 1964, and four more in ’65. His band also sold out 12 straight concerts in Carnegie Hall and, over the course of the 1960s, made 18 appearances on Ed Sullivan, more than any other rock group.

DAVE CLARK: We’d get hundreds of girls leaving us hundreds of dolls and gifts in every city. And one of the gifts was a sheep. I didn’t have the heart to send it anywhere, so I took it back to the hotel suite. And we came back after the show, and it had chewed every credit card, every piece of furniture—we didn’t trash hotel suites, but the sheep did.

But whereas Ed Sullivan saw in Clark a nice, wholesome bandleader who appealed to kids and parents alike, some of Clark’s peers back in England saw hauteur and slick opportunism.

DAVE DAVIES, THE KINKS: Dave Clark was a very shrewd guy, but he wasn’t particularly well liked. Because he wasn’t really a musician—he was more of a businessman: “Let’s make a band up like the Beatles and try to make a lot of money.”

GRAHAM NASH, THE HOLLIES: We fuckin’ hated the Dave Clark Five! They were just awful to us. They were snotty and they couldn’t play for shit. I mean, if you’re great, maybe you have the right to be a little stuck-up, but if you’re not great, fuck you and your attitude.

Beyond the Dave Clark Five, the acts that broke early in the Invasion seemed to be those with Beatle associations, whether because they were fellow Liverpudlians, like the Searchers (“Needles and Pins,” “Love Potion No. 9”); fellow clients of manager Brian Epstein, like Gerry and the Pacemakers (“Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying,” “Ferry Cross the Mersey”) and exCavern Club coat-check girl Cilla Black (“You’re My World”); recipients of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s songwriting largesse, like Peter and Gordon (“A World Without Love”); or all of the above, like Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas (“Little Children,” “Bad to Me”).

__BILLY J. KRAMER:__I came with Brian for a week in New York before the Beatles; I think he was negotiating with the Ed Sullivan Show people. I was totally intimidated. Brian said to me when we got off the plane, “What do you think of this place?” And I said, “I think we should get the next plane back to England.”

__GERRY MARSDEN, GERRY AND THE PACEMAKERS:__New York was brilliant! People used to say to me, “Doesn’t it get on your nerves when they try and rip your clothes off?” And I’d say, “No, they paid for it—they can have ’em. Just leave me underpants.”

CILLA BLACK: I remember coming down Fifth Avenue, and I was wearing a Mary Quant black plastic mac. Some fans who had caught me on The Ed Sullivan Show wanted a souvenir, so they pulled a button off my mac. And of course it all ripped, and I was really upset. But they were still being friendly—they just wanted a Beatle souvenir.

__PETER ASHER:__Almost all our fans were also Beatle fans. By zeroing in on one of the subgroups of the Beatle phenomenon, the fans had more of a chance to actually get to meet the musicians, or to feel more personally involved. I remember one time, we finished a show and jumped off the stage in San Diego or somewhere. And as we did, the girls broke through some sort of barrier thing, chasing after us. My glasses fell off and fell to the ground. I picked ’em up and put ’em back on, and looked behind me. And a girl, where my glasses had fallen on the lawn, was pulling the grass out and stuffing it in her mouth. Something that had touched me had now touched this grass, and the grass had now become sacred. It was fascinating.

Of these acts, Peter and Gordon were the odd ones out, not rough-hewn northerners but posh kids from London’s prestigious Westminster School who’d formed an Everly Brothers-style harmony duo. Their Beatle connection was that Paul McCartney was dating Peter Asher’s actress older sister, Jane. Lacking a permanent home in London at that time, McCartney had taken to bunking with the Ashers, a bourgeois-bohemian Jewish family, when the Beatles weren’t on tour.

__PETER ASHER:__The top floor of our house had two bedrooms on it, which was him and me. So we were hanging out together a lot. One day—I think Gordon was there, too—Paul was fiddling about, playing a song, and I said, “What’s that?” And he said it was something he’d written for Billy J. Kramer, and that Billy J. didn’t like it, and that John didn’t want to do it with the Beatles. So I said, “Well, could we sing it?”

The song, “A World Without Love,” became Peter and Gordon’s debut single, and it went to No. 1 in America in June 1964, making them the first Englishmen after the Beatles to top the U.S. charts.

But even British acts with no Beatles connection whatsoever discovered, as they made their way to the United States in ’64 and ’65, that they were fab-by-association, no matter what their actual provenance.

PETER ASHER: The funny part was that in America at that time “Beatle” almost became a generic term. People would actually come up to you and say, “Are you a Beatle?” Literally, middle-aged America at that time thought everyone with long hair and English was a Beatle.

JEREMY CLYDE, CHAD AND JEREMY: All the time—“Are you from Liverpool?” And our record company, since they didn’t have a band from Liverpool, dubbed us “the Oxford Sound,” because I had been brought up near Oxford at one point. “You’ve heard the Liverpool Sound. Now—wait for it, kids!—it’s the Oxford Sound!” The Oxford Sound, thank God, didn’t last very long.

__GORDON WALLER, PETER AND GORDON:__Americans just assumed that everyone from England was from Liverpool. But if they referred to us as “the Liverpool Sound,” I just went with the flow. If that made them happy and made the kids buy the records—solid!

One band that did not instantly reap the benefits of hysterical Brit-mania was the Rolling Stones. By 1964 they had already developed a fierce live reputation, had hits in England (including the Lennon-McCartney-written “I Wanna Be Your Man”), and had appeared on the frenetic British teen-pop program Ready Steady Go! But establishing a U.S. foothold proved elusive.

__VICKI WICKHAM, PRODUCER, READY STEADY GO!:__I remember sitting with Brian Jones and Mick Jagger at Wembley Stadium when we were doing Ready Steady Goes Mod, some extravaganza out there. We were sitting over a cup of tea, and I remember them saying, “If only we could get a hit in America—wouldn’t it be great? We’d get a trip, we’d get to shop, we’d get to go there .”

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: All the people that we would laugh at while we were backstage at Ready Steady Go! —Dave Clark, Herman’s Hermits, the Animals—they were having hits in America a long time before the Rolling Stones. Name anybody—even [the unforgivably glutinous Irish vocal trio] the Bachelors got to No. 10.

Oldham, just 20 years old in 1964, had already made a name for himself in England by embarking on a whistle-stop apprenticeship tour of early Swinging London, working brief stints for the designer Mary Quant, the jazz-club impresario Ronnie Scott, and the Beatles’ famous manager, Brian Epstein. The son of an American soldier who had been killed in World War II combat before Andrew was born and an Australian-born Englishwoman who concealed her Russian-Jewish background, Oldham gorged himself on American culture, became obsessed with Alexander Mackendrick’s quintessential New York film, The Sweet Smell of Success, and became one of Swinging London’s greatest self-inventions—an immaculately turned-out press manipulator who loved trouble, wore eyeliner, and, in Marianne Faithfull’s words, “would say things you only hear in movies, like I can make you a star, and that’s just for starters, baby!’”

At 19, Oldham took over the management of the Rollin’ Stones (as they were then known), a nice group of middle-class blues enthusiasts from the suburbs of London, and masterfully recast them as mystique-laden bad boys—scruffing them up, encouraging them to unleash their delinquencies, and stoking the newspapers with his “Would you let your daughter marry a Stone?” campaign.

__SIMON NAPIER-BELL:__What Mick Jagger did onstage subsequently was what Andrew did offstage. Andrew was camp and flamboyant and outrageous, and Mick stole Andrew’s movements and put them into a stage act.

But, for all his bravado in England and his romance with America, Oldham never anticipated that he would actually have to try to crack the States.

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: February ’64, when the Beatles came to America, it was a big “Uh-oh”—no, a huge one. I was in a fuckin’ panic, man. All of my gifts were of absolutely no use to me. This was a country where you killed your president. I mean, c’mon, we’re turning up only six months after you’d popped Kennedy. That did have an effect on one.

The Stones arrived in the U.S. in June for a disastrous two-week tour that found them, at one juncture, playing four consecutive shows at the Texas State Fair in San Antonio.

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: Texas . . . [ Sighs. ] There was a swimming pool in front of us. With seals in it. Performing seals were on in the afternoon, in front of us. And Bobby Vee appearing in tennis shorts—forget the American Dream, now we’ve got the American nightmare. The tour was only 15 dates, but it was a hard slog, a lot of disappointment. You know, if the Beatles’ landing at J.F.K. was like something directed by Cecil B. DeMille, it looked as if Mel Brooks directed our entry.

The indignities piled on. Making their American TV debut on the ABC variety program The Hollywood Palace, the Stones were ritually abused by that week’s host, Dean Martin, who said of them, “Their hair is not long—it’s just smaller foreheads and higher eyebrows.”

Oldham did manage one coup on the Stones’ first trip, though, getting the group a recording session at Chess Studios in Chicago, where many of their blues idols had put down their most famous tracks.

__ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM:__I could not have them going back to England with long faces. So, as a compensation, I organized a recording session at Chess, where they could basically record at the shrine. That got us as far as “It’s All Over Now,” the Bobby Womack song . . .

. . . the Stones’ cover of which squeaked into the American Top 40 in late summer ’64, peaking at No. 26 in mid-September—just as their nemesis, Martin, was enjoying his eighth week in the Top 10 with “Everybody Loves Somebody.”

The early Stones were hardly the only British group whose repertoire consisted almost entirely of covers of American R&B singles. For bands who were not writing their own material, it was crucial to have a good song picker. The Searchers, from Liverpool, had one of the best in drummer Chris Curtis.

CHRIS CURTIS: At Brian Epstein’s family’s store, NEMS, you could ask him, and he’d get you anything you wanted. I listened to Radio Luxembourg virtually every night—they used to do an American slot, and I’d say, “Oh, that’s good,” and order it at NEMS. “Needles and Pins”—I just heard Jackie DeShannon’s version on the radio, so I bought the record. “Love Potion No. 9”—we were in Hamburg, and I used to go out on my own, looking in old shops. I found this old secondhand shop in the next road up from the Grosse Freiheit, which is where the Star Club was. I thought, That’s strange—what’s a 45 doing in the window? And it was the Clovers singing “Love Potion No. 9,” which became our biggest hit in America.

Manfred Mann’s song picker was its singer, the dreamy Paul Jones. The band, named after its bespectacled, Beatnik keyboardist, started out as a jazz combo but had little success. Enlisting Jones, they reconstituted themselves as an R&B outfit but still weren’t having much luck, prompting the singer to take them in a poppier direction.

PAUL JONES: I would avidly listen to the very few programs on British radio where you could hear American popular music. And every time I heard something that I liked, I would go to one of the very few record shops in London you could rely on to stock that stuff. And I heard this “Do Wah Diddy,” by [the black New York vocal group] the Exciters, and I thought, It’s a smash!

“Do Wah Diddy Diddy” had been written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, one of the hit-making teams that worked in Manhattan’s fabled Brill Building. But the Exciters’ version had done surprisingly little business in the U.S. Manfred Mann’s version, however, a future staple of sports-arena playlists, became another No. 1 for the British side in October of ’64.

PAUL JONES: I wanted to get over to America as fast as possible. And when some guy said, “There’s a tour with Peter and Gordon,” I said, “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” And it was dreadfully arranged, in the depths of winter ’64-’65. When we got to New York, we played at the New York Academy of Music, and ticket sales were very poor indeed. So they decided that it would be necessary, at the last minute, to beef up the bill with some local talent. And of all the blind-blank stupidities, the local talent that they booked was the Exciters, who then sang “Do Wah Diddy” before we did.

Manfred Mann’s tour wasn’t a total washout, though. While the band was in Los Angeles, the ubiquitous scenester Kim Fowley witnessed what he deems a seminal event in music history: the first official campaign by a groupie to bed a rock star.

KIM FOWLEY: Her name was Liz, with red hair and green eyes; she looked like a Gidget version of Maureen O’Hara. She was about 18 years old. She was the first girl who I ever saw walk into a hotel room for the express purpose of fucking a rock star. I was standing in the driveway, between the Continental Hyatt House and Ciro’s. I had just gotten out of a cab, and I was gonna go over to the hotel and welcome the guys. Then her cab came up. I said, “Hey, Liz, what’s going on?” She said, “Do you know Paul Jones in Manfred Mann?” I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “Well, I want to fuck him.” I said, “Really? So what do you want me to do?” She said, “I want you to drag me into their room and introduce me, so I can nail this guy.”

So we knock on the door, and they open the door, and I said, “Paul Jones, here’s your date for the evening.” “Hi, I’m Liz, I’m gonna have sex with you tonight!” And he said, “Great!”

__PAUL JONES:__If I said Kim was lying, I’d be lying, because I don’t know whether it’s true or false. I seem to remember that at the time there were lots of girls that made a beeline for groups—especially the singer. Look: the music was always the main thing for us. If I did get into debauchery, then I have to admit that girls were more likely to be the subject of it than drink. And drugs a poor third.

The greatest of England’s song pickers in the Invasion era was Mickie Most, a former pop singer of middling achievement who’d made himself over as a Svengali-like producer. Unique among London music figures, Most was jetting off to New York even before the Beatles’ breakthrough, trawling the Brill Building music publishers for songs that he could turn into hits with the promising young groups he’d found, the Animals and Herman’s Hermits.

__MICKIE MOST:__The previous generation of British pop artists, like Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, and Marty Wilde, were basically clones of the Americans, except that they didn’t have the ability to write. They used other people’s songs, normally covers of American records that had already been successful. So I designed a shortcut—go to America, to the publishing companies, and get the songs before they were recorded. When I’d find a band like Herman’s Hermits—I liked the band, but they didn’t have any tunes. So off I went to New York, and we found a song called “I’m into Something Good,” written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King. And the Animals, for instance—their first hit was “House of the Rising Sun,” which was an old folk song they were doing in their set; they weren’t writers. So “We Gotta Get out of This Place,” “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” and “It’s My Life”—those tunes were all American songs which had never been recorded.

The Animals, from Newcastle, were an earthy blues-R&B act fronted by Eric Burdon, a volatile, charismatic belter of small stature and serious intellect. Their slow, portentous version of “House of the Rising Sun” held the No. 1 spot for three weeks in September ’64, establishing them as rootsy heavyweights of the Invasion.

ERIC BURDON: I still resent being lumped in with the British Invasion. That’s just not the way I saw music—to have our management look around for chewing-gum commercials. We weren’t bubblegum. I was fuckin’ serious about the blues. In one of my first journals, I made an incision into my arm and wrote the word “blues” in blood. It was a crusade.

Herman’s Hermits, on the other hand, were the perfect teen-dream band, acutely polite, unsubversively cheeky, and forever dressed for school-picture day. “Herman” was actually Peter Noone, a relentlessly chipper, well-to-do boy from the suburbs of Manchester who had been a child actor on the English soap opera Coronation Street. He was barely 17 when “I’m into Something Good” became an American hit in the fall of 1964.

__PETER NOONE:__Herman’s Hermits were always very civil. Girls, guys, mums, and dads liked us, ’cause we were not in your face in any kind of way. You know how people say, “I couldn’t let me sister see that”? That’s how we were. We all had a sister who was a little bit older than us or a little bit younger than us, and my sister had, like, a plastic statue of Sister Mary Teresa implanted in her forehead: ALL MEN, LEAVE ME ALONE. We thought all girls were like that. Until we found out that we had a shot at them.

Precocious and possessed of Clintonian energy and political skills, Noone proved adept at ingratiating himself to the appropriate American media figures.

PETER NOONE: I made an alliance with Gloria Stavers, the editor of 16 magazine, because I knew that she was the most important person in rock ’n’ roll in America. She developed acts. If she liked what you represented—she liked Paul McCartney; she liked John Lennon—she made you look better. She would change your answers to make you look better . . .

. . . e.g., Stavers: “What do you think of American girls?” Noone: “They make me wish we still owned the colonies. That’s what America used to be, luv!”

PETER NOONE: And Ed Sullivan was charmed by Herman’s Hermits because I was a bit brighter than the average musician. He said, “You’re a Catholic, aren’t you? Meet me tomorrow at Delmonico’s”—which I thought was a restaurant; he meant the building—“and come with me and my family to Mass.” It was a big honor. I showed up, suited up and everything, and genuflected in all the wrong places; I hadn’t been for about 10 years.

Noone’s politicking and Most’s production savvy paid off. erman’s Hermits commenced a streak of five straight Top 5 hits, including the No. 1s “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” and “I’m Henry VIII, I Am.”

__WAYNE FONTANA, WAYNE FONTANA AND THE MINDBENDERS:__I’d say that at that time in America, in ’65, Peter was bigger than the Beatles.

PETER NOONE: Mick Jagger didn’t like Herman’s Hermits. ’Cause people would ask was he Herman in those days.

__ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM:__Mick was stopped in Honolulu Airport and asked for his autograph. And they were disappointed that he hadn’t signed “Peter Noone.” The look on his face! But we took Peter Noone and Mickie Most very seriously, and so did other folk. They and the Dave Clark Five, after the Beatles, took the heart of America way before the Stones. They toured on hits, we went looking for them.

__PETER NOONE:__There was a time when we were all staying at the City Squire hotel in New York—us, the Stones, and Tom Jones. Herman’s Hermits had just done “Henry the VIII” on The Ed Sullivan Show, and there were two or three thousand kids standing outside the hotel for us—it had been on the news. We went up on the roof—the Stones and Tom Jones too—and it must have made a big impact on the Stones, because they started to write pop tunes. No more of the blues stuff, “Little Red Rooster”—that was instantly gone. They went to start and write songs, ’cause they said, “Look what happens when you make it in America.”

As ’64 turned into ’65, the Invasion grew ever more literal, with British groups coming over in great numbers for package tours, New York variety showcases hosted by D.J. Murray “the K” Kaufman, and appearances on the various manic television programs that had arisen to cater to the hysterical-teen demographic: NBC’s Hullabaloo, ABC’s Shindig! and Where the Action Is, and the syndicated Hollywood A Go Go. Among the groups to visit were the Kinks, whose Ray Davies-written originals “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night” were all over the radio; the Zombies, whose extraordinary debut single, “She’s Not There,” was the first self-written British No. 1 after the Beatles; the Yardbirds, who came to America with a new featured guitarist, Jeff Beck, because the old one, blues purist Eric Clapton, found the band’s hit “For Your Love” inexcusably poppy; the Hollies, who were having hits in England but who wouldn’t crack the U.S. Top 10 until ’66 and ’67 with “Bus Stop” and “Carrie-Anne”; and lesser acts like Nashville Teens, yet another Mickie Most discovery, who had a hit with a cover of John D. Loudermilk’s “Tobacco Road,” and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, who went to No. 1 with the soulful “The Game of Love.”

For young Brits abroad for the first time, America was at once a wondrous land of untold exotica . . .

__GRAHAM NASH:__Those little white grease pencils, where you don’t sharpen them, but you pull a little string and they sharpen themselves—incredible!

WAYNE FONTANA: American diners were like top restaurants in London. Meat loaf, Boston cream pie, the steaks—incredible!

RAY PHILLIPS, NASHVILLE TEENS: This little Jewish girl, she always used to bring a hot casserole along to the dressing room in the Brooklyn Fox. It was stuffed peppers. Which I guess must be a Jewish thing.

. . . and a place that was, surprisingly, still very much in thrall to 1950s mores and tastes.

DAVE DAVIES: On our first tour, I was surprised how old-fashioned Americans were. Ray and I grew up listening to Big Bill Broonzy and Hank Williams and the Ventures, all these really cool people. So before I went, I was in awe of America, thinking, We’re gonna go places where all these great people are, and we’re gonna listen to the radio and hear all this great music! And they didn’t play anything on the radio that was any good; it was all that poppy, croonery, 50s kind of stuff. I expected to hear Leadbelly on the radio—no one knew who he was!

__ERIC BURDON:__We were put in a Christmas special called The Dangerous Christmas of Red Riding Hood, with Liza Minnelli as Little Red Riding Hood, Vic Damone as the romantic lead, and Cyril Richard as the Big Bad Wolf. We were his Wolfettes. We’d walk around with this bloody makeup on and tails, and we had to sing a song called “We’re Gonna How-How-Howl Tonight.”

ROD ARGENT, THE ZOMBIES: We did the Murray the K Christmas Show at the Brooklyn Fox. It was Ben E. King and the Drifters, the Shangri-Las, Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles, Dick and Deedee, and another English band, Nashville Teens. Headlining the show was Chuck Jackson. We started at 8 o’clock in the morning and did six or eight shows a day, until about 11 o’clock in the evening. Each act did a couple of songs—our hit and one other song—and then we would have to go to the back of the stage and sort of dance, almost like a very naff chorus line.

But, for all the bands who were chagrined at having to go the cornball route, there were those who embraced the opportunity.

GERRY MARSDEN: On Hullabaloo, I think I was in a hairdresser’s chair, singing “I Like It” while surrounded by a bevy of beauties. I found it great—bloody hell, to be on television in America, I would have shown me bum to get on!

Chad and Jeremy, a harmony duo whose mellow, Kingston Trio-like sound on such hits as “A Summer Song” and “Willow Weep for Me” was as far away as could be from that of the Rolling Stones, were so Old Guard-friendly that they actually lived with Dean Martin for a short time.

JEREMY CLYDE: We were brought over to do the Hollywood Palace show as a sort of antidote to Ed Sullivan —“Well, he’s got the Beatles, so we’ll get Chad and Jeremy!” My parents knew Jeannie Martin, so we stayed with Dean and Jeannie and hung out with Dino, Deana, and Claudia. The house revolved around this great big wet bar.

Clyde was the Invasion’s one authentic English aristocrat, the grandson of the Duke of Wellington. Between his august lineage and his and Chad Stuart’s drama-school backgrounds, Hollywood could not keep its hands off the pair. They could sing; they could act; they had English accents; they had mop-top hair—they were TV-land’s official Invasion mascots.

JEREMY CLYDE: We were on Batman and Patty Duke and The Dick Van Dyke Show. On Dick Van Dyke, we played a British band, and Rob and Laura Petrie kept them in their house for three days—actually, not unlike Dean and Jeannie Martin. On Batman, we did a double episode. We played ourselves, Chad and Jeremy. Catwoman stole our voices—Julie Newmar, who was gorgeous. As I remember, because Catwoman had stolen our voices, the amount of tax that Chad and Jeremy were paying to the British Exchequer would then be lost, and Britain would collapse as a world power. It was a Beatle joke, obviously.

Like Chad and Jeremy, Freddie and the Dreamers were a clean-cut English group who, through the magic of American television and the sheer force of the Invasion, became much bigger in the U.S. than they were in their homeland. Freddie Garrity, a 26-year-old who’d shaved five years off his age to appear more youthquake-friendly, was an impish little fellow in Buddy Holly glasses whose trademark was a spasmodic leg-flailing dance that came to be known as the Freddie.

FREDDIE GARRITY: We were really just a cabaret act. The Freddie dance was just an old routine—it depicted a farmer in a field kicking his feet out in the mud.

Freddie and the Dreamers’ chart placings were already in decline in England when, in 1965, Brian Epstein, moonlighting as the host of Hullabaloo’ s London segment, showed a clip of the group performing its 1963 U.K. hit “I’m Telling You Now.” The clip proved so popular that the group was invited to Los Angeles to perform live on Hullabaloo*.*

__FREDDIE GARRITY:__So we went on, did “I’m Telling You Now,” and the phones lit up. Policemen were doing the Freddie in the street. And the song shot to No. 1 in America . . .

. . . which it hadn’t done even in Britain. Freddie-mania took such hold in America that Garrity’s record company hastily put together a follow-up single called “Do the Freddie” for him to sing (it reached No. 18), and on Hullabaloo such luminaries as Chuck Berry, the Four Seasons, Trini Lopez, Frankie Avalon, and Annette Funicello joined Garrity in doing the dance. Freddie and the Dreamers also embarked on a U.S. tour with two fellow Manchester bands, Herman’s Hermits and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders.

__WAYNE FONTANA:__We had No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 on the chart throughout the tour. One week I was No. 1 with “Game of Love,” then Freddie and the Dreamers, then Herman. It was amazing, because we’d all grown up together.

Another young Englishman unwittingly caught up in the slipstream of the Invasion was Ian Whitcomb, a wellborn boy who, while attending Trinity College in Dublin, had started up a band called Bluesville and secured a modest recording contract with Tower, a small subsidiary of Capitol Records. At the end of a Dublin recording session in which he’d committed to tape a protest song called “No Tears for Johnny,” he and his band played a boogie-woogie joke song they’d made up in which Whitcomb panted like a phone pervert and sang, in falsetto, “C’mon now honey, you know you really turn me on.”

IAN WHITCOMB: I was brought across to New York in spring of ’65 by Tower Records. And, to my horror, the promotion man had a copy of the next release of mine, and it was called “Turn On Song.” I said, “You’re not gonna release this! It’s No Tears for Johnny’! I’m gonna be the next Dylan!”

“You Turn Me On (Turn On Song),” as it was officially billed by Tower, somehow made it all the way to No. 8 in the U.S.

IAN WHITCOMB: I was so embarrassed by this damn thing, because I thought I was a singer and rhythm-and-blues man. And here I was with this novelty hit, and I couldn’t stop this damn thing from going up the charts. It’s still an albatross around my neck. When I was on tour with Peter and Gordon in late ’65, Peter said, “You know, you’ve made one of the worst records that’s ever been. Just as pop is progressing, just as we’re getting into serious art with the Beatles and we’re trying to elevate rock into a serious art form, you come along with this rubbish.”

Conveniently, the British Invasion dovetailed with the sexual revolution, which made for plenty of post-show action for visiting English musicians.

__GORDON WALLER:__It was all too easy, frighteningly easy. I bumped into a woman a couple of years ago who still had a youthful figure and a great-looking face, and she said, “Are you Gordon?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “I’m Cathy. You took me to Vegas when I was 15.” I said, “Cathy, I think we’ll rephrase that. We were playing in Vegas, and you happened along.” She said, “Yes, happened along—in your bedroom.” These days, damn, you’d be banged up, wouldn’t you?

PETER NOONE: I thought I was in love with every girl, and I was gonna get married. I never, ever took advantage of anybody. I didn’t know that they were groupies. I thought, What a nice girl! She likes me!

__FREDDIE GARRITY:__It was difficult. I had a wife and a baby daughter. And all of a sudden you’ve got girls coming out of your ears! And, you know, I didn’t want to go deaf.

WAYNE FONTANA: Oh, Freddie was the worst! Even though he was the funny one that jumped around—oh, what a lech! The group joined in—they hired film cameras and everything, so they could set movie scenes up in bedrooms.

Among the most famous of the early rock groupies was Cynthia Albritton, a shy Chicago teen who, for reasons she barely understood, found herself suddenly impelled to storm the hotels where visiting British musicians were staying. In time, she would make a name for herself, literally, as the groupie who made plaster casts of rock stars’ erect penises—she became Cynthia Plaster Caster.

CYNTHIA PLASTER CASTER: I’d say the British Invasion made me what I am. It was the hysteria of Meet the Beatles that evolved into plaster-casting. When it happened, a lot of us were virgins. We would climb fire escapes—like 15, 20 stories—to get to the rock ’n’ roll floor, because the hotel security guards just didn’t allow girls in. They didn’t think it was proper.

PETER ASHER: The funny part was, a lot of the girls were really young. They’d be trying to sneak into the hotel room, but they would have no idea what to do if they got there. They would be horrified if you really said, “Well, O.K. now—take ’em off!”

CYNTHIA PLASTER CASTER: I didn’t know what my goal was. I didn’t even know why I was drawn there. The guys were like magnets, and I didn’t know what I wanted at first. ’Cause I’d only made out with a boy or two before that.

In time, though, Cynthia and her friends embraced overt naughtiness.

__CYNTHIA PLASTER CASTER:__We discovered along the way this Cockney rhyming slang that only British bands seemed to know. So we learned all the dirty words that we could find out. Such as “Hampton wick,” which rhymes with “dick,” and “charva,” which meant “fuck.” I’m guessing it rhymed with “larva.” Maybe larva’s a sexual term, I don’t know—they didn’t go as far as telling me what it rhymes with. But it was a very popular word; we made a lot of contacts from that word. We actually wrote a note to somebody saying that we were the Charva Chapter of the Barclays bankers. And “Barclays Bank” rhymes with “wank”: “Would you like to make a deposit? Would you like to make a nightly deposit? We have nightly banking hours”—that was it. This was for somebody in Gerry and the Pacemakers. And we didn’t even know what a wank was. We were still virgins.

The end result was that two days later I got a long-distance phone call from the guy. And it transpired into him finding out very quickly that I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.

The plaster-casting idea arose from Cynthia’s and her friends’ desire, having given the matter some consideration, to lose their virginity to British pop stars. Nervous about how to break the ice, Cynthia and company decided that asking musicians to submit to having their members coated in a viscous molding agent was the way to go.

__ERIC BURDON:__I was fascinated by the whole thing. They had a team, and one of them was a real expert at fellatio, and she was beautiful. They came with a wooden box and showed us all the equipment and everything.

The problem was that, initially, Cynthia was not well schooled in the art of molding.

__CYNTHIA PLASTER CASTER:__There was, like, a two-year period where we were dragging the [casting-equipment] suitcase around, not really knowing how to do it, just wanting to try it out, using it as shtick to get to the hotel rooms. We’d tell people, “We need someone to experiment on. Would you like to help us experiment?” We’d get the pants down, and then, ultimately, they would put the make on us, and voilà —sex would happen. I think we encountered Eric Burdon during that time period. We were on an airplane with him, and we were gonna try aluminum foil, wrap it around his dick. That proved not to work.

ERIC BURDON: It was on a tour plane, and the engines were already running. And they had me in the bathroom, and everybody was yelling, “C’mon—we gotta leave!” And the plane was rocking backwards and forwards. They got as far as getting the plaster on. It wasn’t very comfortable, you know. I’m a romantic character—I have to have candles, music, and a bottle of wine.

The British Invasion also ushered in a new kind of sex symbol—not the Brylcreemed, conventionally handsome pop idol of yore, but the skinny, spotty, often myopic, often dentally deficient Englishman whose magnetism derived from his Englishness and status as a musician.

CYNTHIA PLASTER CASTER: Peter Asher was so cute. Him and that guy from Herman’s Hermits, Lek? [Derek “Lek” Leckenby, the group’s bassist.] They wore those Peter Sellers glasses. I thought that was really hot.

PETER ASHER: I had pretty substantially crossed teeth. I think the cliché of the glasses and the bad teeth—I know that I contributed something to Austin Powers’s reality. People have said to me, “It must have been you who inspired Mike Myers.” And while he won’t say that, he did say, in the one conversation we had, that he knew all about Peter and Gordon. Unfortunately, I was never that shagadelic.

For all the fun that touring America entailed, there were some rocky moments for the invaders. Some were merely tempests in a teapot . . .

__JEREMY CLYDE:__It was difficult when you were working with American musicians, ’cause they were resentful. Len Barry, who we toured with, had a hit called “1-2-3,” and he had quite a chip on his shoulder—“English musicians don’t have the chops,” all this kind of stuff. And Paul Revere and the Raiders were there to bring American music back to America.

__MARK LINDSAY, PAUL REVERE AND THE RAIDERS:__Actually, Derek Taylor, who was the Beatles’ publicist, split from them kind of early on and came to America, and we were one of his first clients, and he said, “This is a publicist’s dream—the Americans stem the tide for the second time!” There was never any animosity or real competition. As far as the Brits, I was going, “Yeah, more power to ’em!”

. . . while others were more serious.

JIM MCCARTY, THE YARDBIRDS: Giorgio Gomelsky, our first manager, was a big guy with a beard who looked like Fidel Castro. And when we first came to America, there was still a lot of Communist paranoia going on, you know? And, of course, lots of people used to think he was Fidel Castro, and that all of us, with our long hair, were dropouts following him around. So we’d get people threatening to throw us out of town and beat us up.

DAVE DAVIES: I said “cunt” on the radio in Boston once. The D.J. was talking like the Beatles, so I called him a cunt on the air. They closed the radio station down and dragged me out of the building.

ERIC BURDON: America was hotter than I expected it to be and colder than I ever imagined it would be, weatherwise and culturally. I went to the Stax Studio in Memphis one day and watched Sam and Dave cut “Hold On! I’m a Comin’,” and the next night, in the limousines on the way to the gig, we ran into the Ku Klux Klan on the streets. So one minute you were like, “This is the new South! This is the new dream!,” and then the next minute the old world would just come and slap you upside the head.

Burdon did discover, serendipitously, that his affinity for black America had a secondary benefit.

__ERIC BURDON:__I wanted to hear black music. Anywhere I went, I asked, “How do I get across the tracks? How do I get to Browntown?” And I found out that all you had to do to get away from the screaming girls was drive across the tracks. They would follow us up to Harlem—flying wedges of cars, teenagers hanging out of cars—and as soon as we crossed 110th Street, they would peel off and fall back, and then I’d be alone.

There were fewer high jinks and groupie problems for the women of the British Invasion, a stylistically disparate group—the soulful Dusty Springfield (“Wishin’ and Hopin’”) and Cilla Black; the poppier Petula Clark (“Downtown”) and Lulu (“To Sir with Love”); and the enigmatic Marianne Faithfull (“As Tears Go By”)—whose one common trait was that they were all solo artists who couldn’t seek solace in the camaraderie of a group.

__CILLA BLACK:__It was all right for the guys in any of the bands, because they all had each other. But I’d lost my grandmother while I was over in New York, and it really hit me badly. I was just too homesick, and I wanted to come home. Which I totally regret now.

More sure of herself was Petula Clark, who, at the time of her first U.S. smash, the winter ’65 No. 1 “Downtown,” was a trouper already in her third show-business incarnation—as a child she’d been an actress, England’s answer to Shirley Temple, and as a young woman she’d married a Frenchman, relocated to Paris, and had a second career as a French-singing chanteuse.

PETULA CLARK: The first show I did live was The Ed Sullivan Show. I got there on the day of the show, which was unheard of. But I had a show in Paris on Saturday night, so I got there on Sunday just in time for the dress rehearsal, which was in front of a live audience. I was totally jet-lagged, no makeup, just enough time to throw on my funny little black dress, and they were playing my music—too fast, actually. I walked out onstage, my first time in front of an American audience, and before I’d sung a note, they stood up and cheered. It was extraordinary—that was the moment that I realized what this British Invasion really meant. And then I remember waking up in the hotel and hearing “Downtown,” thinking, Am I dreaming this? It was the St. Patrick’s Day Parade going up Fifth Avenue—the marching band was playing it.

The most beguiling of the Invasion gals was Marianne Faithfull, an aristocratic beauty who was just 17 when Andrew Loog Oldham discovered her at a London party in March of 1964, pronouncing her “an angel with big tits.” By Christmastime of that year, her single “As Tears Go By” had become the first original Mick JaggerKeith Richards composition to crack the American Top 40. Though she was at the epicenter of the Swinging London scene—friends with Paul McCartney and Peter Asher, a visitor to Bob Dylan’s Savoy Hotel suite as chronicled in D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary, Don’t Look Back, affianced to bookstore and gallery owner John Dunbar—Faithfull was reluctant to plunge headlong into America to capitalize on her success. She had her reasons.

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: I was pregnant. So I got married to John Dunbar and had my baby. But, also, I was so young, I couldn’t quite get my head ’round going away to America for a long tour. A very sheltered little girl I was—I honestly did think I would be eaten alive in America. I also knew about the Buddy Holly thing and the Big Bopper and all that stuff. So I couldn’t imagine touring America, and maybe I was right. I did do Shindig!, and it was very weird. I was really beautiful, right? And they covered me in makeup, and put false eyelashes on me, and made me look like a tart—a fucking dolly bird!

Still, Faithfull’s success augured the beginning of better times for the Rolling Stones. The group had secured its first U.S. Top 10 hit late in ’64 with yet another R&B cover, of Irma Thomas’s “Time Is on My Side,” but Oldham had already realized that for the Stones to compete they would have to start writing their own material. After a tentative start, Jagger and Richards, egged on by their manager, finally hit their stride in 1965.

__ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM:__That was a hell of a process for two people who basically thought I was mad, telling them that they could write. My stance, as I was not a musician, was based on the simplicity of “Hey—if you can fuckin’ play music, you can write it.” And they did. “The Last Time” was the first time they got into the Top 10 [in May 1965] with a self-written song. And then the record after that was “Satisfaction” . . .

. . . which was a No. 1 in the summer of ’65, to be followed by “Get off of My Cloud,” to be followed by “19th Nervous Breakdown,” to be followed by “Paint It, Black,” and so on. The Rolling Stones were at last the Rolling Stones.

Another significant development of ’65 was the emergence of Invasion-inspired American bands. Back in ’64, the future members of the Byrds, all folkies, had bonded over their mutual love of the Beatles—a bold stance in the severe, smoky environs of hootenanny-land.

CHRIS HILLMAN, THE BYRDS: I was a bluegrass mandolin player before I was in the Byrds, and I’d cross paths with David Crosby and Jim McGuinn, as Roger was then known, at this folk club in L.A., the Troubadour. So one night I’m down there with my bluegrass group to play open-mike night, and Jim McGuinn gets up. His hair is a little funnier, it’s starting to grow out, and he’s doing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on an acoustic 12-string! And I’m going, “What the hell is that?”

__ROGER MCGUINN:__I was working for Bobby Darin in New York, working in the Brill Building as a songwriter, and he was a mentor to me. He said, “You ought to get back into rock ’n’ roll,” because I was influenced by Elvis Presley originally. So I would go down to the Village and play these sort of souped-up folk songs with a Beatle beat. Then I got a gig at the Troubadour in California and did the same thing. Of course, it didn’t go over well—it was like Dylan at Newport. They were antagonistic, and I got the freeze, and they’d talk and talk over my set. Except [future Byrd] Gene Clark was in the audience and was a Beatles fan, and he liked what I was doing. So we decided to form a duo around that, and then Crosby came in a few days later.

__DAVID CROSBY:__Roger and I and Gene Clark all went to see [the Beatles’ 1964 movie] A Hard Day’s Night together. I was, like, spinning around the stop-sign poles, thinking I’d just seen my life’s work. We started growing our hair right away. We learned how to manipulate a dryer and a comb pretty quickly.

On the more plastique end of the Anglophilic spectrum was Gary Lewis, Jerry’s son, who was the drummer, singer, and leader of the beat combo Gary Lewis and the Playboys.

__GARY LEWIS:__Hearing the Beatles inspired me to get the drums out of storage and put a band together from college students. My father was very supportive. He said, “Son, you’re doing great. Just give it a hundred percent and don’t ever grow your hair like those damn Beatles.”

Soon enough, the Byrds were holding their own during the Invasion with their jingle-jangle No. 1s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” and Lewis was at No. 1 with the ersatz Merseybeat of “This Diamond Ring.”

The English bands weren’t offended by their American imitators—far from it. The Beatles and the Stones befriended the Byrds, while Peter Noone befriended Gary Lewis, toured with him, and found his Old Guard connections useful.

PETER NOONE: We were in Kansas City with Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and Gary says, “I’m gonna go up to see my dad’s friend, this guy who used to be president.” He meant Harry Truman, who was one of my heroes, just because he had big American balls. So I said, “Can I come with you?,” and off we went.

Meeting one’s heroes was a big part of the American experience for Invasion acts, and the biggest hero of all was Elvis Presley—who, though he’d been rendered passé by the Beatles and was then trapped in a grim career limbo of overbaked, sideburnless movie features, proved surprisingly sympathetic to English artists.

PETER NOONE: Elvis was absolutely charming. I had to interview him for the BBC or something. It was the most ridiculous interview, because I didn’t prepare: “When are you coming to England? How did you make it without long hair?” The dumbest questions! But he was charmed, because I was so respectful. And he looked fucking unbelievable! I mean, if you were a woman, you would come.

__ROD ARGENT, THE ZOMBIES:__When we were on tour, we got up one day and said, “Let’s go to Graceland.” And we just walked through the gate. There was no security. We walked up the drive; we knocked on the door. And the guy that I remember being Elvis’s father, Vernon—but some of the others remember it being his uncle—came to the door. And we said, like little boys, “We’re the Zombies from England! Is Elvis here?” And he said, “Well, no, Elvis isn’t here. But he’ll be really sorry to have missed you guys, because he loves you.” And we thought, He’s probably never heard of us and it’s bullshit, but it’s a very sweet thing for him to say. But I later found it out to be true.

Meeting one’s black heroes, however, was more fraught with difficulties, especially given the British artists’ obvious debt to American R&B. For Dusty Springfield, the prospect was downright nervous-making, as her best friend, Vicki Wickham, remembers.

__VICKI WICKHAM:__When Dusty came over to America, there was a certain sense of “Oh, shit—what if I meet Baby Washington, whose song I’ve covered?” ’Cause she always thought the original was better than hers. She met Maxine Brown, who she’d also covered. She wouldn’t deal with it well, unfortunately. She’d shuffle a bit and then run away instead of having a conversation. And they, obviously, were in awe of her, because as far as they were concerned, she was the best English singer.

ERIC BURDON: The agent would say, “Well, boys, I got you on a Chuck Berry tour in the U.S. And guess what? You’re the fuckin’ headliners.” What? We were headlining above these guys who I’d worshiped since I was 14. Chuck was really nice to me. I’ve heard a lot about how nasty Chuck can be, and how difficult he can be to work with, but I showed some interest in his feelings, knew all his records, and told him that I thought he was America’s poet laureate. He was embarrassed, I think, but he was kind enough to take me to dinner, sit me down, and say, “Look—stay away from booze and drugs, you know, and keep your money in your sock.”

With Little Richard, though, there was a huge fight backstage at the Paramount Theater in New York between the manager of the Paramount and our publicist. Little Richard’s set kept going overtime, and they were going to slap him with a $10,000 fine, and he was just going off: “I am Little Richard, I am the king!”—emulating Cassius Clay. And there was this little black kid running around, toweling him down and trying to get him to cool down. And that turned out to be Jimi Hendrix.

Resolutely unimpressed by the Brit parade was Bob Dylan, who, though gracious enough a host to introduce both the Beatles and Marianne Faithfull to marijuana when they visited New York, was otherwise disdainful.

__MARIANNE FAITHFULL:__I don’t think Bob’s ever thought much of the British Invasion. What I do know is how he treated people in London, all those who came to worship at the shrine. He felt that he was much, much, much, highly superior. I think he was really irritated that I wouldn’t run away with him to America, or whatever it was he wanted. And then I went off with bloody Mick Jagger! I can see what he means, quite frankly.

By 196667, there was a palpable shift under way in music, from pop to rock. The vestigial flourishes of 50s showbiz began to fall away, endangering the more clean-cut Invasion acts like Freddie and the Dreamers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Chad and Jeremy.

JEREMY CLYDE: For us, I think it lasted about two years, ’64 to ’66, and then the girls stopped screaming. And we wanted them to stop screaming, because it was annoying, actually. Chad and I tried all kinds of things. We did a two-man show and took it ’round colleges—bits of drama, mime, and songs, very mixed-media. And then people started to re-invent popular music, and it all became very serious and, in quite a lot of cases, certainly ours, pretentious.

This should have been the moment for the Yardbirds, who, with their instrumental virtuosity and futuristic original compositions such as “Shapes of Things” and “Over Under Sideways Down,” were poised for greatness. But they proved too volatile to last, as Simon Napier-Bell, who took over their management from Giorgio Gomelsky, found out.

__SIMON NAPIER-BELL:__The Yardbirds were a miserable bunch. They were always arguing, bickering, and they weren’t fun.

Before the group’s 1966 U.S. tour, Paul Samwell-Smith, their bassist and driving musical force, quit. Jeff Beck recommended that they draft in his guitarist friend Jimmy Page on bass.

SIMON NAPIER-BELL: After three days, Jimmy said, “I think I should play guitar.” And then [rhythm-guitarist] Chris Dreja had to play bass. It was sensational, but, of course, Jeff no longer was getting 100 percent of the credit for his own solos, ’cause he was playing them with Jimmy, and Jimmy wasn’t getting any credit, ’cause everybody knew they were Jeff’s solos. So both of them were pretty dissatisfied. You could see it was just gonna get sourer and sourer, and on the American tour Jeff just walked out.

JIM MCCARTY: There was a bit of competition going on, ’cause they’d follow each other playing solos, and try and outdo each other, and maybe play at the same time. Sometimes it sounded good, but not very often. But I think Jeff just got stressed out. We were on this dreadful Dick Clark Caravan of Stars tour, and it was the totally wrong sort of thing for us—Gary Lewis and the Playboys, Sam the Sham, Brian Hyland, all these really straight American acts. We’d play in some of these little southern towns, and they’d shout, “Turn the guitars down, you’re too loud!” Jeff just blew his top, smashed his guitar up in the dressing room, and disappeared.

Another band to break on the later end of the Invasion, in 1967, was the Spencer Davis Group, whose Top 10 hits “Gimme Some Lovin’” and “I’m a Man” featured the uncannily blacksounding vocals of Steve Winwood, a white, 17-year-old Birmingham boy. The group, named after its founder-guitarist, had actually been knocking around for a while, with two U.K. No. 1s already to its credit.

__SPENCER DAVIS:__We had a kind of cult status in America, with the young Winwood prodigy, Little Stevie—a name he hated with a passion. In respect to why we were late in having hits, we weren’t really a pop group. A lot of groups—Manfred Mann, Stones, Animals—weren’t pop, but went pop for a minute to have a hit and then went back to what they were doing. For us, the hits came when there was a better climate for rhythm and blues.

The only trouble was that the Spencer Davis Group, like the Yardbirds, couldn’t keep its hit-making lineup together.

__SPENCER DAVIS:__We didn’t quite invade as a complete unit. When we recorded “Gimme Some Lovin’,” the band was already splitting. Steve was going into Traffic with Dave Mason. We ended up going to New York in 1967 with a new singer, Eddie Hardin. Elton John had shown up as Reggie Dwight for the audition, wearing a milkman’s outfit, and we didn’t think that was cool.

A lot of the Invasion groups were beginning to splinter or close up shop, either outpaced by musical currents or eager to try new styles with new colleagues. Eric Burdon organized a new lineup of the Animals. The Jeff Beck less Yardbirds carried on briefly before packing it in, prompting their remaining guitarist to form the New Yardbirds, soon to be known as Led Zeppelin. The increasingly psychedelicized Graham Nash was growing disenchanted with the Hollies and more interested in hanging out with his friends David Crosby from the Byrds and Stephen Stills from Buffalo Springfield.

__GRAHAM NASH:__I realized that I was drifting far away from the Hollies. And then, when they didn’t want to do “Marrakesh Express” or “Teach Your Children,” I said, “I’m done.”

__GORDON WALLER:__The whole thing had been drained dry. The people who were left had run out of things to say musically, except for the Beatles and the Stones. And there were other people coming along, the Elton Johns of the world, the Who.

For London’s the Who, the tail end of the Invasion was just the beginning. In 1965 and ’66, they were already a massive success in England with their mod anthems “I Can’t Explain,” “My Generation,” and “The Kids Are Alright.” Their single “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere” had been adopted as Ready Steady Go!’ s theme song, and their volcanic live act was thought to be the U.K.’s greatest. But they didn’t make so much as a dent in the American charts. Part of the reason for this was that their managers, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, were film producers making their first foray into the music business.

__CHRIS STAMP:__We signed in America with a company called Decca, which we thought was the same as the English Decca, which was the second-biggest label in England. In fact, American Decca was utterly unrelated, an old-fashioned label that released Bing Crosby, “White Christmas” sort of stuff. They were Sinatra guys—they didn’t know rock ’n’ roll, didn’t even like it. Well, there was a natural outbreak of Who fans somewhere in Michigan with “I Can’t Explain,” and the next record was “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere.” And this company, Decca, sent it back to me, because they thought there was something wrong with the tape, because of the sounds the Who were making. We think of those songs now as pop, but, you know, they weren’t Herman’s Hermits. “My Generation” had stutters in it; it had feedback.

Lambert and Stamp were desperate to break the Who in America, no matter what it took.

VICKI WICKHAM: Kit was a total eccentric, very upperclass, very upper-crust. And we didn’t know till afterwards that he was selling the family silver, pawning the cuff links his dad had given him, to bankroll the Who. ’Cause they had no money.

Stamp, who was in charge of the Who’s American campaign, caught a break when his brother, the quintessential Swinging London actor Terence Stamp, was going off to the U.S. on a promotional junket.

__CHRIS STAMP:__The first time I got over to New York, I got over because my brother had a premiere of a film called The Collector, and he was coming over to do Johnny Carson and promote the film. He exchanged his studio first-class ticket for two economyclass tickets, and I came over with him and stayed in his hotel for three days while he was doing all this stuff.

Stamp managed to make the acquaintance of promoter Frank Barsalona, whose firm, Premier Talent, had developed a reputation as the best of the booking agents for British groups. One of Barsalona’s star clients at the time, Mitch Ryder, was from Detroit, the one place where the Who had an American fan base. Ryder, an early champion of the Who, had gotten his big break in 1965 playing one of Murray the K’s 10-day multi-act shows, and in gratitude had promised to come back whenever Murray Kaufman beckoned.

__FRANK BARSALONA:__Well, of course, a year and a half later, Mitch was really happening, and Murray, of course, wanted him to headline his Easter show. And Mitch called me and said, “Frank, that’s 10 days, five shows a day. I can’t do that.”

Barsalona, in an effort to extricate Ryder from this situation, tried to sour Kaufman on Ryder by making a series of absurd demands, such as having Ryder’s dressing room done up entirely in blue, from the walls to the carpet to the curtains.

__FRANK BARSALONA:__Murray kept saying yes to everything. So then the last thing I said was “Look, Mitch has this thing about this British act called the Who, and he would like them on the show.” Murray said, “They don’t mean anything.” I said, “Murray, that’s what I’m saying. So why don’t we forget about Mitch?” “I’m not going to forget about Mitch!” I said, “Well, then you have to put the Who up in the show.”

In such a fashion did the Who secure its first American engagement, as a support act, along with Eric Clapton’s new group, Cream, in Murray the K’s 1967 Easter show at the RKO 58th Street Theater in New York.

__FRANK BARSALONA:__I had never seen the Who live, and I thought, Oh my God, I’m going to screw myself over! I went to the dress rehearsal with my wife, June, and I said, “You know, June, they’re not bad at all.” And then Pete Townshend starts smashing his guitar to pieces, and Roger Daltrey is destroying the microphone, and Keith Moon is kicking over the drums. I said, “June, do you think this is part of the act?”

__CHRIS STAMP:__Murray the K was still doing these old-fashioned shows in Brooklyn where the act came on, sang their hit, and walked off. So we had to compromise—we stretched it out, I think, to about four songs. The Who would come on; do, like, “I Can’t Explain” and some other song; and finish up with “My Generation” and smash their equipment. Normally, the smashing came about of its own volition—it wasn’t meant to be a showbiz thing. But in the Murray the K thing, it tended to be slightly that. Although Pete was just as angry, I suppose, about having to do only four songs.

Naturally, the Who stole the show, and their reputation grew to the point that by June of ’67 they were one of the major attractions of the Monterey Pop Festival in California, a three-day event that effectively brought down the curtain on chirpy, well-groomed, besuited 60s pop—and, therefore, the phenomenon known as the British Invasion. At Monterey, hair was longer, “Monterey Purple” acid was being taken, and such ascendant, hirsute San Francisco bands as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were the stars. Eric Burdon played with his hippiefied new Animals, and Burdon’s friend Jimi Hendrix made his first major U.S. appearance, bringing down the house by setting fire to his guitar during his version of the Troggs’ late-Invasion hit “Wild Thing.”

ERIC BURDON: Monterey was probably the most important three or four days of my life. It was the apex of what was happening. I’d known Jimi from London, and we traveled across together with Brian Jones. And I saw him cut loose in America—it was his first opportunity to be Jimi Hendrix in front of an American audience.

Though many Invasion acts moved in the late 60s and 70s to distance themselves from their scrubbed Shindig! images, most have since come around to accepting their identification with those days.

__GRAHAM NASH:__You can’t change anything that’s already happened. And so you have to embrace it and say, “You know, the Hollies weren’t too bad.” Would I have done it differently, knowing what I know? Possibly. But I choose to look back at it with fondness rather than look back at it and say, “Boy, was I fucked.”

PAUL JONES: I find that, as time goes on, I’m just more and more associated with the 60s. I’m not getting further into the future; I’m getting further into the past. And I just think, Oh, man, accept it and just don’t worry. You know, I could have gone on to design motorcars, and I might have had some success; in the end, people would have said, “It’s old Paul Do Wah Diddy’ Jones.” You can’t get away from it.

DAVE DAVIES: On my new album, Bug, there’s a song called “It Ain’t Over, ’Til It’s Done!” which is about the 60s. It’s saying, Maybe it’s not all finished yet. Maybe, rather than it always being a retro thing, all us crazy guys from the 60s are alive and well for a reason, and there’s still something we’ve yet to say.

And while the actual value of the Invasion’s music remains a subject of debate . . .

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: I was a great friend of [the American arranger and producer] Jack Nitzsche, and from Jack I got a different perspective on the British Invasion—that American music was on the verge of changing into something incredible. They were all working away—him, Phil Spector, the Four Seasons, Brian Wilson. And the visions they had, what they were trying to do with American music, were completely fucked up by the British Invasion. Jack never really got that vicious about the Beatles and the Stones, but in the wake of those bands that were actually good—real musicians with some kind of vision—came all this other crap like Herman’s Hermits, the Dave Clark Five, et cetera. And I actually agree with him.

. . . its social impact was indubitably huge.

__PETER NOONE:__The bit that people are missing about the British Invasion is that it really was a much bigger deal than people think it was. Even though the newspapers keep going, “Twiggy!,” “Bobbies on Bicycles!,” and all that. Because, before it, England was this quaint little country. It wasn’t considered a haven of brilliant musicians. Can you imagine what it’s done for the British economy? That all these songwriters are bringing all this money back into the economy? Britain is a new place—a new place.

__DAVE CLARK:__When Britain started to do all this stuff, have all these bands, the gap between the countries was so great.In London you’d see these bombed-out blocks of flats, and there were restrictions and rations, and you didn’t always have the luxury of indoor plumbing.In America, we saw the possibilities.I’m still grateful to America—it really is beautiful. “America the Beautiful” is my favorite American song. It really should be your national anthem.

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British Invasion Musical Evolution Essays

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Analytical Essay #1

Simon and Garfunkel

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel came together in the early 1960’s to form one of the most prominent American musical duos of the decade. With their folk-rock sound and poetic lyrics, they captured the hearts of young and old audiences alike, perfectly reflecting the emotions of the tumultuous 60’s.

When Simon and Garfunkel first started out, they were a very basic folk duo heavily influenced by the Everly Brothers, much like every other folk group during this time. When they released their first album in 1964, Wednesday Morning, 3 am, they didn’t see massive success right away. In fact, they were lost among the growing number of folk groups, all striving to find success in the genre of Bob Dylan in the early days of his career (Scoppa).

In 1965, music producer Tom Wilson, who was actually responsible for electrifying Dylan, electrified Simon and Garfunkel’s song “The Sound of Silence” from Wednesday Morning and released it as a single (Scoppa). Wilson added electric guitar, bass, and drums to the original track, capitalizing on the growing genre of “folk-rock”, which had been started by The Byrds (Greene). It was then that people really started to take notice of Simon and Garfunkel. Pretty soon, “The Sound of Silence” became a number one hit, which proceeded to launch Simon and Garfunkel into the fame that had previously escaped them in 1964. “The Sound of Silence” actually went on to be the anthem of the year, reflecting the discontent among the people during the 1960’s (Scoppa).

By 1966, Simon and Garfunkel were actively taking part in the political unrest spreading across the country, especially in the face of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. Their anti-war sentiments were reflected in their album released during this year, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme ( Scoppa) . This album showed off their new “folk-rock” sound, and was a huge success across America. The album won over young audiences because they loved the “relevance” of the album to the music and discontent of the time, while older audiences loved it for Simon and Garfunkel’s “intelligence” and complex lyrics (Greene). Simon and Garfunkel’s music was really starting to resonate with people all across America (Scoppa).

Politically speaking, Simon and Garfunkel made it clear what they thought about the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement, and other events happening across the country in their album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (Eder). Before this, the duo had dabbled in political statements with their song “The Sound of Silence,” which subtly suggested that it was wrong for people to blindly follow their government and not freely speak their minds (Simon).

Parsely, Sage , however, was not so subtle in its meaning. Especially evident in their song “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night”, Simon and Garfunkel did not shy away from expressing their anti-war sentiments and reflecting the dissatisfaction of many across America. “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” is so effective in blatantly expressing their thoughts on the subject because of their use of authentic news footage and audio taken during the 60’s. The duo “juxtaposed the Christmas peace hymn with an increasingly grim newscast” (Fyfe), containing controversial events from the year 1966, such as the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement, anti-war protests, student demonstrations, etc. (Eder). By combining a song with such an obviously peaceful connotation with the accounts of the volatile occurrences of the time, it was very apparent that Simon and Garfunkel supported the anti-war movement and other protests that were occurring, as these movements were a way to bring back the peace that had been abandoned in the turmoil of the decade (Fyfe).

In 1968, a year after the Beatles released their album Sgt. Pepper and the Lonely Hearts Club Band, and thus effectively changing the face of the music industry, Simon and Garfunkel released their next album, Bookends. Unlike the Beatles and the groups that followed in their wake, Simon and Garfunkel didn’t give in to the psychedelic mood that was created during 1967’s “Summer of Love”. Instead, they added “color” to their album by infusing it with a deep lyrical meaning and messages. This is in part why the album is called Bookends, to reflect this literary emphasis (Scoppa).

By the end of the 1960’s, the “Summer of Love” definitively came to an end as tensions over the Vietnam War continued to escalate. As the country grew even more restless, many groups, including the Beatles, started to break up. Simon and Garfunkel wrote their album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, in response to the conflicting emotions of this period, with the title song offering a “much needed message of hope with eloquent simplicity and grace” (Scoppa). Shortly after, however, Simon and Garfunkel succumbed to the unrest of the time and broke up, just like the Beatles had before them. Both Simon and Garfunkel went on to pursue successful solo careers (Scoppa).

It wasn’t just the messages of their albums and their relevance to the time that made Simon and Garfunkel a success as a duo while they were still together. Musically, Simon and Garfunkel were able to stand out from all of the others folk groups of the 1960’s. The duo was heavily influenced by the Everly Brothers (Scoppa), a rock and roll duo from the late 50’s and early 60’s, known for their use of close harmonies (Kemp). Simon and Garfunkel were especially inspired by the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, and implemented extremely close harmonies in their own music.

Where Simon and Garfunkel were able to stand out from their contemporaries was with their “overtly poetic lyrics and Garfunkel’s keening tenor,” (Scoppa), both of which brought a unique flair to the duo’s music. The music of Simon and Garfunkel, while lyrically complex, relied simply on the close harmonies of the duo’s intertwining voices, acoustic guitar, and “the sparest of rhythmic underpinnings and melodic ornamentation” to give their music the beauty it is known for (Scoppa).

Paul Simon was really the backbone of the duo, writing the music and amazingly complex lyrics. Simon was essentially a poet, and brought great literary depth to their songs. Because of this, Simon and Garfunkel’s music really meant something, which made it unique. On the other hand, Garfunkel’s vocals carried the duo, and added the heart and intensity to the music that the lyrics alone could not (Thorncroft). When Simon and Garfunkel sang together, their voices were described as “blending effortlessly, with Garfunkel’s rising smoothly above Simon’s like a front row forward in a line out” (Thorncroft). Evidently, it was the combination of Simon and Garfunkel’s talents that made them so great, not their individual talents alone. Together, Simon and Garfunkel’s distinct abilities were able to combine to create incredible music, which would go on to influence singer-songwriters for years to come (Greene).

Interestingly, Simon and Garfunkel didn’t just have an important impact on the music industry, but on the film industry as well. Their music was used on the soundtrack for The Graduate , which greatly affected the way music was used in future films. Until this point, new music was usually written for the soundtrack of a movie. Using existing, popular music for soundtracks was very uncommon (Lipshutz).

However, that was exactly what happened with The Graduate soundtrack. Simon and Garfunkel’s existing music, such as the songs “The Sound of Silence” and “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” was used for the soundtrack because it perfectly reflected the mood of the movie. Simon and Garfunkel’s music completely captured the overall feelings of melancholy and ennui that pervade the film, which was about a recent college grad dissatisfied and confused about his life (Lipshutz). In fact, both the movie and its Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack reflected the overall discontent of the 60’s perfectly (Scoppa).

The reason Simon and Garfunkel’s music had such a huge impact on the film industry was that it changed how the industry used popular music in movies for the years to come. Their music proved that “popular artists could steer the emotional impact of a film’s music” (Lipshutz), sometimes even better than music written specifically for it. Furthermore, this soundtrack exposed Simon and Garfunkel to an even wider audience across the country, since the movie was incredibly popular, which in turn had a positive effect on Simon and Garfunkel’s career (Lipshutz).

Overall, Simon and Garfunkel made a tremendous impact during the 1960’s. From the music industry all the way to the politics of the decade, their music resonated with people across the country. The duo’s overall messages, as well as the melancholic mood of many of their songs, reflected the discontent that was so prevalent during this decade. As Simon and Garfunkel said themselves in their song “America”, “I’m empty and aching, and I don’t know why” (Simon). The people in America during the 1960’s were feeling restless, and Simon and Garfunkel’s music embodied this attitude effortlessly.

Works Cited

Eder, Bruce. “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme – Simon & Garfunkel.” AllMusic . All Media Network, LLC, n.d. Web. 18 May 2015.

Fyfe, Andy. “Simon and Garfunkel Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme Review.” BBC Music . BBC, 2009. Web. 18 May 2015.

Greene, Andy. “Simon & Garfunkel Biography.” Rolling Stone . Rolling Stone, n.d. Web. 17 May 2015.

Kemp, Mark. “The Everly Brothers Biography.” Rolling Stone . Rolling Stone, n.d. Web. 15 May 2015.

Lipshutz, Jason. “R.I.P. Mike Nichols: Why ‘The Graduate’ Soundtrack Will Always Matter.” Billboard . Billboard, 20 Nov. 2014. Web. 18 May 2015.

Scoppa, Bud. “Simon & Garfunkel.” The Official Site . Sony Music Entertainment, n.d. Web. 15 May 2015.

Simon, Paul. “Music+Lyrics – The Sound of Silence.” Paul Simon . Sony Music Entertainment, n.d. Web. 17 May 2015.

Thorncroft, Antony. “Simon and Garfunkel.” The Financial Times [London, England] 28 Apr. 1970, 25th ed.: 3. Gale NewsVault . Web. 17 May 2015.

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British Invasion Essay Example

• Pages: 4 (1085 words)
• Published: January 3, 2017
• Type: Essay

The British Music Invasion was one of the most influential time periods for the development and maturation of a new variation of rock and roll. This innovating movement was initially inspired by some of America’s greatest rock and blues musicians including: Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, and so on.

The establishment of the British music scene absorbed and completely reconfigured the traditional instruments, established music forms, and the same overused lyrics that once belonged to rock and roll. Two different schools with two different sounds categorize this great time of influence, now known as the British Invasion. Even though both schools were yielded from the same “musical soil,” Great Brittan’s internal struggle between economic and social classes had a fundamental role in forming each school’s distinguishable style.

: justify">The British Invasion was the product of Great Britain’s attempt to,” [break] free from the overt imitation of musical references and with the incorporation of direct influences from African American blues and R&B musicians, [Great Britain unknowingly] laid the foundations for the development of a uniquely British rock &roll sound” (Perone). Essentially, the American music scene provided a pattern that led to the synthesis of two very distinctive music styles that were influentially different yet generated from the same music source.

The complexity of each school’s sound allocated a generous amount of variation from the same musical sources. Among the first of the two schools, Liverpool manufactured a sound comparable to skiffle and really laid the framework for deeper music interpretation. Originally, the term skiffle referred to the sound created by the poorer African-American musicians of the America

South who resorted to raw materials and handmade instruments that produced a more homegrown, earthy sound (Harry).

Especially at this point in time, Great Britain was still experiencing the aftermath of World War II, “the practical matters [such as] social prejudice, economic disparity, and psychological distress in the post WW-II era were vital motivators for British Invasion bands” (Perone). The depressed state of the country clearly defined and divided social classes. Much like the originators of skiffle had to deal with racism, the working-class British musicians endured class discrimination first hand.

These similarities helped form a kinship or appreciation for American blues music that without question influenced the working-class nature of early rock and roll. The Liverpool sound embodies a direct imitation of “American rockabilly structures, instruments, and vocal styles [and incorporates] a more thorough integration and modification of skiffle-based styles (Perone). ” The complex combination of this softer, more refined rock helped pave the way for the second school of the British Invasion.

Among the Liverpool bands, the Beatles were one of the most influential bands that pioneered new variations of rock and roll that catapulted them to the frontlines of the British Invasion. The Beatles sophisticated sound developed the precedents for a variation of rock and roll that pushed the boundaries of traditional style and established new norms that enticed bands to try and replicate their sound. The Beatle’s song “I Want To Hold Your Hand” characterizes this school best because it was the Beatle’s first number one hit in America, which then triggered “Beatlemania,” the jumping-off point for the British Invasion (Stuessy, 85).

The Beatles creativity inspired an

enriched style of rock and roll that was also exemplified through bands like Gerry and The Pace Makers who reached number 4 with their song” Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying”. Moreover, the band, The Searchers, who sang “Love Potion NO. Nine”, and “Needles and Pins” demonstrated their Beatle-inspired, softer style of music that held the same standard of sophistication. Subsequently, the London school responded to Liverpool’s revolutionary rock sound with its own modification of rock and roll generated from influential, American rhythm and blues bands with a more basic, raw demeanor.

The newer London school was accompanied by a newer sound that is most often described as a combination of jazz and R&B-oriented mainstream rock. With the debut of the Liverpool British Invasion bands, newer bands from London had more creative freedom and were challenged by overcoming the previous British bands’ successes. As the styles of each school developed, the variation between the two groups also widened. The second-wave of British Invasion bands personified a harder, more aggressive sounding rock and placed a heavy emphasis on rebellious behavior.

With the intention of creating more blues-based rock and roll, this second school deconstructed the stylistic complexities that they once sought after. It is important to note that the Beatle’s strong American following made it difficult for bands to compete within the same realm of music (Stuessy, 125). The Beatle’s limitless innovation seemed impossible to surpass, ultimately inspiring the creation of a counter-image that highlighted alternate aspects of rock and roll and promoted louder, more antisocial variations of rock. Without a doubt, The Rolling Stones were key players in the British Invasion’s blues-based

rock style.

Although The Stones initially tried to imitate the Beatle’s style, they found their success when they embraced their contrasting characteristics. With songs like “ Satisfaction” and “Sympathy For The Devil,” the Rolling Stone’s simplistic and repetitive style combined with their nonchalant attitudes created an appeal for listeners who desired something simpler than the complex styles of The Beatles. Along with the Stones, bands like The Yardbirds, who sang “ For Your Love” created sounds of hard rock that was considered “before their time.

The Yardbirds are especially significant to the British Invasion because their use of improvisational instrumental solos were quickly embraced by their predecessors (Stuessy, 127). Yet another significant band within the British Invasion would have to be Deep Purple. The band’s largest hit “Smoke On The Water” helped the harder side of rock and roll transition into a style of heavy metal. The bands’ adaptations to traditional rock and roll created a diverging path from Liverpool’s initial musical influence.

The British Invasion was an essential time period where new concepts and variations within rock and roll resonated throughout America. The movement’s two schools, Liverpool and London, were each responsible for unique contributions to the progression of rock and roll and the transformation of pop culture trends. While Liverpool found parallels with America’s Southern Skiffle sound, the London school generated a new variation from rhythm and blues. Collectively, the British Invasion redefined the parameters of rock and roll and reintroduced Americans to traditional music templates, largely distinguishable by their distinctive new sounds.

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Illusions of empire: Amartya Sen on what British rule really did for India

It is true that before British rule, India was starting to fall behind other parts of the world – but many of the arguments defending the Raj are based on serious misconceptions about India’s past, imperialism and history itself

T he British empire in India was in effect established at the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757. The battle was swift, beginning at dawn and ending close to sunset. It was a normal monsoon day, with occasional rain in the mango groves at the town of Plassey, which is between Calcutta, where the British were based, and Murshidabad, the capital of the kingdom of Bengal. It was in those mango groves that the British forces faced the Nawab Siraj-ud-Doula’s army and convincingly defeated it.

British rule ended nearly 200 years later with Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous speech on India’s “tryst with destiny” at midnight on 14 August 1947. Two hundred years is a long time. What did the British achieve in India, and what did they fail to accomplish?

During my days as a student at a progressive school in West Bengal in the 1940s, these questions came into our discussion constantly. They remain important even today, not least because the British empire is often invoked in discussions about successful global governance. It has also been invoked to try to persuade the US to acknowledge its role as the pre-eminent imperial power in the world today: “Should the United States seek to shed – or to shoulder – the imperial load it has inherited?” the historian Niall Ferguson has asked . It is certainly an interesting question, and Ferguson is right to argue that it cannot be answered without an understanding of how the British empire rose and fell – and what it managed to do.

Arguing about all this at Santiniketan school, which had been established by Rabindranath Tagore some decades earlier, we were bothered by a difficult methodological question. How could we think about what India would have been like in the 1940s had British rule not occurred at all?

The frequent temptation to compare India in 1757 (when British rule was beginning) with India in 1947 (when the British were leaving ) would tell us very little, because in the absence of British rule, India would of course not have remained the same as it was at the time of Plassey. The country would not have stood still had the British conquest not occurred. But how do we answer the question about what difference was made by British rule?

To illustrate the relevance of such an “alternative history”, we may consider another case – one with a potential imperial conquest that did not in fact occur. Let’s think about Commodore Matthew Perry of the US navy, who steamed into the bay of Edo in Japan in 1853 with four warships. Now consider the possibility that Perry was not merely making a show of American strength (as was in fact the case), but was instead the advance guard of an American conquest of Japan, establishing a new American empire in the land of the rising sun, rather as Robert Clive did in India . If we were to assess the achievements of the supposed American rule of Japan through the simple device of comparing Japan before that imperial conquest in 1853 with Japan after the American domination ended, whenever that might be, and attribute all the differences to the effects of the American empire, we would miss all the contributions of the Meiji restoration from 1868 onwards, and of other globalising changes that were going on. Japan did not stand still; nor would India have done so.

While we can see what actually happened in Japan under Meiji rule, it is extremely hard to guess with any confidence what course the history of the Indian subcontinent would have taken had the British conquest not occurred. Would India have moved, like Japan, towards modernisation in an increasingly globalising world, or would it have remained resistant to change, like Afghanistan, or would it have hastened slowly, like Thailand?

These are impossibly difficult questions to answer. And yet, even without real alternative historical scenarios, there are some limited questions that can be answered, which may contribute to an intelligent understanding of the role that British rule played in India. We can ask: what were the challenges that India faced at the time of the British conquest, and what happened in those critical areas during the British rule?

T here was surely a need for major changes in a rather chaotic and institutionally backward India. To recognise the need for change in India in the mid-18th century does not require us to ignore – as many Indian super-nationalists fear – the great achievements in India’s past, with its extraordinary history of accomplishments in philosophy, mathematics, literature, arts, architecture, music, medicine, linguistics and astronomy. India had also achieved considerable success in building a thriving economy with flourishing trade and commerce well before the colonial period – the economic wealth of India was amply acknowledged by British observers such as Adam Smith.

The fact is, nevertheless, that even with those achievements, in the mid-18th century India had in many ways fallen well behind what was being achieved in Europe. The exact nature and significance of this backwardness were frequent subjects of lively debates in the evenings at my school.

An insightful essay on India by Karl Marx particularly engaged the attention of some of us. Writing in 1853, Marx pointed to the constructive role of British rule in India, on the grounds that India needed some radical re-examination and self-scrutiny. And Britain did indeed serve as India’s primary western contact, particularly in the course of the 19th century. The importance of this influence would be hard to neglect. The indigenous globalised culture that was slowly emerging in India was deeply indebted not only to British writing, but also to books and articles in other – that is non-English – European languages that became known in India through the British.

Figures such as the Calcutta philosopher Ram Mohan Roy, born in 1772, were influenced not only by traditional knowledge of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian texts, but also by the growing familiarity with English writings. After Roy, in Bengal itself there were also Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Madhusudan Dutta and several generations of Tagores and their followers who were re-examining the India they had inherited in the light of what they saw happening in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their main – often their only – source of information were the books (usually in English) circulating in India, thanks to British rule. That intellectual influence, covering a wide range of European cultures, survives strongly today, even as the military, political and economic power of the British has declined dramatically.

I was persuaded that Marx was basically right in his diagnosis of the need for some radical change in India, as its old order was crumbling as a result of not having been a part of the intellectual and economic globalisation that the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution had initiated across the world (along with, alas, colonialism).

There was arguably, however, a serious flaw in Marx’s thesis, in particular in his implicit presumption that the British conquest was the only window on the modern world that could have opened for India. What India needed at the time was more constructive globalisation, but that is not the same thing as imperialism. The distinction is important. Throughout India’s long history, it persistently enjoyed exchanges of ideas as well as of commodities with the outside world. Traders, settlers and scholars moved between India and further east – China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere – for a great many centuries, beginning more than 2,000 years ago. The far-reaching influence of this movement – especially on language, literature and architecture – can be seen plentifully even today. There were also huge global influences by means of India’s open-frontier attitude in welcoming fugitives from its early days.

Jewish immigration into India began right after the fall of Jerusalem in the first century and continued for many hundreds of years. Baghdadi Jews, such as the highly successful Sassoons, came in large numbers even as late as the 18th century. Christians started coming at least from the fourth century, and possibly much earlier. There are colourful legends about this, including one that tells us that the first person St Thomas the Apostle met after coming to India in the first century was a Jewish girl playing the flute on the Malabar coast. We loved that evocative – and undoubtedly apocryphal – anecdote in our classroom discussions, because it illustrated the multicultural roots of Indian traditions.

The Parsis started arriving from the early eighth century – as soon as persecution began in their Iranian homeland. Later in that century, the Armenians began to leave their footprints from Kerala to Bengal. Muslim Arab traders had a substantial presence on the west coast of India from around that time – well before the arrival of Muslim conquerors many centuries later, through the arid terrain in the north-west of the subcontinent. Persecuted Bahá’ís from Iran came only in the 19th century.

At the time of the Battle of Plassey, there were already businessmen, traders and other professionals from a number of different European nations well settled near the mouth of the Ganges. Being subjected to imperial rule is thus not the only way of making connections with, or learning things from, foreign countries. When the Meiji Restoration established a new reformist government in Japan in 1868 (which was not unrelated to the internal political impact of Commodore Perry’s show of force a decade earlier), the Japanese went straight to learning from the west without being subjected to imperialism. They sent people for training in the US and Europe, and made institutional changes that were clearly inspired by western experience. They did not wait to be coercively globalised via imperialism.

O ne of the achievements to which British imperial theorists tended to give a good deal of emphasis was the role of the British in producing a united India. In this analysis, India was a collection of fragmented kingdoms until British rule made a country out of these diverse regimes. It was argued that India was previously not one country at all, but a thoroughly divided land mass. It was the British empire, so the claim goes, that welded India into a nation. Winston Churchill even remarked that before the British came, there was no Indian nation. “India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator,” he once said.

If this is true, the empire clearly made an indirect contribution to the modernisation of India through its unifying role. However, is the grand claim about the big role of the Raj in bringing about a united India correct? Certainly, when Clive’s East India Company defeated the nawab of Bengal in 1757, there was no single power ruling over all of India. Yet it is a great leap from the proximate story of Britain imposing a single united regime on India (as did actually occur) to the huge claim that only the British could have created a united India out of a set of disparate states.

That way of looking at Indian history would go firmly against the reality of the large domestic empires that had characterised India throughout the millennia. The ambitious and energetic emperors from the third century BC did not accept that their regimes were complete until the bulk of what they took to be one country was united under their rule. There were major roles here for Ashoka Maurya, the Gupta emperors, Alauddin Khalji, the Mughals and others. Indian history shows a sequential alternation of large domestic empires with clusters of fragmented kingdoms. We should therefore not make the mistake of assuming that the fragmented governance of mid-18th century India was the state in which the country typically found itself throughout history, until the British helpfully came along to unite it.

Even though in history textbooks the British were often assumed to be the successors of the Mughals in India, it is important to note that the British did not in fact take on the Mughals when they were a force to be reckoned with. British rule began when the Mughals’ power had declined, though formally even the nawab of Bengal, whom the British defeated, was their subject. The nawab still swore allegiance to the Mughal emperor, without paying very much attention to his dictates. The imperial status of the Mughal authority over India continued to be widely acknowledged even though the powerful empire itself was missing.

When the so-called sepoy mutiny threatened the foundations of British India in 1857, the diverse anti-British forces participating in the joint rebellion could be aligned through their shared acceptance of the formal legitimacy of the Mughal emperor as the ruler of India. The emperor was, in fact, reluctant to lead the rebels, but this did not stop the rebels from declaring him the emperor of all India. The 82-year-old Mughal monarch, Bahadur Shah II, known as Zafar, was far more interested in reading and writing poetry than in fighting wars or ruling India. He could do little to help the 1,400 unarmed civilians of Delhi whom the British killed as the mutiny was brutally crushed and the city largely destroyed. The poet-emperor was banished to Burma, where he died.

As a child growing up in Burma in the 1930s, I was taken by my parents to see Zafar’s grave in Rangoon, which was close to the famous Shwedagon Pagoda. The grave was not allowed to be anything more than an undistinguished stone slab covered with corrugated iron. I remember discussing with my father how the British rulers of India and Burma must evidently have been afraid of the evocative power of the remains of the last Mughal emperor. The inscription on the grave noted only that “Bahadur Shah was ex-King of Delhi” – no mention of “empire” in the commemoration! It was only much later, in the 1990s, that Zafar would be honoured with something closer to what could decently serve as the grave of the last Mughal emperor.

I n the absence of the British Raj, the most likely successors to the Mughals would probably have been the newly emerging Hindu Maratha powers near Bombay, who periodically sacked the Mughal capital of Delhi and exercised their power to intervene across India. Already by 1742, the East India Company had built a huge “Maratha ditch” at the edge of Calcutta to slow down the lightning raids of the Maratha cavalry, which rode rapidly across 1,000 miles or more. But the Marathas were still quite far from putting together anything like the plan of an all-India empire.

The British, by contrast, were not satisfied until they were the dominant power across the bulk of the subcontinent, and in this they were not so much bringing a new vision of a united India from abroad as acting as the successor of previous domestic empires. British rule spread to the rest of the country from its imperial foundations in Calcutta, beginning almost immediately after Plassey. As the company’s power expanded across India, Calcutta became the capital of the newly emerging empire, a position it occupied from the mid-18th century until 1911 (when the capital was moved to Delhi). It was from Calcutta that the conquest of other parts of India was planned and directed. The profits made by the East India Company from its economic operations in Bengal financed, to a great extent, the wars that the British waged across India in the period of their colonial expansion.

What has been called “the financial bleeding of Bengal” began very soon after Plassey. With the nawabs under their control, the company made big money not only from territorial revenues, but also from the unique privilege of duty-free trade in the rich Bengal economy – even without counting the so-called gifts that the Company regularly extracted from local merchants. Those who wish to be inspired by the glory of the British empire would do well to avoid reading Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, including his discussion of the abuse of state power by a “mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies”. As the historian William Dalrymple has observed: “The economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was producing 22.5%. By the peak of the Raj, those figures had more or less been reversed: India was reduced from the world’s leading manufacturing nation to a symbol of famine and deprivation.”

While most of the loot from the financial bleeding accrued to British company officials in Bengal, there was widespread participation by the political and business leadership in Britain: nearly a quarter of the members of parliament in London owned stocks in the East India Company after Plassey. The commercial benefits from Britain’s Indian empire thus reached far into the British establishment.

The robber-ruler synthesis did eventually give way to what would eventually become classical colonialism, with the recognition of the need for law and order and a modicum of reasonable governance. But the early misuse of state power by the East India Company put the economy of Bengal under huge stress. What the cartographer John Thornton, in his famous chart of the region in 1703, had described as “the Rich Kingdom of Bengal” experienced a gigantic famine during 1769–70. Contemporary estimates suggested that about a third of the Bengal population died. This is almost certainly an overestimate. There was no doubt, however, that it was a huge catastrophe, with massive starvation and mortality – in a region that had seen no famine for a very long time.

This disaster had at least two significant effects. First, the inequity of early British rule in India became the subject of considerable political criticism in Britain itself. By the time Adam Smith roundly declared in The Wealth of Nations that the East India Company was “altogether unfit to govern its territorial possessions”, there were many British figures, such as Edmund Burke, making similar critiques. Second, the economic decline of Bengal did eventually ruin the company’s business as well, hurting British investors themselves, and giving the powers in London reason to change their business in India into more of a regular state-run operation.

By the late 18th century, the period of so-called “post-Plassey plunder”, with which British rule in India began, was giving way to the sort of colonial subjugation that would soon become the imperial standard, and with which the subcontinent would become more and more familiar in the following century and a half.

H ow successful was this long phase of classical imperialism in British India, which lasted from the late 18th century until independence in 1947? The British claimed a huge set of achievements, including democracy, the rule of law, railways, the joint stock company and cricket, but the gap between theory and practice – with the exception of cricket – remained wide throughout the history of imperial relations between the two countries. Putting the tally together in the years of pre-independence assessment, it was easy to see how far short the achievements were compared with the rhetoric of accomplishment.

Indeed, Rudyard Kipling caught the self-congratulatory note of the British imperial administrator admirably well in his famous poem on imperialism:

Take up the White Man’s burden – The savage wars of peace – Fill full the mouth of famine And bid the sickness cease

Alas, neither the stopping of famines nor the remedying of ill health was part of the high-performance achievements of British rule in India. Nothing could lead us away from the fact that life expectancy at birth in India as the empire ended was abysmally low: 32 years, at most.

The abstemiousness of colonial rule in neglecting basic education reflects the view taken by the dominant administrators of the needs of the subject nation. There was a huge asymmetry between the ruler and the ruled. The British government became increasingly determined in the 19th century to achieve universal literacy for the native British population. In contrast, the literacy rates in India under the Raj were very low. When the empire ended, the adult literacy rate in India was barely 15%. The only regions in India with comparatively high literacy were the “native kingdoms” of Travancore and Cochin (formally outside the British empire), which, since independence, have constituted the bulk of the state of Kerala. These kingdoms, though dependent on the British administration for foreign policy and defence, had remained technically outside the empire and had considerable freedom in domestic policy, which they exercised in favour of more school education and public health care.

The 200 years of colonial rule were also a period of massive economic stagnation, with hardly any advance at all in real GNP per capita. These grim facts were much aired after independence in the newly liberated media, whose rich culture was in part – it must be acknowledged – an inheritance from British civil society. Even though the Indian media was very often muzzled during the Raj – mostly to prohibit criticism of imperial rule, for example at the time of the Bengal famine of 1943 – the tradition of a free press, carefully cultivated in Britain, provided a good model for India to follow as the country achieved independence.

Indeed, India received many constructive things from Britain that did not – could not – come into their own until after independence. Literature in the Indian languages took some inspiration and borrowed genres from English literature, including the flourishing tradition of writing in English. Under the Raj, there were restrictions on what could be published and propagated (even some of Tagore’s books were banned). These days the government of India has no such need, but alas – for altogether different reasons of domestic politics – the restrictions are sometimes no less intrusive than during the colonial rule.

Nothing is perhaps as important in this respect as the functioning of a multiparty democracy and a free press. But often enough these were not gifts that could be exercised under the British administration during imperial days. They became realisable only when the British left – they were the fruits of learning from Britain’s own experience, which India could use freely only after the period of empire had ended. Imperial rule tends to require some degree of tyranny: asymmetrical power is not usually associated with a free press or with a vote-counting democracy, since neither of them is compatible with the need to keep colonial subjects in check.

A similar scepticism is appropriate about the British claim that they had eliminated famine in dependent territories such as India. British governance of India began with the famine of 1769-70, and there were regular famines in India throughout the duration of British rule. The Raj also ended with the terrible famine of 1943. In contrast, there has been no famine in India since independence in 1947.

The irony again is that the institutions that ended famines in independent India – democracy and an independent media – came directly from Britain. The connection between these institutions and famine prevention is simple to understand. Famines are easy to prevent, since the distribution of a comparatively small amount of free food, or the offering of some public employment at comparatively modest wages (which gives the beneficiaries the ability to buy food), allows those threatened by famine the ability to escape extreme hunger. So any government should be able stop a threatening famine – large or small – and it is very much in the interest of a government in a functioning democracy, facing a free press, to do so. A free press makes the facts of a developing famine known to all, and a democratic vote makes it hard to win elections during – or after – a famine, hence giving a government the additional incentive to tackle the issue without delay.

India did not have this freedom from famine for as long as its people were without their democratic rights, even though it was being ruled by the foremost democracy in the world, with a famously free press in the metropolis – but not in the colonies. These freedom-oriented institutions were for the rulers but not for the imperial subjects.

In the powerful indictment of British rule in India that Tagore presented in 1941, he argued that India had gained a great deal from its association with Britain, for example, from “discussions centred upon Shakespeare’s drama and Byron’s poetry and above all … the large-hearted liberalism of 19th-century English politics”. The tragedy, he said, came from the fact that what “was truly best in their own civilisation, the upholding of dignity of human relationships, has no place in the British administration of this country”. Indeed, the British could not have allowed Indian subjects to avail themselves of these freedoms without threatening the empire itself.

The distinction between the role of Britain and that of British imperialism could not have been clearer. As the union jack was being lowered across India, it was a distinction of which we were profoundly aware.

Adapted from Home in the World: A Memoir by Amartya Sen, published by Allen Lane on 8 July and available at guardianbookshop.com

This article was amended on 29 June 2021. Owing to an editing error, an earlier version incorrectly referred to Karl Marx writing on India in 1953. The essay was written in 1853.

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The British Invasion Essay

There were plenty of music coming out and showing up in the 1960’s. It was time; time for a new form of music, a new sound, it was time for a revolution. There was all types of music being played and new music being formed. There were all sorts of bands playing different kinds of music and playing with their own styles while taking over the airwaves. Whether it be rock, soul, or any other type of music, it was a revolution. This also led to new bands forming and breaking into the industry.

In the sixties rock music comes of age and dominates the popular music charts. Elvis Presley continued to score hits in the early part of the decade, but the music continued to diversify with the folk revival, the Brill Building sound, Phil Spector’s wall of sound, girl groups and surf music, all impacting the early part of the decade. The Motown, Stax and Atlantic labels bring more African-American artists back to the forefront of the pop charts.

By 1964 American artists are sharing the top of the charts with U. K. bands led by the Beatles and The Rolling Stones . In the U. S. garage bands emerge, inspired by the British Invasion sound. There were many bands that were ruling the airwaves and even just beginning and making their name in the music industry . From the Beatles to Led Zeppelin , all the way to Black Sabbath in the category of Rock. Songs ranging from “Hey Jude” to “Whole Lotta Love”. In Soul/Motown; the Temptations to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, all the way to Aretha Franklin.

Songs ranging from “Respect” all the way to “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”. The two types that showed the most in this decade are rock & roll and motown/soul. One thing that helped along and start it all was the British Invasion. The British Invasion was a musical movement of the mid-1960s composed of British rock-and-roll (“beat”) groups whose popularity spread rapidly to the United States . The Beatles’ triumphant arrival in New York City on February 7, 1964, opened America’s doors to a wealth of British musical talent.

What followed would be called—with historical condescension by the willingly reconquered colony—the British Invasion. Like their transatlantic counterparts in the 1950s, British youth heard their future in the frantic beats and suggestive lyrics of American rock and roll. But initial attempts to replicate it failed. Lacking the indigenous basic ingredientsrhythm and blues and country music of rock and roll, enthusiasts could bring only crippling British decorum and diffidence.

The only sign of life was in the late 1950s skiffle craze, spearheaded by Scotland’s Lonnie Donegan. Skiffle groups (like the Beatles-launching Quarrymen) were drummer less acoustic guitar-and-banjo ensembles, jug bands really, who most often sang traditional American folk songs, frequently with more spirit than instrumental polish. The “Motown Sound” and popular R&B music had a major significance in terms of the Civil Rights movement and integration in American society during the sixties.

Motown started as a Detroit-based record label in the late fifties and early sixties, but it quickly turned into much more as the acts gained popularity worldwide. Motown records consisted mainly of African-American groups, singers, songwriters and management and their musical and business success proved in breaking down the barriers of segregation and granted AfricanAmerican performers and musicians a chance to appropriate much of the success that had been credited to white rock ‘n’ rollers and pop artists who had success in singing “black music” during the previous decade.

Two of the most influential groups to come out of the Motown sound were Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and Diana Ross and the Supremes, both of which had as much chart success as any of the rock groups that dominated the airwaves during the sixties. The success of Motown also paved the way for R&B singers and groups who were not necessarily a part of the movement to also enjoy mainstream success. Roots rock emerged in the mid to late 1960s as a combination of several genres and subgenres of rock music that were popular at the time.

Roots rock combined elements of folk music, Blues, Country and Rock ‘n’ Roll. The genre was exemplified by its “back to basics” sound. Bob Dylan is thought to have pioneered the genre with the release of his 1966 album “Blonde on Blonde” that demonstrated what roots rock was to become. Many of the most popular bands of the time joined the “roots revival” and crafted albums of their own that featured and experimented with a roots sound.

Some of the bands that created music in the style of this broad genre including some of the great bands like The Rolling Stones, The Doors, The Beatles, The Band, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. 1960s music h. caused great impact on this current time also, the music is still playing today , some of the bands from then still creating music, and have led to inspiring many new bands, genres of music, and songs. The rock back then has inspired some great songs from later eras. Some bands have even inspired new bands to be formed, like tribute bands, who try to cover the original band’s music and may even do some originals.

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The British Occupation of Manila, 1762-1764, through Franciscan Eyes

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Bruce Cruikshank

Ernest Rafael Hartwell

The Philippines and Puerto Rico are part of a transoceanic archipelago of colonies that continued under Spanish rule throughout the 19th century, long after the Latin American wars of independence. This article examines parallel projects in anticolonial historiography from these two regions through the prism of converging and diverging articulations of authority. Specifically, two late 19th-century intellectuals, José Julián Acosta of Puerto Rico and José Rizal of the Philippines, dust off 17th- and 18th-century tomes of official Spanish colonial history, publishing critical editions of these histories. Acosta and Rizal insert their own voices into discussions over the past, present, and future of their colonies through the annotations that they append to the original texts. While scholars often affirm that the work of Latin American 19th-century writing is to facilitate the forgetting of differences in the service of community consolidation, I argue that these experiments in marginal historiography constitute a contentious and continual revisiting of difference at the root of the authors’ assertion of their own authority: difference from Spain, from the popular classes, and from other colonies. These projects of annotation expose the racialized nature of the colonial intellectuals’ constructions of authority, pointing to diverging understandings of the work of doubt in anticolonial historiography. The Philippines and Puerto Rico, often overlooked in studies of Latin American literature and history, are endnotes to Spain’s imperial saga. Acosta’s and Rizal’s annotations show why we have to pay attention to these kinds of endnotes; they destabilize certainties and pursue contentious and divergent forms of truth.

Philippiniana Sacra

Melanie Turingan

Evaristo Martínez-Radío

En 1762 Manila cae por sorpresa en manos británicas. A partir de ese momento comenzará una tenaz resistencia al invasor en un contexto de improvisada guerra irregular que incluyó nativos filipinos y religiosos. Tal confrontación dio pie a diferentes comportamientos respecto a los varios tipos de cautivos involucrados.

More Hispanic than We Admit, 3

Jorge Mojarro

The first years of Spanish presence in the Philippine archipelago resulted in the production of an enormous amount of epistolary literature, which sought to provide authorities in New Spain as well as in Madrid reliable information regarding events that had occurred on the other side of the empire. Among this body of reports, letters, and memorials, the numerous accusatory texts of the first Augustinian missionaries led by Fr. Martín de Rada and his companions stand out. Using the discourse of the defender of the natives Fr. Bartolomé de las Casas, Fr. Rada denounced the excesses and abuses wreaked by the Spanish military on Filipino natives. The most decisive and contentious lines of these letters will be analyzed in thispaper.

joseba gabilondo

Rossend Rovira Morgado , Simone Fracas

Asian Research Trends (Tokyo), 1995, 5, pp. 1-23

Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez

Alexandre Coello de la Rosa

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, to underline the fact that the Relación de las Islas Filipinas (ca. 1654) responded to the need to provide "entera notiçia de las cosas" to the new governor of the Philippines, Don Sabiniano Manrique de Lara, to promote good government. And second, to demonstrate how this report was drawn up to convince the new governor to fight against Muslim sultanates as a way to protect the Lutaos and Suban natives, thereby spreading the Catholic faith in the southern islands of Mindanao and Sulu. Placing it into Manila's troubled relationship with the Muslim population, Francisco Combés' Relación was a minor but no less important work. It was a complete report-entera relación-which used witness-based (autoptic) knowledge and empirical practices, with imperialist biases. Nonetheless, this new knowledge was not an imposition of hegemonic cultural models but the result of cultural exchanges across Muslim, Christian, and native cultures.

Gregg Galgo Media

Gregg J . Galgo

The Spanish colonial designs in the Philippines could perhaps be summarized into three key terms, namely: Unification, Christianization, and Hispanization. This book summary delves into the work of John Leddy Phelan entitled The Hispanization of the Philippines. The book “concerns itself with the meeting of indigenous Filipino society with Spanish culture.” The author explored the successes and failures of the Spanish project in the Philippines.

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For Many Western Allies, Sending Weapons to Israel Gets Dicey

As civilian casualties in Gaza spiral, some nations are suspending sales amid accusations of abetting genocide and war crimes.

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By Lara Jakes

Lara Jakes writes about weapons and military aid to conflict zones.

For months, Western governments have provided military support for Israel while fending off accusations that their weapons were being used to commit war crimes in Gaza. But as a global outcry over the growing death toll in Gaza mounts, maintaining that balance is becoming increasingly difficult, as was clear on a single day this past week.

On Tuesday, in a United Nations court, Germany found itself having to defend against accusations that it was complicit in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza by exporting weapons to Israel.

A few hours later, in Washington, a top Democrat and Biden administration ally, Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, said he might block an $18 billion deal to sell F-15 fighter jets to Israel unless he was assured that Palestinian civilians would not be indiscriminately bombed.

And two miles away, at a media briefing at the State Department, Britain’s foreign minister, David Cameron, was pressed on what his government had concluded after weeks of internal review about whether Israel has breached international humanitarian law during its offensive in Gaza.

The governments of Germany and the United States remain the backbone of international military support for Israel, accounting for 95 percent of major weapons systems sent to Israel, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks the global weapons trade. So far, the pressure has not swayed them or Britain, though President Biden this month went further than he ever had, threatening to condition future support for Israel on how it addresses his concerns about civilian casualties and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Mr. Cameron also equivocated, if only a bit. After defending Israel at the briefing and suggesting that the recent advice he had received did not conclude that arms exports should be halted, he said that the British government’s position reflected only “the latest assessment” of the issue, implying some flexibility.

Global outrage over a war that the Gazan health authorities say has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians, including 13,000 children, has already upended geopolitics and could help determine the outcome of the American presidential election in November. Increasingly, it also raises the threat of war crimes charges against governments that export weapons in conflicts where opponents argue international humanitarian law has been violated.

Such concerns were raised recently by more than 600 lawyers and retired judges who urged the British government to freeze weapons shipments to Israel, citing a “plausible risk” of genocide in Gaza.

Israel vigorously denies accusations of genocide, arguing that it needs to defend itself against Hamas, which led the Oct. 7 attack that Israeli officials say killed about 1,200 people.

A threatened Iranian strike on Israel in retaliation for the Damascus bombing that killed a number of high-ranking Iranian officers seems certain to shake up an already volatile situation.

Nevertheless, as the death toll has risen in Gaza, Belgium, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain have all halted arms deals with Israel. The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles, has appeared to discourage sending more weapons, wryly noting in February that “if the international community believes that this is a slaughter, that too many people are being killed, maybe they have to think about the provision of arms.”

The hearings this past week against Germany, at the U.N.’s International Court of Justice, was the most recent chilling factor for Israel’s arms suppliers. And matters could grow even worse if Israel follows through on its plans to invade Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans are sheltering.

The case, brought by Nicaragua, highlighted concerns that foreign weapons sales to Israel have done as much to kill Palestinians as they have to help protect the Jewish state. Israel has strongly denied that it is committing genocide, but it was ordered by the court in February, in a separate case brought by South Africa, to take steps to prevent atrocities.

Germany is estimated to have approved about $353 million in arms exports to Israel last year, although officials have said most military aid provided since the war began was nonlethal. Accusations that its weapons might have contributed to genocide has stung Germany, given its World War II-era crimes, although public opposition to the war and concerns about being liable for atrocities have grown.

“This was such an emotional wave that went through parts of German society — so many people were taking sides,” said Christian Mölling, the research director for the German Council on Foreign Relations. But, he said, it is unclear if public antipathy toward Israel will ultimately cut off weapons sales, in part because “the overall amount of delivery is astonishingly low.”

Approving weapons exports to Israel is also landing its allies in local or national courts. That has ramped up anxiety for governments that assumed their arms shipments were too small to attract international rage.

In the Netherlands, a state court in February ordered the government to stop sending parts for F-35 fighter jets to Israel, calling it “undeniable that there is a clear risk” of the equipment being used “in serious violations of international humanitarian law.”

The Dutch government is appealing the decision, arguing that the jets are crucial for Israel’s security against regional enemies like Iran and Hezbollah. Total exports of military goods to Israel from the Netherlands in 2022, the most recent figures available, amounted to about $11 million, officials said.

In Italy, the government halted its arms trade with Israel only weeks after the war in Gaza began, in “a suspension that continues to this day,” Guido Crosetto, the Italian defense minister, told Parliament last month. Officials said that decision was made to ensure Italy was compliant with international humanitarian laws and a national policy against supplying arms to countries at war.

Although Italy delivered some weapons late last year to fulfill pre-existing contracts, Mr. Crosetto said they “do not concern materials that could be used with repercussions on the civilian population of Gaza.” Only about 2 percent of Israel’s imported weapons come from Italy, amounting to about $9.6 million in 2022. Yet Italy ranked as the third-largest foreign supplier of major weapons systems to Israel in the years leading up to the war, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks arms transfers.

By far the largest exporter of weapons to Israel is the United States, which committed in 2016 to a 10-year, $38 billion military aid package, including $5 billion for missile defense, with grants that underwrite Israeli purchases from American defense companies.

The Biden administration is assessing whether Israel has violated international law in Gaza and, as of last week, “we’ve not seen any indication they have,” said John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman. The government is required by law to cut off American military support to countries that restrict humanitarian aid deliveries, as Israel is widely accused of doing in Gaza.

More than one million Palestinians are facing famine and more than 200 aid workers have been killed, including seven killed this month in airstrikes on a World Central Kitchen convoy.

Over the past six months, President Biden has repeatedly proclaimed his “unwavering" support for Israel and its right to defend itself — not only from Hamas but also from Iran and allied militants in Lebanon and Yemen. “We’re going to do all we can to protect Israel’s security,” he said at the White House on Wednesday.

Yet Mr. Biden has gradually taken a tougher tone against Israel as the war wears on, and the bombing and invasion have sent civilian casualties spiraling. “They need to do more,” Mr. Biden said of Israel’s government during the same White House news conference . .

But that has not been enough to satisfy Americans who want Mr. Biden to use the threat of an arms cutoff to pressure the Israelis to accept a cease-fire. That sentiment is being echoed by some Democrats who worry about his re-election prospects and the dismal down-ballot effect it could have on the rest of the party.

In a recent flurry of letters, at least seven Democratic s enators and more than 50 House Democrats , including Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California and a former House speaker, have urged Mr. Biden to halt all weapons transfers to Israel.

Adding to the pressure, a coalition of a dozen liberal organizations and labor unions that will be a key part of Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign demanded in a letter on Thursday that he end military aid to Israel until its government lifts restrictions on humanitarian aid to Gaza.

If not, he could risk losing support from reliable Democratic voters — particularly younger people, said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the president of NextGen America, which focuses on driving voter turnout and was part of the coalition.

“We are concerned with the humanitarian and moral implications,” said Ms. Tzintzún Ramirez, “and the political survival of the administration.”

Jason Horowitz and Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting.

Lara Jakes , based in Rome, reports on diplomatic and military efforts by the West to support Ukraine in its war with Russia. She has been a journalist for nearly 30 years. More about Lara Jakes

Our Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War

News and Analysis

Dozens of Israelis and Palestinians were wounded  after an Israeli teenager's disappearance led to riots in the West Bank. Israeli forces later found the boy’s corpse, and the military said, without providing evidence, that he had been “murdered in a terrorist attack.”

A coalition of a dozen liberal organizations and labor unions sent a letter to the White House demanding that Biden end military aid to Israel until it lifts restrictions on humanitarian aid to Gaza , the latest indicator of shifting mainstream Democratic opinion on the war.

The Israeli military announced what it called a precise operation to kill members of Hamas in Gaza , a day after a strike there killed three sons  of one of the most senior leaders of the group.

Mobilizing the American Left: As the death toll in Gaza climbed, the pro-Palestinian movement grew into a powerful, if disjointed, political force in the United States . Democrats are feeling the pressure.

Riding Rage Over Israel: Jackson Hinkle’s incendiary commentary  has generated over two million new followers on X since October — a surge that some researchers say is aided by inauthentic accounts by the online celebrity.

Psychedelics and Trauma: Thousands of festival-goers were using mind-altering substances when Hamas-led fighters attacked on Oct 7. Now, scientists are studying the effects of such drugs at a moment of trauma .

Turmoil at J Street: The war in Gaza has raised serious concerns within the Jewish political advocacy group about its ability to hold a middle position  without being pulled apart by forces on the right and the left.