After the Beatles came to the USA for the first time and first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Sunday night CBS television show in early 1964, of course, the impact of EMI/Capitol Records's "Beatlemania" media promotional campaign blitz, and the national access to U.S. television the "Brit Invaders" had received, became more evident in the hallways of Broad Ripple High School in Indianapolis.
Mostly freshman and sophomore white high school women students--who usually weren't in the "G" classes of the more academically-higher-achieving students--could now be seen wearing buttons with pictures of the individual members of the Beatles or overheard chattering about "how cute Paul is" or "how cute John is," etc.
Initially, in early 1964, though the "Beatlemania" that the corporate mass media helped create, didn't seem to have much impact on most of the high school guys at Broad Ripple, most members of the high school band, most of the junior and senior class members or most of the students in the classes of the more academically-higher-achieving students.
And initially, in early 1964, the guys who were on the school's sports teams, involved most actively in the school clubs or in the school's orchestra, singing groups or band did not all immediately purchase electric guitars and begin forming their own Beatles-imitation group rock bands, that spent hours of time after school practicing.
Over the next few years, however, as the AM radio stations continued to play regularly Beatles' hit vinyl records again and again and Beatles movies like "Hard Day's Night" and "Help" hit the movie theaters, I imagine that large numbers of the guys at schools like Broad Ripple High School did, however, soon eventually end up buying electric guitars and forming Beatles-imitation rock bands.
I liked folk music, had seen Peter, Paul and Mary perform on television and had occasionally watched the Hootenanny folk music show on ABC-TV that Jack Linkletter hosted (which did not allow Pete Seeger to appear on the show, for political reasons), prior to The Beatles first arriving in the USA in early 1964.
But in early 1964, I had still never heard of either Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez or Bob Dylan, because I hadn't been following what was being written about early 1960's folk music "commercial boom" in either newspapers or magazines; and had also never heard of publications like Sing-Out magazine or Broadside magazine before the Brit Rock invasion happened.
Yet because I was still into Broadway musical songs a lot and had, by then been developing some consciousness about the power of mass media to articially create the instant popularity of entertainers like The Beatles, I pretty much didn't listen too much to or check out the recordings they were making, until 1965. And the only thing I felt was particularly different about The Beatles group, compared to the pop singers whose 45 rpm records I had listened to in the late 1950's, was that they were individual guys who let their hair grow much longer than the 1950's singers, as a gimmick to make them appear more unusual than the previous pop singers.
And even in 1966, when I was again living in New York City, and just happened to be on the same IRT #7 subway train that was transporting a lot of junior high school and high-school white women teeny-boppers, wearing "Beatlemania" buttons, out to Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows, Queens, to scream during a live Beatles outdoor concert there, I still tended to feel that, most of The Beatles' fans were much less intellectually, culturally or politically hip than were most of Dylan's pre-1966 folk music fans.
