Like everybody else in the country, I’m thinking this morning about The Beatles.
Washington Coliseum – Feb 11, 1964
I’m posting because I want to pass along a piece I heard on NPR’s Weekend Edition/Saturday about the first live concert The Beatles performed after their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on Feb 9, 1964 – fifty years ago today.
Their first concert was two days later in Washington DC.
The centerpiece of this NPR report is an interview with Mike Mitchell, at the time an 18-year-old photographer who somehow landed the plum gig of shooting this Beatles first U.S. concert. The report revisits the venue, now a derelict building used mostly for a parking lot.
What struck me was the part where Scott Simon asks, “So what did they look like close up?”
And Mike Mitchell answers,
I’ve said before that they kind of were an alien species to us… At that point they looked incredibly fresh, you know, like a fresh iteration of the human race. Read More