I’ve interviewed Beatles drummer Ringo Starr several times, and one of the things he told me the last time we spoke was what it felt like when the band’s Pan Am Flight 101 was descending into JFK Airport in New York City in February of 1964. To Ringo, it was as if the Big Apple was extending some kind of invisible embrace up to the Fab Four in the sky — as if the city was calling out to the boys to ‘come on down, we’re ready for you.’
The purpose of the band’s US arrival that year was an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, which became nothing short of a pop culture milestone and brought Beatlemania to the US. More than 73 million viewers watched that broadcast, or about four times as many who watched the Game of Thrones finale. And it’s this moment in the story of the greatest band of all time that’s the focus of Beatles ’64, a new documentary from Martin Scorsese and director David Tedeschi that revisits the band’s arrival in the US. It debuts on Disney+ on Nov. 29.
“Prepare to experience the electrifying moment when The Beatles first touched down in America,” the band teases about the doc via its social channels.
“If you’re not American, I don’t know if you’ll ever understand it,” Ringo told me in one of our interviews. “But we were English boys, coming to Americaaaaaa! … It was just so great! I could feel, when we flew over New York, I could feel it calling me. ‘Come on down, Ringo!”
The doc from Scorsese, who also directed 2011’s George Harrison: Living in the Material World, is promising to tell “a more intimate behind the scenes” story of the band’s US debut, which quickly became one of the most-watched TV events of all time. And in addition to new interviews with the two surviving Beatles, Starr and Paul McCartney, the film will also be packed with never-before-seen footage.
Worth adding: November is going to be a big month for Beatles fans, with the Disney+ documentary also preceded by the release of seven American Beatles albums on Nov. 22 — a vinyl collection titled “The Beatles: 1964 US Albums in Mono.” Casual fans might not realize that the Beatles’ American record company often released different versions of the band’s albums in the US. Sometimes, the albums had different running orders, while other American releases grabbed songs from the band’s UK albums and singles to create unique Beatles albums that didn’t exist in the UK at all.
