51 YEARS AGO: THE BEATLES AT THE WASHINGTON COLISEUM

The Beatles arrived in Washington D.C. today in 1964 for their first show on American soil at the Washington Coliseum, conveniently located right next to the train station. 

They were just 48 hours removed from their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the single most watched event in Television’s short life, but not everyone had been impressed by the lads from Liverpool. They’d sat around the hotel over breakfast reading reviews with headlines like “Beatles Bomb” that dismissed them as a fad and substandard musicians, and no one had taken it harder than their manager Brian Epstein, who angrily cancelled the rest of their scheduled interviews until his press agent convinced him to change his mind.

Their senses of humor and quick wit at these events were pure gold to the American press, who couldn’t believe they weren’t scripted, and no one was having more fun with them than Ringo Starr, who suddenly found himself an equal in the band where at home in England he’d just been the drummer. The rest of the band brushed off the criticisms, with John Lennon telling a reporter “If everybody really liked us it would be a bore”.

By showtime in DC it was back to full-blown Beatlemania, with 8000 fans showing up at the basketball/hockey arena.  Their new Vox guitar amplifiers, built just for them, were up to the task of keeping up with Ringo’s Ludwig drum kit, but the primitive P.A. system was only for the vocals, and the band could barely be heard over the incessant screaming of teenage girls, to the point where one of the 350 police officers who surrounded the stage was seen putting bullets in his ears as plugs. The band had been set up toward the center of the arena, so that during the 12-song half-hour set they stopped to re-position the microphones and Ringo’s kit to face another part of the crowd. Concerts at the Washington Coliseum would continue for only three more years when they were banned after a riot at a Temptations show in ’67,  it would serve as a makeshift jail in ’71 for some 1200 Vietnam War protesters, and later suffer the humiliation of being used as a garbage transfer station by Waste Management Inc., but when that company applied for a demolition permit in 2003, a successful campaign was started to place it on the National Register of Historic Places largely because it was the spot of the first Beatles show in America. It now serves as a parking lot, awaiting the completion of redevelopment plans.