LADIES AND GENTLEMEN… THE BEATLES!

Raised on a podium at the front of Ringo Starr’s bass drum and emblazoned with the band’s famous black on white drop-T logo, this distinguished drum head announced to 73 million Americans that “THE BEATLES” had arrived in the United States. Widely regarded as a cultural watershed, the Beatles’ historic debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday 9 February 1964 would be the most important performance of their careers, sparking a wave of Beatlemania across America, launching the British Invasion, and changing the face of popular music for ever. Accompanying the Beatles for the duration of their two-week trip across the Atlantic, this logo drum head was at the epicenter of their first U.S. concert at the Washington Coliseum, their two performances at New York City’s famed Carnegie Hall, and a further two appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show on 16 and 23 February – the former broadcast live from the Deauville Hotel in Miami. Along with their matching suits and mop-top haircuts, the Beatles’ logo drum head was essential to establishing the indelible image of the band on stage that remains so instantly recognizable to a generation of Americans over sixty years later.

Legend has it that Ed Sullivan became interested in booking the Beatles for his show when he happened to witness thousands of screaming fans welcoming the band back to London Heathrow airport after their successful tour of Sweden in October 1963. By early November, the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein had flown to New York to meet with Sullivan and agreed that the group would perform three shows in February 1964. In the months leading up to their first US visit, the mainstream American press began to report on their British success, which contributed to a rapidly growing demand that led their new US record label Capitol to rush-release the band’s new single ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ in late December. By the end of January 1964, the song had reached number one on the US Billboard chart, just weeks before the Beatles were due to arrive in America.

The Beatles flew in to the freshly named JFK Airport on 7 February 1964 and were met by thousands of screaming American fans. In his 2023 book 1964: Eyes of the Storm, Paul McCartney recalled their arrival on US soil: President Kennedy had been murdered only a little over two months before our arrival, and his assassination had ricocheted throughout the world, so we figured the atmosphere in the States might be a bit subdued. But the minute we landed in New York, we knew instantly that we were not in store for any kind of funereal time. It was a Friday in early February when we touched down, and it felt like thousands, and later, through television and The Ed Sullivan Show, millions of eyes were suddenly upon us, creating a picture I will never forget for the rest of my life. Prior to departure, it was decided that Ringo Starr would travel without his drum kit, with the intention that a second Ludwig Oyster Black Pearl Downbeat drum kit would be acquired from the famous Manny’s Music Store in Manhattan on arrival in the States, as a secondary kit would be required for filming A Hard Day’s Night when the Beatles returned to England. Starr brought only his 1963 Jazz Festival snare drum, his cymbals, and a new Beatles drop-T logo bass drum head.

With its oversized ‘B’ and elongated ‘T’, the now iconic Beatles drop-T logo had been designed on the spot by the owner of London’s specialist drum store Drum City, Ivor Arbiter, when Starr and Epstein turned up to purchase Ringo’s first Ludwig drum kit in April 1963. Interviewed by Andy Babiuk for Beatles Gear in 1996, Drum City manager Gerry Evans recalled Ivor Arbiter drew the Beatles logo on a pad of paper… There were about three or four options, and they chose the one with the drop-T. Arbiter’s design was hand-painted on the drum head by the store’s part-time sign painter Eddie Stokes. Long before drum companies routinely splashed their names across their bass heads like they do today, Arbiter had insisted that the Ludwig logo be stuck on the front drum skin for promotion, as he had just begun distributing the brand. When the Ludwig sticker had almost fully flaked off the first logo drum head by December 1963, Arbiter had arranged for Stokes to replace the sticker with a more permanent hand-painted Ludwig logo above the band’s name.

When Drum City were commissioned to prepare a second logo drum head for the Beatles’ upcoming American trip in early 1964, Arbiter and Evans selected a 20-inch Remo Weather King drum head, identified by the crown badge at the top, near the rim. All the heads for Ringo’s kits were Ludwig Weather Masters, but often we’d put the logo on a Remo Head, Evans explained. We figured as it was only a front head, it could be a cheaper one. Stokes hand-painted the second Beatles drop-T logo with a bolder, thicker lettering than the first, spanning the full width of the drum head, edge to edge. His faint pencil guide marks remain visible on the front of the drumhead today. As before, the Ludwig logo was hand-painted prominently above the band’s logo. This, the Ed Sullivan drum head, has also become known as the number two drop-T logo drum head, the second in a series of seven that would be produced over the group’s lifespan for Starr’s various Ludwig drum kits.

Manny’s delivered Starr’s second Ludwig Oyster Black Pearl Downbeat kit to CBS Studio 50 in time for the morning dress rehearsal for the Beatles’ hotly anticipated debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday 9 February 1964, although it appears that the logo head was not installed on the bass drum until just before the band taped a live performance that afternoon for what would become their third appearance on the show, for broadcast after their return to England. At 8pm EST the Beatles made their record-shattering live debut on American national television before an estimated audience of 73 million, which at the time was over 40% of the country’s population. I’ve heard that while the show was on there were no reported crimes, or very few. When The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, even the criminals had a rest for ten minutes, George Harrison later joked in The Beatles Anthology. Marveling at the Beatles fever that had swept New York City since the band’s arrival in the States, Ed Sullivan told the audience: Now yesterday and today our theater’s been jammed with newspapermen and hundreds of photographers from all over the nation, and these veterans agreed with me that this city never has witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool who call themselves The Beatles. Now tonight, you’re gonna twice be entertained by them. Right now, and again in the second half of our show… and introduced the band with a booming Ladies and gentlemen… The Beatles!

John, Paul, George and Ringo entered the stage, opening their short set with ‘All My Loving’, to the piercing screams of the teenage girls in the studio audience, followed by ‘Till There Was You’, and ‘She Loves You’, before the show cut to commercial. While McCartney sang ‘Till There Was You’, the cameras panned to each of the Beatles in turn, with their names captioned on screen to introduce them to the American public. When they got to John Lennon, an additional caption revealed Sorry Girls, He’s Married. The group later returned to close the show with ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and their number one single ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. As the boys bowed and ran off the stage, the camera lingered on the drum kit left behind, with its logo drum head leaving a nation of mesmerized teenagers in no doubt that they had just witnessed the arrival of THE BEATLES and that nothing would be the same again. Later regarded as a milestone moment in the history of popular culture, the Beatles’ explosive performance immediately propelled them to a new level of global fame, kicked off full-blown Beatlemania across America, and influenced a generation of future musicians.

Virtually every American rock musician that emerged over the following decades, from Bruce Springsteen to Billy Joel, would cite first seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show as a moment that changed their lives. I think the whole world was watching that night, Tom Petty told Guitar World magazine in 2004. It certainly felt that way - you just knew it, sitting in your living room, that everything around you was changing. It was like going from black-and-white to color. Really. Looking back for The Beatles Anthology, McCartney admits It was very important. We came out of nowhere with funny hair, looking like marionettes or something. That was very influential. With the nation’s youth mobilized to follow the Beatles’ lead and form their own bands, demand for the Beatles’ signature instruments went through the roof virtually overnight. Speaking to Andy Babiuk in 1995, William Ludwig Jr, then president of the Ludwig drum company, explained the show’s impact: That was the first time I ever saw my name on TV. There I was sitting watching The Ed Sullivan Show and I see my name on the front of the drum head… Our company was besieged with calls the next day with people looking to order that Ludwig drum set… We had 85,000 on back order! And they were all ordering it with the Ludwig logo on the front head. Thanks to Ringo’s hand-painted drum head, it wasn’t long before promoting the kit’s brand name on the front of the bass drum became standard practice industry wide. When I watch that first Ed Sullivan Show performance now, I’m struck by how much fun we’re having, mused McCartney in 2023. Apparently almost everyone in America watched The Ed Sullivan Show… Seventy-three million people, way more than the entire U.K. population. It was a wildly exciting time and went far beyond our expectations – as did the rest of that visit to the U.S.

Following their unparalleled success on The Ed Sullivan Show, the group travelled by train to Washington, D.C., where the logo drum head was next seen by over 8,000 fans at Washington Coliseum for the Beatles’ first US concert on 11 February 1964. To accommodate the Washington Coliseum’s in-the-round design and allow every member of the audience an equal view, Starr would spin his drum kit around on a turntable every few songs as the rest of the band moved their microphones. Looking back for 1964: Eyes of the Storm, McCartney said of the show: I’ll always remember our first American concert at the Coliseum. The gig itself was crazy… the seating all pointed towards the middle of the room, and Ringo was supposed to move his drum kit every three or four numbers… Watching the footage of us struggling to help him, you’d never know we were ‘taking a country by storm’. With Epstein’s consent, the concert was filmed by CBS and telecast by the National General Corporation in US cinemas on 14 and 15 March 1964. Extracts from the concert footage can be seen in the 1991 documentary The Beatles’ First U.S. Visit, the 1995 documentary television series The Beatles Anthology and its 2025 reissue on Disney Plus, Ron Howards 2016 documentary film The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years, and David Tedeschi's 2024 documentary film Beatles ’64.

After the show, the group travelled back to New York City for two sold out performances at Carnegie Hall on 12 February, where the demand for tickets meant some of the audience ended up sitting on the stage with the band. The Beatles then flew to Miami Beach, Florida, where they would make their second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, live from the Deauville Hotel. The drum head can be seen in numerous photographs from the band’s rehearsals at the hotel on 14 and 15 February, before the live broadcast of the television show at 8pm on Sunday 16 February 1964. In front of an audience of 2,600, the Beatles opened with ‘This Boy’ and ‘All My Loving’, before returning to close the show with ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘From Me To You’, and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. An estimated 70 million viewers tuned in across the country, almost equaling the prior week’s performance. The band’s third appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, featuring a performance of ‘Twist and Shout’, ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ taped prior to their live debut, was broadcast after the Beatles returned to England, on 23 February 1964.

Although their first American adventure had come to an end, their meteoric rise was only just beginning. The Beatles held number one for a then-record fourteen straight weeks and by April became the first act to hold all top five spots on the Billboard Hot 100. Remarkably, the entire two-week trip was captured on film by the pioneering Maysles Brothers for the 1964 documentary What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A., including the Washington Coliseum concert and the band’s three historic performances on The Ed Sullivan Show. The documentary was re-edited for release on DVD as The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit in 1991, and substantial footage was digitally restored for the 2024 documentary film Beatles ’64.

The number two drop-T logo drum head acquired a few scuffs and scratches during its American tour, as it was packed and unpacked by the Beatles’ road manager Mal Evans on the band’s various stops up and down the East Coast. Beatles drum head authority Russ Lease notes that a half-moon scrape running from the top of the ‘B’ through the ‘E’ and ‘A’ in ‘BEATLES’ corresponds with the circumference of a 14-inch hi-hat cymbal, suggesting that Starr’s hi-hat was likely laid on top of the flat lying bass drum at some point between the band’s Ed Sullivan Show debut and their Washington Coliseum concert two days later, as evidenced by identical marks seen in photographs from the latter show. When Starr’s second Ludwig Downbeat drum kit was sent to Drum City on the band’s return to London, for the installation of all new drum heads in preparation for filming A Hard Day’s Night, it was decided that the scuffed logo drum head from the two-week American trip should be replaced with a pristine, freshly painted, new logo drum head for the film.

The number two logo drum head was removed from the bass drum of Starr’s #2 Ludwig kit and was not seen again until it was consigned to auction in 1984 by the estate of Mal Evans and purchased by Australian restaurateur George Wilkins for display in his restaurant. Wilkins reconsigned the drum head to auction in 1994, when it was acquired by Beatles collector Russ Lease, who spent the next eight years documenting the history of the seven Beatles drop-T logo drum heads. During his ownership, Lease arranged for renowned vintage drum restorer Jack Lawton to mount the drum head on a half-depth mid-1960s Ludwig bass drum with a reproduction Oyster Black Pearl finish sourced from the original manufacturer for the purposes of display, after which it was exhibited at major institutions including the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The number two drum head returned to auction in 2015 and was acquired by Jim Irsay.

The most celebrated of the seven known Beatles drop-T logo drum heads for its association with the band’s revolutionary American debut, when they exploded onto the nation’s television screens for the first time and took the country by storm, the present drum head was also the only logo drum head to appear on any of the Beatles’ album covers, featuring on the front cover of the 1964 Capitol LPs The Beatles’ Second Album and Something New, as well as the interior gatefold of their fourth studio album Beatles For Sale, released on Parlophone in December 1964. One of the most iconic rock and roll artifacts ever to come to sale, the Ed Sullivan drum head represents a landmark moment in American history and popular culture that continues to resonate over sixty years on. We four guys from Liverpool couldn’t possibly realise then the implications of what we were doing, reflected McCartney in 2023. By the end of February 1964, after our visit to America and three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, we finally had to admit that we would not, as we had originally feared, just fizzle out as many groups do. We were in the vanguard of something more momentous, a revolution in the culture, especially as it affected the youth.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES:
M. Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Chronicle, London, 1992.
P. McCartney, 1964: Eyes of the Storm, London, 2023.
G. Nachman, Right Here on Our Stage Tonight!: Ed Sullivan's America, Berkeley, 2009.
T. Petty, interviewed by J. Bosso, ‘American Idols’, Guitar World, May 2004.