February 5, 2024, was indeed a fab, gear and groovy evening at the Loft at City Winery where a sell-out audience โ from as far away as California โ listened with rapt attention to the conversation between legendary radio personality Bruce Morrow and author Jamie Bernstein, and cheered Amiri and Rahiem Taylor, the twins of Blac Rabbit, as though they really were John and Paul.
It Was 60 Years Ago Today: A Beatles Conversation with Cousin Brucie and Jamie Bernstein, the first of The Village Tripโs quarterly events, kicked off a week of New York City-wide celebrations marking The Beatlesโ first landing in America and their epoch-making appearance onย The Ed Sullivan Show, watched by 73 million people โ including the entire Maestro Bernstein clan. Amiri and Rahiem werenโt yet born and feel they missed out on all the fun of Beatlemania.
Jamie, as big a fan of Cousin Brucie as she is of The Beatles themselves, was in fine form, onstage and off. In the Green Room before the show, she led a Beatles singalong, joyously playing air guitar, harmonica, and drums. On stage, she and Brucie brought their own memories and perspectives to the conversation, each from his or her own side of the transistor radio โ the equivalent in 1964 of a cell phone! Their chat โ and the exhilarating Blac Rabit sets that bookended it โ held the audience spellbound.
Welcoming that audience was a greeting from Jon Keats and Bill Heckle at Liverpoolโs Cavern Club, where the Beatles got started: โThe Beatles played here 292 times between 1961 and 1963. They actually made their debut here on the 9th February 1961 and it was a mere three years later, on the same date, that they made their US debut on The Ed Sullivan Showโฆ New York and Liverpool, two great historic cities united by The Beatles!โ
The Q&A after the conversation covered a lot of ground โ from how โThe Beatles Are Comingโ campaign unfolded, to what โthe boysโ themselves were actually like, and of course how it felt to be inside The Beatlesโ bubble. Outside the bubble, fans did crazy thingsโsuch as hiding themselves in laundry baskets to try and infiltrate the bandโs hotel suite, and asking a woman in a neighboring building if they could climb out her bathroom window and somehow reach the Beatlesโ hotel room on the other side of a perilous drop. And how John OโConnor, the hotelโs chief engineer disabled The Beatles TV (in those far-off days there was a bulb in the back) so he would be summoned to repair it and have the opportunity to get their autographs for the little girl who lived next door to him in the Bronx. That little girl, Nancy Stern, now all grown up, was in the audience to recall the story! Then there was Merle Frimark, now a celebrated publicity agent who, as a teenager, got herself a job at 1501 Broadway โ The Beatlesโ US office โ to help handle the truckloads of fan mail and later, to callย Cashbox, Record Worldย andย Billboardย to get the chart reports and then Telex them to London. Occasionally, someone in the studio would Telex back! Nor should we forget the excitement of the demos that arrived routinely.
The Today Showย team was on hand to interview Jamie and the Cuz before the event, and Les Marshak, the "voice" ofย The Today Showย and other NBC programs, was in the audience to made introductions from the floor. Three days later, NBC aired its eight-minute Beatles feature on The Today Show.
If you werenโt lucky enough to be at City Winery, you can watch the complete recording ofย It Was 60 Years Ago Today: A Beatles Conversation with Cousin Brucie and Jamie Bernstein ย below, and check out The Today Show interview with Harry Smith. And hereโs Lincoln Andersonโs report from The Village Sun.
Be sure to sign up for The Village Trip Newsletter and stay up to date with the news, including another quarterly event in May and of course The Village Trip Festival, which takes place this year from September 14-28. Be there or be square!
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We are now a 501c3 non-profit. Make a donation and your gift will beย matched dollar for dollar โ up to $25,000 โ by one of The Village Trip's generous board members. Your support is essential for us to continue producing a festival that captures the spirit of Greenwich Village, so please give whatever you can afford.
Thanks, and stay tuned!
Jamie Kalikow Gallery of the Event
Jamie Kalikow is a New York City-based photographer specializing in music and street photography. She graduated from Syracuse University Newhouse School of Public Communications with a degree in photojournalism. Directly after graduating, she moved to Greenwich Village and has maintained an apartment on Bleecker Street since 1979. From the late 1970s till the present, she has photographed the streets of New York City and in the last decade photographed and videotaped over a thousand NYC music events.
