Ed, Steve, Jon and Paul

The year was 1964. I was 12 years old and had just crossed that line when suddenly girls were more interesting than before. I was playing Bach on the organ and Beethoven on the piano and listening to Tchaikovsky, Debussy and the like. But as the body changed, the ear discovered Cousin Brucie on AM Radio and found a whole new crowd of musicians speaking a new language to me— the Four Seasons, Martha and the Vandellas, Rickie Nelson, the Beach Boys and a group called—the Beatles. 

 

I remember walking over to my friend Bruce’s house to watch them on the Ed Sullivan show. Though it wasn’t easy to hear the actual music over the screams of the girls and Bruce’s mother’s constant commentary—“Their hair is so long!!”—I believe I liked what I heard, never dreaming what an iconic moment this was to become in the history of popular music. I followed them for the next six years and felt us growing up together—from the innocent I Want to Hold Your Hand through the zany movie Hard Day’s Night to the ever-evolving styles in each new recording —from Rubber Soul to Revolver to the mind-expanding Sgt Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band and beyond. They were at the center of the soundtrack to the late 60’s consciousness, complete with sitars and Maharishi Yogi, LSD, revolution and pleas to “give peace a chance.” The kick-off to it all was that appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

 

Ed Sullivan hosted the longest running variety show in TV history. It ran from 1948 to 1971. The first seven years it was called the Toast of the Town before changing to The Ed Sullivan Show. He was infamous for his lack of flamboyant personality, called by one reviewer, “a cigar-store Indian, the Cardiff Giant  and a stone-faced monument just off the boat from Easter Island. He moves like a sleepwalker; his smile is that of a man sucking a lemon; his speech is frequently lost in a thicket of syntax; his eyes pop from their sockets or sink so deep in their bags that they seem to be peering up at the camera from the bottom of twin wells." And yet, his show both reflected and helped shape American culture.

 

And he was courageous. He once said, "In the conduct of my own show, I've never asked a performer his religion, his race or his politics. Performers are engaged on the basis of their abilities.” and indeed, he featured many black performing groups that were not given chances in other mainstream culture venues. Performers and groups like Bo Diddley, the Platters, Jackie Wilson, Fats Domino, the Supremes, the Jackson Five and more. He got flak from his advertisers for shaking Nat King Cole’s hand, kissing Pearl Bailey on the cheek on camera, putting his arm around dancer Bill Bojangles Robinson and stood up to it all. He gave visibility to an impressive list of black jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Lionel Hampton, Sarah Vaughan, Errol Garner, Nina Simone and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. 

 

The theater where all this magic happened was on 1697 Broadway in New York, built in 1927 by Richard Hammerstein in honor of his father, Oscar Hammerstein 1 (grandfather of the jazz song lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II) and appropriately named the Hammerstein Theater. Over the years, it hd many different names—The Manhattan Theater, Billy Rose’s Music Hall, the WPA Theater, Studio 50 and finally, in 1967, it became The Ed Sullivan Theater. In 1993, David Letterman took over the theater to house his Late Show and in 2009, Paul Macartney performed on his show, some 45 years after the Beatles’ first appearance. Stephen Colbert took over the Late Show in 2015 and continued the legacy of both reflecting and shaping the zeitgeist —the moral, intellectual and cultural climate of our times and our nation. 

 

Until last night. When the suits at CBS capitulated to the fascist bully-in-chief in a shameful display of spineless decision-making and made good on their promise to cancel the show. Yet another sad marker of the dying gasps of a struggling democracy. How did Colbert’s last show reflect this critical moment in our struggle to resist the evil and preserve the good? 

 

Read on.