It started with The Beatles.  Their buoyant rock and roll had been stirring fans into a frenzy in the U. K.  And when the group flew to New York in February 1964, Walter Cronkite heralded their arrival on the CBS Evening News by declaring, "The British Invasion this time goes by the code name Beatlemania."

TV talk show host Jack Paar showed a clip of those frenetic fans merely “as a joke.”  Newspapers dismissed the group as a passing fad.  U. S. News & World Report even interviewed a Harvard sociologist to find out whether this fervor for The Beatles would last very long.  “No,” was his reply.  “No craze does.”

But The Beatles’ energy and charm were just what the country needed in the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  Their music leaped to the top of the charts and transformed the four lads from Liverpool into the first rock stars of a new generation.  In fact, The Beatles were so popular here in the U. S. that music fans clamored for anything that came from Great Britain.

Before 1964, you’d be hard put to name an artist from the U. K.  But after the British Invasion, there were often a dozen or more British bands in the Top 40 at the same time…including The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Herman’s Hermits, The Animals, The Dave Clark Five, The Zombies, Dusty Springfield, The Zombies, Peter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy, and more.

Join Great Moments in Vinyl at the Joliet Area Historical Museum on Saturday, January 27th as we relive those heady days of 1964 and ’65 when the British Invasion captured our ears and our imagination.  It was a remarkable time when music changed the course of our culture.

For this tribute, our line up features Phil Angotti, Casey McDonough, Debbie Kaczynski, and Kriss Bataille, plus bandleader and storyteller William Lindsey Cochran.