On new DVDS and a remixed CD, the Beatles get back

For their children, the baby boomers, it was a much happier date: Feb. 9, 1964, the night the Beatles first appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Now that the four hours of the Beatles' live appearances on the show -- the three February dates from 1964 and their return in 1965 -- have been released on DVD as "The Four Complete Historic Ed Sullivan Shows Featuring the Beatles," it's time to look back in wonderment, more than nostalgia. What made these programs such a transformative experience?

On a personal level, Feb. 9, 1964, was the night I stopped beating up my younger sister, who would wake up screaming when she heard the Beatles on the radio, go to sleep screaming to the Beatles on the radio, and spend the time in between talking to her friends who were all screaming at "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "She Loves You," and all the other Mersey mush streaming over WBZ-AM and WMEX-AM. (FM radio was undiscovered territory at the time.)

My friends and I listened to really sophisticated stuff at the time -- Dion, Bobby Rydell, Chubby Checker, maybe a little Motown. The Beatles were a downright threat to our manhood. Imagine: men in long hair instead of pompadours. And the music -- "yeah, yeah, yeah," "love, love me do." Strictly for the goils.

And then came 8 p.m. that Sunday night. I sat down to laugh at and otherwise torture my sister. Elvis Presley had made his appearances on the Sullivan show eight years earlier, but since then the anchor of CBS's Sunday-night schedule had become a joke to teenagers. The hip kids watched "Maverick" on ABC; only their parents and the nerds tuned in to the Broadway singers and magicians we wouldn't be caught dead watching on the Sullivan show.

"Wagon Train" had taken over for "Maverick" by 1964, so it wasn't much of a sacrifice to cede the TV to my sister. (And I was probably more curious than I wanted to admit.) Five minutes later, after "All My Loving," everything had changed. I would never again put goo in my hair to make it stand up. I would bow after playing air guitar. My sister would be my good pal. My Bobby Rydell and Chubby Checker LPs would gather dust while my Motown 45s would gather greater currency.

And on Feb. 10, when I walked into Boston Latin School (then an all-boys academy), it was apparent I wasn't alone. Future generations would worship their own Elvis (Costello) and have their own Nirvana nirvanas, but as our popular culture became more fragmented, nothing like this would happen on such a mass scale. The Beatles were what everyone was talking about. Kids were combing their hair down instead of up. If we had been any more awestruck, we would have adopted British accents and worn Beatle boots.

So what changed? I put on the first of the two DVDs, and while it was fun to relive the moment in terms of cultural history, it seemed impossible to figure out what the emotional connection was. Truth be told, the Beatles seemed as dated as Tessie O'Shea playing her banjo or the "comedy" team of McCall & Brill doing a lame imitation of Nichols & May. By any objective scale, the Beatles' rendition of "Till There Was You" from "The Music Man" was on a lower artistic scale than Georgia Brown and the cast of "Oliver" (with Davy Jones of the Monkees) doing "I'll Do Anything For You" on that first show.

It was fun watching the young and reed-thin Frank Gorshin do his Kirk Douglas impression a couple of days after seeing him do his George Burns live in "Say Goodnight Gracie." And the Anacin commercials with the ominous guitar simulating headaches and the constant repetition of the word "pain" seemed a precursor of "Twin Peaks." But if you told a Martian that this was the night life in America changed, you'd be beamed up for a close encounter.

When the Beatles returned at the end of the show with "I Saw Her Standing There" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand," though, their radicalism started to make more sense. The Beatles gave men -- well, boys, really -- a different way to carry themselves. Presley, for all the great music, was really a throwback -- to John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, the "rugged individualists" who were alpha males in manner, conservatives politically, contemptuous of women, and dismissive of anyone who didn't agree with them.

Elvis, to be honest, scared me. He reminded me of kids who wanted to beat me up. I dressed like him and, to the best of my limited ability, acted like him so I'd be mistaken for one of the strong kids.

The Beatles gave boys -- white boys, anyway -- an alternative. Watching them in these tapes, it becomes clearer how radical that alternative was. You didn't have to snarl like Elvis or sneer like Frank. Cute (Paul McCartney) was cool. Irreverent (John Lennon), for me at least, was better. Silence (George Harrison) was golden if you could let your guitar do your talking. Even offbeat and dorky-looking (Ringo Starr) was perfectly acceptable. The Beatles, it turned out, were even more radical for the silent boys than for the screaming girls.

And while Mitzi Gaynor was stirring our hormones on the Feb. 16 show, and any number of horrible individual acts -- including comedians Dave Barry (no, not that Dave Barry) and Myron Cohen -- were catering to our parents, the Beatles were teaching another lesson. Watching them enjoy one another's company and goof on the Sullivan ethos (their collective disbelief when Sullivan tells them Richard Rodgers was a huge fan) made me realize that I didn't have to be a macho man.

Is this where the communalism of the '60s began, only to end with the breakup of the Beatles and the end of the war in Vietnam? Finding your group, based on shared values, was more important than striking the "lonely teenager" pose. Lennon was often off to one side, taking it all in with a smile and a slow rhythmic thrust below the waist while McCartney and Harrison were having a less wry but still great time sharing the other microphone.

Oh, and the music. Even with the bad sound of '60s television, the gentle but propulsive quality of the Beatles' songs come through on these DVDs -- particularly in the 1965 segment, when the music got quirkier, with the hard R&B of "I'm Down" and the country swing of "Act Naturally" setting off the Mersey-er melodies of "Ticket to Ride," "I Feel Fine," and "Yesterday." The Beatles were more confident this time around. By 1965, Sullivan needed them more than they needed him.

The Beatles ended that show with a great version of "Help!" At the end of it -- with my sister, my brother, and me enthralled -- an aunt who lived upstairs and had come down to watch snorted, "Help? I'll say they need help!"

I looked at her and said, "Go back upstairs."

These DVDs celebrate the time when one generation broke loose from another. It should give us pause when we start to look down on any generational group -- or anyone else -- marching to a different beat. As "Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk" says, "There will always be 'Da Beat."

And as old Ed Sullivan makes clear, there will always be the Beatles.

Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.