Come on, I gotta see you, baby
Come on, I don’t mean maybe
Come on, I’ve gotta make you see
That I belong to you and you belong to me
THE ROLLING STONES
The world was in flux in the summer of 1963. President Kennedy promised to deliver a civil rights bill in the United States and traveled to Germany to denounce the recent construction of the Berlin Wall in front of half a million Berliners. Martin Luther King declared, “I have a dream” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and the Kremlin sent the first woman into space. Zip codes were introduced in America, Marvel Comics created the X-Men, and Cleopatra, the most costly and beleaguered movie ever, was finally premiered. Britain remained in the grip of the Profumo Affair, and the public marveled at the audacity of a gang that pulled off the Great Train Robbery. And the youthquake was in full force.
Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’ had been a huge success in the UK in the spring, and while it languished on the U.S. charts, he himself rose to national prominence, walking out on The Ed Sullivan Show over attempts to censor his music; appearing at the Newport Folk Festival; and singing with Joan Baez at the March on Washington in August.
Ready Steady Go!, a subversive new pop show, was launched on British commercial television and literally rocked convention. The Rolling Stones released their first single, the word Beatlemania was coined, and the not-long-ago conservative record labels finally woke up to the tectonic changes in the industry and began scouring provincial towns for talent that didn’t wear suits and ties and eschewed covers of middle-of-the-road American music.