Did the Beatles Kill America’s Radio Stars?

The following is a Ross On Radio guest article from Ken Barnes, former music editor at USA Today.

The arrival of the Beatles shook the foundations of the American music industry — that much is undeniable. At the end of 1963, around three months before, there was one UK artist in the top 100. In the legendary chart week of April 4, 1964, when the Beatles monopolized the top 5, the Billboard top 100 included 12 Beatles records, two novelties about the Beatles, and seven records by other UK acts (one a Beatles novelty by the Carefrees). The British occupied seven slots in the top 20, so suddenly the space for hits by American acts was sharply reduced.

A number of artists were quick to blame the Beatles for their declining careers, and many historians seized on one of the easiest explanations to sum up the changing times. But was that the whole story, or even the real story?

I tallied every top-20 hit in 1963 by an American artist, as charted by Billboard, Cash Box, and Music Vendor in order to collect a reasonably sized sample base while still dealing with a class of artists who could roughly be classified as hitmakers. I then examined the chart career of each artist (some of whom had more than one top-20 hit in ’63) going forward, examining the downslides for their most pertinent causes, while also noting the artists who continued to score hits, Brits or no Brits. 

Of course every record tells a story, involving among other things timing, record-label politics, brilliant promotion or its opposite, visionary or recalcitrant programmers, and larger cultural trend shifts. But for the purposes of a broad study, I assigned each of the artists to one of five somewhat-arbitrary classifications that describe the impact the British Invasion wreaked on their careers.

> LITTLE OR NO IMPACT (artists that stayed hot through the Invasion and, in most cases, beyond) 

> TEMPORARY SLOWDOWN (artists who slumped in 1964 but whose careers ignited again afterward)

> IRRELEVANT (covers the cases of artists who were already in irrevocable decline or had scored with such a fluke that further hits were unlikely regardless of the arrival of the UK contingent). 

> PARTIAL VICTIMS (artists whose careers cratered in 1964 for reasons that included but were not entirely attributable to the British Invasion. A lot of judgment calls here.)

> CLEAR VICTIMS (blame it on the Beatles)

Who survived the Invasion relatively unharmed? The two biggest male groups of the time, the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons, for two. Both career trajectories ignited in late 1962, burned hot through 1963, and stayed that way for all of 1964 and beyond. The Four Seasons couldn’t quite match their initial trio of hits (“Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man”). But “Dawn (Go Away)” would have been No. 1 with no Beatles blocking it. “Rag Doll” hit the top anyway. The Beach Boys arguably got bigger in the face of the Invasion, collecting their first chart-topper with “I Get Around.” 

Meanwhile, Motown proudly waved the flag, not only sustaining the careers of such previous hitmakers as Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, Martha & the Vandellas, and the Miracles in 1964, but breaking the Temptations, the Four Tops, and the biggest of them all, the Supremes, during the same year.

Some “pre-Beatles” artists bore up at least through 1964. Roy Orbison also had his biggest hit that year (“Oh, Pretty Woman”), while Lesley Gore narrowly missed a No. 1 (again because of the Beatles) with “You Don’t Own Me” and scored hits for the rest of the year. Sam Cooke maintained his hit streak until his death.  

Elvis Presley was the Beatles of his day through 1962 — while they didn’t all go to No. 1, his records rocketed up the charts dramatically faster than most other hits. But the peaks were losing altitude in 1963, and that trend continued throughout Beatles Year One. Presley came back for a top-5 hit, the uncharacteristic “Crying in the Chapel,” in early 1965. That was his last hit of that magnitude until 1969, but he still belongs in the temporary slowdown pile at worst.

That “temporary slowdown” cluster includes some artists who are often thought of as obvious casualties. Bobby Vee slumped severely, even after a potent London recording session early in 1964, but rebounded in 1967 with the appropriately titled “Come Back When You Grow Up.” Dion traded his boppy early-‘60s hits for the blues at exactly the wrong time, but made it back in 1968 with “Abraham, Martin, and John.” The Beatles definitely accelerated Neil Sedaka’s fall from American chart grace in 1964, but he came back in the next decade under the tutelage of Elton John, an early-‘60s devotee (as “Crocodile Rock” so vividly illustrates). 

The “Beatles were irrelevant” acts included a clutch of 1963 novelty one-shots: the Ran-Dells (“Martian Hop”), Allan Sherman (“Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh”), and even Lou Monte and his mercifully mostly forgotten “Pepino the Italian Mouse.” A pair of surf instrumental groups also would have been extreme long shots to hit again, regardless of the Invasion: the Chantays (“Pipeline”) and the Surfaris (“Wipe Out,” although that record outlived the surf-instrumental fad by a couple of years to return to the charts in 1966). Several one- or two-shot artists, for example Little Eva, the Cookies, the Cascades, also had essentially seen their fates sealed before the Beatles cleared customs. 

Partial victims of Anglophilia were the tricky ones to assign. They’re artists who are as closely aligned with the pre-Beatles era as Dion or Neil Sedaka, but were already on more of a downward trajectory (Connie Francis), or artists who continued to have careers that didn’t depend on consistent pop hits (Tony Bennett, Country hitmaker Bobby Bare). Country acts supply no easy answers: Unlike Bill Anderson, who also had a big crossover hit (“Still”) in 1963, Bare had a closer relationship with folk, pop, and rock, and probably would have had a better chance to consolidate the crossover success of “Detroit City” and “500 Miles” if there had been no invaders to contend with. 

A surprising percentage of the “clear victims” recorded for one company, Cameo Parkway, which had strings of hits in 1963 from the Dovells, the Tymes, Dee Dee Sharp, the Orlons, Bobby Rydell, and the big gun, Chubby Checker. Their 1964 departures, en masse, from the higher regions of the chart were so abrupt that it seemed implausible not to blame the British. But the Motown explosion probably made the Cameo Parkway artists sound quaint as well, supplying danceable records that weren’t as dependent on dance fads as Checker and his labelmates. Also, Cameo’s conveniently located TV showcase, American Bandstand, relocated from Philadelphia to Los Angeles in February 1964.

Similarly, the cancellation in September 1964 of the ABC-TV series Hootenanny, replaced in effect by the rock-and-pop showcase Shindig!, likely played a role in icing the careers of folk acts such as the New Christy Minstrels and the Serendipity Singers. Other folk acts who had strong 1963 showings, such as the Kingston Trio, seemed to be wiped out entirely by the coming of the British.

But even after assigning most of the Cameo cases and the Kingston Trio to the category, the clear victims total is low. Just 7% of 1963’s biggest hitmakers were dispatched – entirely or nearly so — to oblivion by the coming of the Beatles and their support groups. 

Breaking down the other overall results:

> 42% of the artists fell victim to pop music’s eternally high mortality rate and saw their chart careers shrivel in virtually inevitable extinction events that would have occurred even if the Beatles meteorite had missed the earth entirely.

> 24% maintained their hot streaks beyond 1963, also experiencing little or no impact from the British Invasion.

> 14% suffered temporary slowdowns but recovered in later years, sustaining little or no Invasion damage.

> 13% endured downturns, often fatal, that were to varying degrees prompted by other factors but were helped along by the daunting British chart presence.

If you add that 13% to the 7% for whom the British were the primary fatal career blow, about a fifth of the former stars can claim that the Beatles rendered them obsolete. Adding the temporary-slowdown victims’ 14%, a more-significant one-third were affected to some degree. 

But if we take the 14% that survived and add them to the 24% who sailed serenely through the Invasion, 38% of the artists managed to survive the onslaught. And, as noted, for slightly more than 40%, the fault for their commercial failure clearly lies elsewhere.

It’s also worth looking at what types of songs and acts did well in 1963 vs. 1964. 

In 1964, the percentage of male groups more than doubled, and that’s nearly totally due to the British Invasion, since American male groups were up only slightly (19% to 21%). Female solo vocalists held on strongest, with an assist from British acts (mainly Dusty Springfield) as well. 

As some of the individual case studies show above, slots for male solo acts were down sharply, but hardly eliminated. 51% of male solo acts either continued to have hits or made a later comeback compared to 40% of female solos, 29% of male groups, and 20% of female groups. Girl groups, and to a slightly lesser extent, male vocal groups were indeed hit hard in 1964 by the arrival of the Beatles and their support troupes. But for solo artists in the main, it was mostly just a convenient excuse. 

Likewise, 1964 brings a sharp rise (37% to 53%) in the amount of pop/rock. That’s almost all British Invasion, too. With British titles filtered out, the pop/rock vs. R&B breakdown would be 40% to 33%, not that much wider a spread than 1963. Instead, R&B is down 33% to 26%. MOR is actually up slightly thanks to the likes of Louis Armstrong, Dean Martin, and invasion assists from the Bachelors and Julie Rogers. (Some songs, such as surf instrumentals, were placed in more than one genre.)