I was in fifth grade the night The Beatles played the Ed Sullivan Show. Four guys with mop-top haircuts nobody on American TV had ever worn walked out, plugged in, and the studio audience simply lost it — girls screaming so hard you could barely make out the song underneath them. I’d never seen anything like it. Seventy-three million people watching that night hadn’t either. It wasn’t just loud, it was new in a way that felt almost disorienting — like the room had gotten bigger in real time.
I never forgot how new it felt, the way you don’t forget a scene even when you can’t yet explain why it stuck.
