John screams the lyrics of “Twist and Shout” with such raw intensity that everyone fears for his vocal cords. “I was always bitterly ashamed of it,” he’ll say later, “because I could sing it better than that.…You can hear that I’m just a frantic guy doing his best.” Decades later, Rolling Stone magazine readers vote the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” the third-best vocal performance in rock history.

All four Beatles have aspirations to conquer the American charts. But there’s one fact the boys can’t escape: nearly every band from England has failed to make it there. The Beatles won’t tour America until they’ve achieved a number-one hit, John vows, later saying of the American audience, “We knew we would wipe you out if we could just get a grip on you. We were new.”

George, though, brings back some daunting intelligence after a September 1963 visit to Benton, Illinois, where his sister, Louise, lives. “They don’t know us,” he reports. “It’s going to be hard.”

But in England, it seems everyone knows them. When they return to Heathrow the following month after a tour of Sweden, the size of the crowds gathered to welcome them home astonishes even Ed Sullivan, whose eponymous variety show is among the most popular in America. Sullivan wagers that the excitement is translatable to the American market and invites the Beatles to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show.

In November, they’ll play for royalty. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother asks the band to perform as part of a celebrity musical lineup that includes Marlene Dietrich and Burt Bacharach at her annual charity event. Her younger daughter, Princess Margaret, and Margaret’s husband, Lord Snowdon, also attend (Queen Elizabeth, pregnant with Prince Edward, does not). John makes sure the glittering show at Prince of Wales Theatre, in London’s West End, is unforgettable.

“For our last number,” he announces from the stage with a mischievous grin, “I’d like to ask your help. The people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewelry.”

It is a cheeky thing to say (John originally told Brian he was going to ask the audience “to rattle their fucking jewelry”), but the audience is charmed.

“The Beatles are most intriguing,” the Queen Mother pronounces, and the Daily Mirror exclaims, “How refreshing to see these rumbustious young Beatles take a middle-aged Royal Variety Performance by the scruff of their necks and have them beatling like teenagers.”

The band closes out the year with a special supplement put out by the London Evening Standard declaring “1963…the Year of the Beatles.” They also set a national milestone: their second album, With the Beatles, released November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy is assassinated, is the first rock album in Britain to sell one million copies.

On January 13, 1964, the single “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is released in America.