On February 10, at the Baroque Room in the Plaza, cameras flash as the band accepts two gold records—signifying one million copies sold apiece—for their album Meet the Beatles and their single “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which topped the American charts on February 1, just weeks after its December 26, 1963, rush release.

On Sunday, February 9, 1964, at 8:00 p.m., seventy-three million people—plus the 728 inside the theater—tune in to watch the Beatles perform live. An odd protester or two, including one young man holding a sign reading ALONZO TUSKE HATES THE BEATLES, contends with a robust police presence patrolling the streets.

The televised caption SORRY GIRLS, HE’S MARRIED does little to calm the fervor of fans who decree by placard JOHN, DIVORCE CYNTHIA.

“Us guys had to play it kind of cool,” recalls Joe Perry, who would go on to found and play guitar in the band Aerosmith, of his school-age self, “because the girls were so excited and were drawing little hearts on their notebooks—‘I love Paul,’ that kind of thing. But I think there was an unspoken thing with the guys that we all dug the Beatles, too. We just couldn’t come right out and say it.”

In Hicksville, Long Island, a musically inclined fourteen-year-old is also watching. “I remember noticing John that first time on the Sullivan show,” Billy Joel later recalls. “He’s standing there, looking around him as if to say, ‘Is all this corny or what?’”

In the first of two musical segments, the Beatles sing “All My Loving” followed by the Peggy Lee ballad “Till There Was You.” As John sings “She Loves You,” a song he and Paul wrote while strumming their guitars on opposite beds at a hotel in Newcastle, England, he recalls that Paul’s father, Jim, asked, “Couldn’t you sing, ‘She loves you, yes, yes, yes?’ There’s enough of these Americanisms around.”

There is nothing proper about the way the fans—nearly three thousand of them—carry on a few days later, on February 12, at a pair of thirty-minute concerts at Carnegie Hall. “Shut up!” John shouts at the screaming masses, who were producing noise a local DJ describes as “the most piercing, uncomfortable sound I’ve ever heard.”

It was like “that terrible screech the BMT Astoria train makes as it turns east near 59th Street and Seventh Avenue,” remarks the New York Herald Tribune.

At their show in Washington, DC, the noise is so loud that journalist Michael Braun reports, “One of the policemen at the ringside removed two .38 caliber bullets from his belt and placed them in his ears.”

The strain of their popularity is already starting to wear, even when it comes to making music.