American invasion

With exquisite timing I Want To Hold Your Hand was at number one in the USA (where it stayed for seven weeks) on the 1st of February 1964. A week later the Beatles arrived to a rapturous welcome at Kennedy Airport and two days later around 75 million people watched them perform on the Ed Sullivan show. They played a sold out Carnegie Hall two days after that.
These were heady days, for the band, Epstein and for the American record company. It was the norm at Capitol to press up around 5,000 copies of a single for a new artist. They would press perhaps 25,000 copies for an established star. With the Beatles they’d press a million advance copies for each release and for each release a million copies was never enough. Capitol’s other artists would claim that the pressing factory was so full of Beatles product that they couldn’t get their own stuff onto the presses.
In April 1964, the Beatles had singles at numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the American charts. They also had singles in 11 other slots in the Billboard Hot 100. This phenomenal feat is unlikely to ever be repeated.