How big were the Beatles?
I’ll tell you how big the Beatles were.
In 1948 an American named Meredith Willson wrote a story based on his home town in Iowa.
He added songs, and lyrics, and worked it up into a full scale musical.
‘The Music Man’ opened on Broadway in 1957 and swept the board, one of the biggest successes New York had ever seen. It beat ‘West Side Story’ to Best Musical. It won five Tony Awards. It blew away the West End. It went down a storm in Australia. The showstopping song ‘76 Trombones’ was a worldwide hit. The cast album spent 245 weeks on the Billboard charts. A big Hollywood blockbuster movie with Shirley Jones and Robert Preston came out in 1962.
The whole caboodle made Meredith Willson a millionaire.
The following year four young Englishmen recorded one of the 22 songs from The Music Man and buried it on the second side of their second album. They never released it as a single.
And the widow of Meredith Willson said that that Beatles’ 2m 16s recording of ‘Till There Was You’ made more money for his estate than the entire income he took from the musical, the film and the #1 cast album.
That’s how big The Beatles were.
