The Experts Were Wrong
The world is full of experts making ‘predictions.’ Some are spectacularly wrong. As physicist Neils Bohr allegedly said: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”
A few examples:
1903: “The horse is here to stay, the automobile is just a fad – Henry Ford’s banker
1927: “Who in the hell wants to hear actors talk?” – Warner Brothers
1970: “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” – Paul Ehrlich – author of The Population Bomb.
1977: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” — Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp.
2007: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” — Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO
And sometimes, hyped musical acts crash and burn. One band found these reactions to its initial performances in America:
The Los Angeles Times: “Not even their mothers would claim that they sing well. But the hirsute thickets they affect make them rememberable, and they project a certain kittenish charm which drives the immature, shall we say, ape” (hirsute refers to their hair)
Boston Globe: “The…are not merely awful; I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are god awful. They are so unbelievably horribly, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as “anti-popes.”
Newsweek: “Visually they are a nightmare, tight, dandified Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically, they are a near disaster, guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody. Their lyrics…are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments….”
New York Times: “Their vocal quality can be described as hoarsely incoherent, with the minimal enunciation necessary to communicate the schematic texts.”
Boston Globe: “Don’t let them bother you. If you don’t think about them, they will go away…it is characterized by an inability to recognize melody, a highly emotional state with severe body twitches and a strange accent…The disease is at the height of its virulence, but the fever will subside, and the victims may receive immunity for life from fads.
Washington Post: “Just thinking about them seems to induce mental disturbance. They have a commonplace, rather dull act that hardly seems to merit mentioning, yet people hereabouts have mentioned scarcely anything else for a couple of days.”
Boston Globe: “They … sound like a group of disorganized amateurs whose voices seem to be fighting each other rather than blending…. If I call the act rank, I have a two-fold purpose in mind. For the word has two meanings — strong and disagreeable, and luxuriant growth.
David Susskind – Talk Show host: “The most repulsive group of men I’ve ever seen.”
Sixty years ago, in 1964, the Beatles made three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show – February 9, 16, and 23. Over 73 million households watched the show – estimated at over 40% of the U.S. households. The quotes above are responses to those appearances. I guess those ‘experts’ were wrong - we still listen to the Beatles today.
The Beatles’ copyright protections are vigorously enforced. I could locate only two of their Ed Sullivan appearances, linked below. And for those who haven’t seen it, I’ve also linked the last Beatles release, done in late 2023, almost 60 years after those Ed Sullivan shows.
Enjoy!
