The Rolling Stones in 1964, from left: Mick Jagger, Bill Wyman, Brian Jones, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts. Click photo for larger image. More on the Rolling Stones Concert Preview: Rolling Stones a little rocky but fans love them Rolling Stones show this week another in a rock constellation The Rolling Stones' Top 10 Best Albums So, you think you're a Stones expert? Take our quiz

By the time the Beatles landed in Pittsburgh in September 1964, the Fab Four had already charted an amazing 15 hits that year, starting in January with "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

It's no wonder you couldn't hear them singing over the screams of young girls at the sold-out Civic Arena.

The Rolling Stones' first local appearance was a different story altogether. In fact, we could have fought off this British Invasion with a couple of guys from the Elks Club. And, if you were recording a live album on June 17, 1964, at West View Park's Danceland, you could have done it without mixing down the audience.

"The applause was very little," recalls Dave Goodrich, a local music historian.

That was a fairly typical reaction to the Stones on the band's nine-city, 15-day tour of the States that summer. Although they had just sparked a minor riot at the "Ready Steady Go! Mod Ball" back in England, over here they had only one hit, a sloppy cover of Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away," that peaked at No. 48.

It was the lead track on the prophetically titled "England's Newest Hit Makers," a debut album that was released in the States in late April, a month and a half before the show here. The album had one original, the Jagger-Richards song "Tell Me" (a hit by August), along with covers -- "Route 66," "I'm a King Bee," "Carol," "I Just Want to Make Love to You" -- that demonstrated their primal approach to American blues and R&B.

It was the summer of '64 and rock 'n' roll was just coming alive again, having lost its first wave of stars. Elvis had gone Hollywood. Chuck Berry had gone to jail. Little Richard had found the Lord. And Jerry Lee Lewis had found his young cousin. It moved Variety to declare in the early '60s that "rock 'n' roll is dead."

With the nation reeling from the assassination of JFK in November of '63, young people were in desperate need of distraction.

Along came the British.

Cover from "The Rolling Stones" by The Rolling Stones, 1964.

The Beatles struck first, thrilling teens with their mod clothes and mop-tops on those ecstatic performances on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in February of '64. The Dave Clark Five hit Sullivan a month later as a Beatles knockoff your mom might like.

The Stones, London bad boys with a blues bent, were stuck with "The Hollywood Palace" show in June during which guest host Dean Martin made fun of their scruffy hair, then, introducing a trampolinist, cracked, "That's the father of the Rolling Stones. He's been trying to kill himself ever since."

Goodrich, an adventurous music fan, had seen that TV show and was eager to see the Stones. Or anything British for that matter. The fact that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones would perform here the same year, the only time that ever happened, was one for the history books. But the Stones wouldn't even be the second best of the British Invasion shows that summer.

"Oh, no. The Dave Clark Five was better," Goodrich says. "Those guys were polished, man, and it was the first light show that had ever played Pittsburgh. They did 'Bits and Pieces,' and as they're going, 'As day is night and night is day,' everything stops and all you could hear were foot stomps. When they did the foot stomps, all the lights in the Arena went out, and spotlights were on their boots. The show was stopped by police because they didn't know how to deal with girls screaming and standing in the aisles. It was their first taste of Beatlemania. That had never happened before at a concert."

That was June 5, the same date the Rolling Stones were opening their first U.S. tour in San Bernardino, Calif. The Stones then hit the Midwest with shows in San Antonio, Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha and Detroit.

Local pop station KQV, in fierce competition with KDKA (which had promoted the Dave Clark Five), brought in the lesser-known Stones with no inkling they would one day become the "World's Greatest Rock & Roll Band."

"This was an extreme move for West View Park to play something like this because it was so different. You'd usually see the Five Satins or something like that," says Rich Engler, drummer and founder of promoter DiCesare-Engler. Engler was there to see them set up but had to leave for a gig with his band, the Grains of Sand. "My band was in the process of going to the matching Beatle-ish coats, so we went out there thinking we'd pick up some [tips] firsthand."

There was no mention of the show in the local newspapers. Tickets were $1.50, and Goodrich had heard they were letting people in for free "just to get bodies in the place." He estimates the crowd at 400 tops, about one-third of Dance-land's capacity.

The bill also included Bobby Goldsboro, a two-hit wonder at the time; Patty and the Emblems, a black group from Camden, N.J., who would hit with "Mixed Up Shook Up Girl"; The Pixies 3, a finger-snapping girl group from Hanover, York County; and The Fenways, Pittsburgh's first self-contained rock 'n' roll band.

They all played about three or four songs. Then the lights dimmed for the Stones. "When they came in, they must have been in some kind of office," Goodrich says, "because they had to go through the crowd to get to the elevated stage. I remember Brian Jones, girls were pulling his hair, but he was clutching his guitar with both hands, so he couldn't defend himself."

The Stones opened with "Hi Heel Sneakers" (a Tommy Tucker cover) and then launched into the blues ravers from "England's Newest Hit Makers." Most of the band wore jackets, but Jagger, bucking the protocol of the day, strutted around in shirt sleeves. There was very little banter, and the music, Goodrich says, was "raw, really raw."

Perhaps too raw for the crowd. "One kid flipped a cigarette butt on the stage and went, 'fag.' Guys weren't impressed, either that or they were [mad] 'cause their girls might have liked them. And, remember, Pittsburgh was really divided because at the record hops they did not play British stuff. The radio stations would push British stuff, but at the dances, you heard oldies and R&B. Here's a British band trying to do blues. Kids were looking at them, like, 'What the hell's this?' "

"All the bands from up north in England were much less blues influenced," says Rob Bowman, referring to the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers. Bowman, an ethnomusicologist from York University in Toronto who has written extensively about the Stones, says, "Bands up north were girl-group influenced, they were R&B influenced, rockabilly influenced, but straight 12-bar blues was not a big thing for those bands."

The Stones played a little more than 20 minutes, a standard set length at the time. "There was no jamming," Goodrich says. "That came with bands like the Yardbirds." They finished with "Not Fade Away," another prophetic title, before disappearing without an encore. The band would roll on to Harrisburg, then close that first '64 leg at Carnegie Music Hall in New York, where Bowman says the crowd was worked into a frenzy.

"Don't take this the wrong way," he says, "but Pittsburgh, perhaps being more insulated from the Coasts, just wasn't hip to the whole phenomenon as, say, New York would have been. Carnegie Hall went insane when they played there. Pittsburgh may not have known what to expect. I know people who were at the Detroit shows who say they were pretty intense, but Detroit is a harder-rocking city than Pittsburgh anyway."

By the time the Stones returned to Pittsburgh, in November of '65, the writing team of Jagger-Richards was in full bloom and on its way to superstardom with a pair of No. 1 hits: "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "Get off My Cloud."

The Stones had now moved up to the same Arena stage where the Beatles and Dave Clark Five had played. The opening acts: Simon & Garfunkel, the Byrds, and Paul Revere and the Raiders. It was the KQV Thanksgiving Shower of Stars, the crowd was 9,131 strong, and they were wild.

It was the fall of 1965 and, as we know now, the Beatles were winding down as a touring phenomenon. The Rolling Stones were just gearing up.