Dick Biondi and the Beatles

I didn't know this story. Bob Dearborn tells it this morning in The Olde Disc Jockey's Almanac...

February 7, 1963…The Vee-Jay label first released the Beatles single "Please Please Me" in the U.S. Your editor's friend and colleague Dick Biondi, a disc jockey at WLS in Chicago at the time and a friend of Vee-Jay executive Ewart Abner, played the song on the radio perhaps as early as February 8, 1963, thereby becoming the first disc jockey to play a Beatles record in the United States. "Please Please Me" peaked at #35 after four weeks on the WLS music chart, but did not show up on any of the major national American surveys. The label re-issued the single in January 1964 with a much better result: it peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100, trailing only the group's "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Loves You."