Friday marked the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ seismic, game-changing appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, on February 9, 1964. I wasn’t old enough to have seen or remembered it, being just two months old at the time. But on second thought, maybe my parents did watch the Sullivan show that evening with me in my crib, hearing (how could you not?) the shrieking lullaby of those delirious teenagers in Ed’s audience.

But I got The Beatles bug soon enough, at the ripe old age of ten a decade later. And I obsessed, like those screaming kids in the grainy black and white footage, over “A Hard Day’s Night,” the U.S. soundtrack from the epochal 1964 movie of the same name.

It started with a stare. Namely, when those four moptops on the cover gazed back at me, somewhat seriously, from a rack in the always oddly empty music section at the Zayre discount department store situated off of Route 9 in a small mid-century strip mall in Western Massachusetts.

Barely half of their faces were revealed on the front cover. But even as a Beatles newbie, I recognized the subtle differences in haircuts — and dramatic differences in eyebrows, especially John’s (bushy, smudged like a messy dash of black magic marker) and Paul’s (thin, inquisitively curved like a question mark). The black and white photography evoking the film only added to the allure.

Most importantly, I loved the gleaming, effortless energy of the music and exuberance of the voices. “I Should Have Known Better,” “Tell Me Why,” “Can’t Buy Me Love” — the songs leapt to life from my mom’s old Victrola, with John, Paul, and George’s (and even Ringo’s) bright, distinctive deliveries. Here the Fab Four were, right in my parlor, taking solo turns and enthusiastically harmonizing with one another, as if doing so were the distillation and essence of pure joy itself.

I simply couldn’t get enough of them. So much so that I even taped my name across the front cover and carefully tucked the LP under my arm nearly every morning to bring it with me onto the bus to elementary school, where I could get my Beatles fix by playing it during recess on the classroom record player.

Discovering and playing the music I loved — and excitedly extolling its heady virtues to a grown-up world that had long known about the Beatles’ historic magic — sounds quaint now, given the multi-media-saturated, everything-instantly-all-at-once age we inhabit.

But for me back then, in 1973-74, with only my parents’ dusty World War II-era Big Band and dreary classical music LPs lining the wall next to the washer and dryer, that discovery felt like uncovering a thrilling secret. The rush of adrenaline I got when that first ringing chord of “Hard Day’s Night” chimed like a clarion call was something close to what, I imagined, those four young men must have also felt, before the psychedelic experimentation, the strained relationships, the business of being The Beatles took hold: The essence of pure joy.