Why did America go nuts for British music in the 60s?

It was funny, easy, inoffensive, and when the Beatles stopped being the type of folks you could introduce to mother, Herman's Hermits were always there for you.

Because John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Pete Townshend, Rod Argent, Colin Bluntstone (sp?), Rod Stewart, Ron Woods, Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, Donovan, Manfred Mann, Tom Jones, and, yes, Peter Asher lived there. And the Queen.

Secondarily, the zeitgeist of the Kennedy Administration was very outward looking, internationalist, and when you looked out the first thing you saw was Great Britain. There was a lot of interest in other British pop and semi-pop culture as well: Ian Fleming, John LeCarre, David Lean, Tony Richardson, Richard Lester (an American!), Cary Grant, Lawrence Olivier, all of the Redgraves, Peter Brooks, Harold Pinter, D.H. Lawrence, R.D. Laing, A.S. Neill, P.G. Wodehouse, Leon Uris, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot (another American!), Peter Cook, Dudley Moore . . . They were all hot. There was a lot of fashion energy in London, too. And the musicians were basically doing American music, but largely free of the things that were hang-ups here, questions of whether white artists were ripping off Black musicians too much, whether doing pop was selling out, whether Elvis and Jerry Lee were white trash or Bill Haley a hoodlum. They were cute! They were English! They had classy accents! That took them out of American class- and ethnic-conflict context, and made it possible for Americans to enjoy their own music without subtext. And, at a time when people were feeling prosperous and socially mobile, England was the achievable fantasy of sophistication.

But I suspect the British Invasion was primarily a question of luck and the tendency of hype to build on itself, like Seattle in the early 90s. Three or four really charismatic, talented stars showed up and found an audience, and then everyone wanted one of those so a few more people got shots, and kids got encouraged to put themselves out there, etc.

Not to mention Julie effing Andrews. You can't imagine how many times my sisters saw Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music, and this before DVDs and cable.

Whoa. Good answer.

All good answers above; I suppose it's the American confusion over things like class, I mean Scouse wasn't really a classy accent in England, right? And I guess Liverpool was like the Memphis of England, a place where all this obsessive and strange musical activity was happening, coming in from all directions--gritty place.

I guess too that the Beatles were a separate race already, when they hit; they seemed familiar yet totally alien. When you see the Stones doing "Time Is on My Side" to a puzzled audience back then, you muse on how ignorant Americans were about a song that originated in New Orleans, ditto all those blues songs. Kind of strange actually, and an indication of how different things were then, it's like no one here knew anything. I suppose it seemed funny and piquant that British singers were doing this music, too--familiar yet totally weird. Me, I think the British Invasion derailed music for a while while at the same time it helped it; in retrospect what was happening in Latin music, bossa nova for example, seems far more to the point to me than does the Stones doing Don Covay--and I like the Stones doing Don Covay. In short, I'm glad those groups got their message across but it caused a massive insecurity over here, I'd say.

It was the sound of swingers, baby.

i vote for the cute boy theory