Four fab nights on two DVDs

Feb. 9, 1964, was a historic night on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Who will ever forget the sensational appearance by comics Allen & Rossi?

Oh, yeah, and a band called the Beatles played.

The latter, of course, is viewed by many as the Big Bang of pop music, when the Fab Four stepped into America and shook up the youth of a nation grief-stricken after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy less than three months earlier.

But unless you saw that and the three other appearances the group made on Sullivan at the time, or in the one-time-only repeats each received, you’ve seen little of those performances. Since they aired, all that’s been shown in various films and TV documentaries have been several brief clips.

Even the Beatles’ own 10-hour “Anthology” TV series about the group’s history devoted just 2 1/2 minutes to the Sullivan appearances.

Yet over three consecutive Sundays in 1964 and another in September 1965, the Beatles performed more than an hour of music in 20 total songs.

On Oct. 28, Andrew Solt, the film and television producer who owns the release rights to the Sullivan vaults, is issuing the entire catalog of the Beatles on Sullivan on a double DVD set, “The Four Complete Historic Ed Sullivan Shows Featuring the Beatles and Other Artists.”

As the title indicates, the DVDs, previously in limited release on www.edsullivan.com, cover the entire original shows, with the other performers and even the commercials.

“I felt I was stepping into King Solomon’s mines and seeing the Holy Grail,” says Martin Lewis, a Beatles historian and associate producer for this release, but who, having been raised in England, had never seen the whole shows.

Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the estates of Lennon and George Harrison were not involved. But Solt’s credentials are solid with Beatles fans. He co-wrote, co-produced and directed the 1988 documentary “Imagine: John Lennon.”

“In the post-JFK shock syndrome of America, all the other artists appear almost in what I would call a ‘50s Eisenhower gray,” Lewis says. “The Beatles come out and it’s as if they’re in 3-D Technicolor by comparison, though it’s all in black-and-white. The other acts and the commercials show you the world that the Beatles were changing.”

Say hello to ‘Scarface’

Ask those in the hip-hop world to cite the most profound influence on the music and culture in the last 20 years and many will name a movie: “Scarface.”

The 1983 film, directed by Brian De Palma, starred Al Pacino as a Cuban refugee who becomes a Miami drug lord.

“It’s the movie we all watched 100 times,” says Kevin Liles, president of Def Jam/Def Soul and executive vice president of the Island Def Jam group. “It became a ghetto classic, especially to inspire people for that American Dream.”

, Liles has co-produced a 20-minute documentary tribute to the connection between “Scarface” and hip-hop that will be a feature on the 20th anniversary DVD release of the movie.

Liles has also assembled a CD of songs influenced by the movie, from Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines,” N.W.A’s “Dopeman,” Jay-Z’s “Streets Is Watching” and, of course, Geto Boys member Scarface’s “Mr. Scarface Is Back.” Both are due in stores Sept. 16.

Liles believes the message of the movie, and the message that has filtered through the rap world, is a cautionary tale of power and ambition gone out of control. “It’s a thing where people wanted to have all the money, all the girls, all the cars, all the houses, and even if you get everything you want, it can destroy your life,” Liles says.

Small faces

* Jane’s Addiction will be the subject of its first authorized biography, “Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction,” to be written by Brendan Mullen, former Los Angeles club promoter. The Jane’s book is due in 2005 from Da Capo Press. “Whores,” he says, will be not just about Farrell and the band but a “word documentary” of the times and places surrounding the often-controversial musicians.

* Longtime activist Michelle Shocked is planning an 11-day trip to Ghana and Nigeria next month with the Pan-African Children’s Fund delegation to aid the massive number of African orphans. At home, she’s recorded a new song, “Flesh & Bloods (We’re All in the Same Gang),” for an album benefiting the Watts Community Self-Determination Institute.