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“You cannot forget 8,000 screaming girls,” Mike Mitchell recalls. “It was like the birth of my generation.” The photographer, who was only 18-years-old when he met the Beatles as they arrived to Washington DC in 1964, followed them to their first ever US performance at the Washington Coliseum and caught them two days after their performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Hidden away for 50 years until the photograph hit his sixties and fell on some hard times, 50 lots of these photographs go on sale tonight at Christie’s Auctions in New York, estimated to rake in $100,000.

At the event horizon of American Beatlemania, we see the Fab Four goof off at press conferences, disarm the concert crowd with their bopping moptops and exchanging nervous, knowing glimpses. Also, Ringo Starr romancing some eager gals of the audience with a snarl. Naughty. Check out these previously unseen photos of the Fab Four about to blow up and, for context, imagine mass girl-screams of communal desire…

Photo credit: Mike Mitchell. Courtesy of Christie’s Images LTD. 2011