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Dennis Donovan

(18,770 posts)
Thu Aug 29, 2019, 09:57 AM Aug 2019

53 Years Ago Today; The Beatles final paid concert ever - at Candlestick Park

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles#Controversy,_final_tour_and_Revolver



Controversy, final tour and Revolver
Capitol Records, from December 1963 when it began issuing Beatles recordings for the US market, exercised complete control over format, compiling distinct US albums from the band's recordings and issuing songs of their choosing as singles. In June 1966, Yesterday and Today, one of Capitol's compilation albums, caused an uproar with its cover, which portrayed the grinning Beatles dressed in butcher's overalls, accompanied by raw meat and mutilated plastic baby dolls. It has been incorrectly suggested that this was meant as a satirical response to the way Capitol had "butchered" the US versions of their albums. Thousands of copies of the LP had a new cover pasted over the original; an unpeeled "first-state" copy fetched $10,500 at a December 2005 auction. In England, meanwhile, Harrison met sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, who agreed to train him on the instrument.

During a tour of the Philippines the month after the Yesterday and Today furore, the Beatles unintentionally snubbed the nation's first lady, Imelda Marcos, who had expected them to attend a breakfast reception at the Presidential Palace. When presented with the invitation, Epstein politely declined on the band members' behalf, as it had never been his policy to accept such official invitations. They soon found that the Marcos regime was unaccustomed to taking no for an answer. The resulting riots endangered the group and they escaped the country with difficulty. Immediately afterwards, the band members visited India for the first time.

We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first – rock 'n' roll or Christianity.
– John Lennon, 1966


Almost as soon as they returned home, the Beatles faced a fierce backlash from US religious and social conservatives (as well as the Ku Klux Klan) over a comment Lennon had made in a March interview with British reporter Maureen Cleave. "Christianity will go," Lennon had said. "It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. ... Jesus was alright but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me." The comment went virtually unnoticed in England, but when US teenage fan magazine Datebook printed it five months later – on the eve of the group's August US tour – it sparked a controversy with Christians in the American "Bible Belt". The Vatican issued a protest, and bans on Beatles' records were imposed by Spanish and Dutch stations and South Africa's national broadcasting service. Epstein accused Datebook of having taken Lennon's words out of context; at a press conference Lennon pointed out, "If I'd said television was more popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it." Lennon claimed that he was referring to how other people viewed their success, but at the prompting of reporters, he concluded: "If you want me to apologies, if that will make you happy, then okay, I'm sorry."

As preparations were made for the US tour, the Beatles knew that their music would hardly be heard. Having originally used Vox AC30 amplifiers, they later acquired more powerful 100-watt amplifiers, specially designed by Vox for them as they moved into larger venues in 1964, but these were still inadequate. Struggling to compete with the volume of sound generated by screaming fans, the band had grown increasingly bored with the routine of performing live. Recognizing that their shows were no longer about the music, they decided to make the August tour their last.

Rubber Soul had marked a major step forward; Revolver, released in August 1966 a week before the Beatles' final tour, marked another. Pitchfork's Scott Plagenhoef identifies it as "the sound of a band growing into supreme confidence" and "redefining what was expected from popular music". Revolver featured sophisticated songwriting, studio experimentation, and a greatly expanded repertoire of musical styles, ranging from innovative classical string arrangements to psychedelic rock. Abandoning the customary group photograph, its cover – designed by Klaus Voormann, a friend of the band since their Hamburg days – "was a stark, arty, black-and-white collage that caricatured the Beatles in a pen-and-ink style beholden to Aubrey Beardsley", in Gould's description. The album was preceded by the single "Paperback Writer", backed by "Rain". Short promotional films were made for both songs; described by cultural historian Saul Austerlitz as "among the first true music videos", they aired on The Ed Sullivan Show and Top of the Pops in June 1966.


San Francisco's Candlestick Park (pictured in its 1960s configuration) was the venue for the Beatles' final concert before a paying audience.

Among the experimental songs that Revolver featured was "Tomorrow Never Knows", the lyrics for which Lennon drew from Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Its creation involved eight tape decks distributed about the EMI building, each staffed by an engineer or band member, who randomly varied the movement of a tape loop while Martin created a composite recording by sampling the incoming data. McCartney's "Eleanor Rigby" made prominent use of a string octet; Gould describes it as "a true hybrid, conforming to no recognizable style or genre of song". Harrison was developing as a songwriter, and three of his compositions earned a place on the record. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked Revolver as the third greatest album of all time. During the US tour that followed its release, however, the band performed none of its songs. As Chris Ingham writes, they were very much "studio creations ... and there was no way a four-piece rock 'n' roll group could do them justice, particularly through the desensitizing wall of the fans' screams. 'Live Beatles' and 'Studio Beatles' had become entirely different beasts."


The Beatles arrive in San Francisco on August 29, 1966 for their concert at Candlestick Park. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon and George Harrison

The band's concert at San Francisco's Candlestick Park on 29 August was their last commercial concert. It marked the end of a four-year period dominated by almost nonstop touring that included over 1,400 concert appearances internationally.

</snip>


Given how badly the last tours went, who could blame them?
5 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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53 Years Ago Today; The Beatles final paid concert ever - at Candlestick Park (Original Post) Dennis Donovan Aug 2019 OP
K & R SunSeeker Aug 2019 #1
My cousin just did his annual post of his ticket to the 2nd-to-last concert at Dodger Stadium trackfan Aug 2019 #2
My wife still has her ticket stub from ten day previous.... Brother Buzz Aug 2019 #4
The music is doing a lot better than Candlestick Brother Buzz Aug 2019 #3
I saw them in Chicago and Cleveland that year. You couldn't hear them for all the screaming, Vinca Aug 2019 #5

trackfan

(3,650 posts)
2. My cousin just did his annual post of his ticket to the 2nd-to-last concert at Dodger Stadium
Thu Aug 29, 2019, 11:25 AM
Aug 2019

[link:]

Check out the price. And The Cyrkle and The Ronettes opened!

Vinca

(50,172 posts)
5. I saw them in Chicago and Cleveland that year. You couldn't hear them for all the screaming,
Thu Aug 29, 2019, 12:21 PM
Aug 2019

but it was a great experience. Hard to believe it was that long ago.

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