That event is being celebrated this weekend with three nights of concerts
at the Bowl curated by Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics. Stewart will
preside over a cross-genre bill with singers Martina McBride, Michelle
Branch, Billy Ray Cyrus, Mary Lambert, Allen Stone and Vanessa Amorosi,
who will re-create the Beatles' set list from that 1964 show and then
offer up other Beatles tunes as well.
Eubanks and his former KRLA-AM (1110) cohort Dave Hull also will be on hand to share stories about their role in that show.
After
the Beatles’ watershed performances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in
February of ’64, the group announced it would undertake its first U.S.
tour. Eubanks was part of the team of deejays at KRLA, one of the top
rock and pop radio stations in L.A. at the time, and had operated a
chain of Cinnamon Cinder nightclubs when he put to it to promote the
Beatles’ L.A. tour stop. Eubanks and team got the chance after another
local promoter, who'd been more comfortable booking established showroom
entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, turned the Liverpool moptops down.
“They
only wanted to play the Hollywood Bowl, because of its iconic status,"
Eubanks, 76, said this week in a silky baritone that sounds as smooth as
ever. "Thank you Brian Epstein for that. There was another organization
— I won’t name names — that tried to take the show away from me and
wanted to put them into the Coliseum. Had they played the Coliseum they
would have done well. But they wanted the prestige of the Hollywood
Bowl.”
Their fee for the night was $25,000, a princely sum half a century
ago, even to a relatively high-profile entertainment-world figure like
Eubanks. He made the leap from radio to television as host of the
long-running game show "The Newlywed Game," then "Card Sharks" and for
years has anchored KTLA-TV's coverage of the Rose Parade in Pasadena,
among his many endeavors.
“My business partner, Mickey Brown, and I
owned a house together as an investment, and I convinced him it was a
good idea to bring in the Beatles," he said. "So we borrowed $25,000
against the house to do that show. I couldn't get the Hollywood Bowl
without the Beatles, and I couldn't get the Beatles without the
Hollywood Bowl.”
Veteran radio DJ, TV show host and concert promoter Bob Eubanks was the
promoter for the Beatles' concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964 and
1965 and their show at Dodger Stadium in 1966.
The fan frenzy at that show, as on all the group’s other tour stops
that year, has been well-documented. Yet despite the intense interest in
the group, and the fact that the concert sold out quickly — “We had
been told it would be impossible to sell out the Bowl in one day, but it
sold out in 3 1/2 hours, without computers, without the Internet,”
Eubanks recalled — he said he and Brown didn’t make a lot of money on
that first tour stop.
“During the afternoon a busload of marshals
came in, and said, ‘We’re here to protect the homes up above on that
hill.’ I said, ‘That’s cool. Who’s paying you guys?’ They said, ‘You
are.’ One of the county supervisors thought that up,” Eubanks said with a
chuckle.
Eubanks also promoted the band’s return visits to the Bowl in 1965
and its third and final L.A. concert on Aug. 28, 1966, at Dodger
Stadium. That was the night before the final bona fide public concert of
the group’s career at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, after which
the quartet restricted itself to the recording studio, films and special
televised performances.
“They got tired of touring,” Eubanks
said, recalling their demeanor during the Dodger Stadium show. “After
the ’66 tour they just didn’t want to do that anymore. My personal
opinion is they were tired of being hassled and being chased. They said,
‘OK, we’re done.’”
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