The Beatles played at Crosley Field for their second and final concert in Cincinnati.
They
took to the stage on Aug. 21, 1966, after the performance was cancelled
the previous night, then flew to St. Louis for a concert that evening –
the only time the Beatles played two cities on the same day.
No
one knew at the time that just eight days later they would play their
last show – at Candlestick Park in San Francisco – and then stop touring
all together.
The Beatles would never be that close to their fans again.
Half
a century has passed. The Beatles went on to reinvent popular music.
Everyone got older and grayer. Some are gone – including John Lennon and
George Harrison – and some remain.
For the lucky ones who were at
the concert, that indelible experience is captured in memory. For the
rest of us, let me take you down . .
Girls were
screaming everywhere, a shrill roar every time someone glimpsed a
mop-top from the player’s tunnel at the Reds’ ballpark. Handmade signs
draped from the upper deck proclaimed “Beatles – We Luv Ya” and “Hi
Ringo.”
The opening acts went on. The Remains, Bobby Hebb crooning
“Sunny,” then the Cyrkle singing “Red Rubber Ball” and the Ronettes
(minus Ronnie Bennett). Good solid groups, all of them, but not the
Beatles.
It
had been two years since Beatlemania had exploded, a tonic for the
nation’s ills after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The WSAI-AM
“Good Guys” DJs had brought the Fab Four to Cincinnati Gardens on their
first U.S. tour in August 1964.
The concert was a smashing success, and the lads were booked at Crosley Field for the 1966 U.S. tour. It didn’t go smoothly.
If the rain comes …
The concert had been scheduled for 8:30 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 20, 1966. Tickets sold for $4.75, up to $5.50.
Just
before show time, the rain started coming down hard. For two hours,
fans in the exposed stands of Crosley Field were drenched as they waited
and waited for the Beatles to come out. The promoters hadn’t put up a
canopy, in violation of the contract, so the stage was sopping wet.
“Cincinnati
was an open-air venue, and they had a bandstand in the centre of the
ballpark, with a canvas top on it,” George Harrison recalled. “It was
really bad weather, pouring with rain, and when Mal [Evans, the Beatles’
road manager] got there to set up the equipment he said, ‘Where’s the
electricity power feed?’ And the fella said, ‘What do you mean,
electricity? I thought they played guitars.’ He didn't even know we
played electric guitars.
“It was so wet that we couldn’t play.
They’d brought in the electricity, but the stage was soaking and we
would have been electrocuted, so we cancelled – the only gig we ever
missed.”
About 10:25 p.m., a spokesman announced that due the
threat that the Beatles could be electrocuted the concert was cancelled.
Disappointed teens threw away their tickets.
Backstage, John
Lennon stepped up and agreed that they would come back to play the next
day. The band spent the night at Vernon Manor in Mount Auburn.
The Enquirer headline: “Beatles All Wet But They’ll Be Back Noon Today.”
After
church on Sunday morning, the teen-age crowd filed back to their seats.
Ticket stubs were slashed with a black marker for re-admittance.
About
1:30 p.m., the Beatles finally emerged from the player’s tunnel near
third base, their guitars slung over their shoulders, and trotted out to
the stage. The crowd took to their feet. The stage, now under a canopy,
was at second base, some 100 feet from the audience, and a row of
policemen (with cotton in their ears) stood as a barricade for
overzealous fans.
The Beatles wore matching gray suits with red
pinstripes and blue paisley shirts. George sported small round
sunglasses, and he and Paul waved, exciting the girls.
The screaming was non-stop.
Then, a guitar jangled and John started singing. Justletmehearsomeofthat rock and roll music!
The crowd roared. The band had no monitors so they couldn’t hear themselves play.
Two
huge speakers blasted out the music and you could actually hear their
singing unless you were too close to a hysterical teenager or were one
of them.
“I reckon we could send out four waxwork dummies of
ourselves and that would satisfy the crowds,” John Lennon once said.
“Beatles concerts are nothing to do with the music any more. They’re
just bloody tribal rites.”
That summer, the luster of Beatlemania had started to fade.
In August, a teen magazine printed an interview John had given months before where he discussed religion.
“Christianity
will go,” John had said. “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue
about that; I’m right and will be proved right. We’re more popular than
Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock ’n’ roll or
Christianity.”
The reaction in the Bible Belt to the “more popular
than Jesus” quote, taken out of context, was swift and vicious. People
held “Beatle burning” bonfires. The Ku Klux Klan leveled threats. John
apologized, but they weren’t too forgiving in the South.
The night
before the Cincinnati show, the Beatles’ Memphis concerts were
canceled, then back on. During the song “If I Needed Someone,” a kid
threw a cherry bomb on stage. The Beatles looked at one other to see
which of them had been shot, then without skipping a beat they finished
the performance.
Shows were no longer selling out. The stands at
Crosley were half full. About 15,000 fans filled two decks of a ballpark
that seated 30,000.
“I don’t think what John said bothered the
fans,” Ringo told an Enquirer reporter. “But we’ve lost audiences, you
see, because their mums and dads pay for the tickets.”
My love don’t give me presents …
In
between songs, the Beatles took turns addressing the crowd. John
stepped out from beneath the canopy and a thousand Brownies snapped a
picture.
The Beatles played for only 28 minutes, 11 songs total,
and none from their new album, “Revolver,” released a few weeks earlier.
“Eleanor Rigby” was all over the airwaves, but there hadn’t been time
for the band to rehearse the new songs for the tour.
Also, their music had evolved to be too complex to be done with the instrumentation they toured with.
At
their live shows, “Yesterday” was performed by all four Beatles and in a
different key rather than just Paul on acoustic guitar backed by a
string quartet. That version, never released except on bootlegs, was
heard by only the concertgoers.
Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away
“We
had to get up early and get on and play the concert at midday, then
take all the gear apart and go to the airport, fly to St. Louis, set up
and play the gig originally planned for that day,” George recalled. “In
those days all we had were three amps, three guitars, and a set of
drums. Imagine trying to do it now!”
The St. Louis show that night also had a torrential downpour, but the Beatles were protected under a canopy and played the show.
“We
were having to worry about the rain getting in the amps and this took
us right back to the Cavern days–it was worse than those early days”
Paul remembered “And I don’t even think the house was full.”
The experience convinced Paul to stop touring.
“I
finally agreed. I’d been trying to say, ‘Ah, touring’s good and it
keeps us sharp. We need touring, and musicians need to play. Keep music
live.’ I had held on that attitude when there were doubts, but finally I
agreed with them.
“George and John were the ones most against touring; they got particularly fed up. So we agreed to say nothing, but never to tour again.”
Hey, we’ll have some fun
Some fun toni-hi-ight
The
last chords rang out, the Beatles bowed and said “thank you,” then
hopped into a car waiting behind the stage and drove to a door near the
scoreboard. They waved goodbye and were gone. Their music still echoes
across generations.
THE BEATLES' SETLIST
1. “Rock and Roll Music”
2. “She’s a Woman”
3. “If I Needed Someone”
4. “Day Tripper”
5. “Baby’s in Black”
6. “I Feel Fine”
7. “Yesterday”
8. “I Wanna Be Your Man”
9. “Nowhere Man”
10. “Paperback Writer”
11. “Long Tall Sally”
No comments:
Post a Comment