Well, what would they have played? “Eleanor Rigby”? No strings. “Yellow Submarine”? No brass band. “Got to Get You Into My Life”? No piano or horns. “Love You To”? No sitar or tabla. “Tomorrow Never Knows”? No way. Like cjepson said, by this time the Beatles were deep into studio experimentation and were creating music that just the four of them couldn’t reproduce onstage.
Ticket prices for that convert were $4.50 to $6.50 for the really good seats. And note that there were about 17,500 unsold seats (42% unsold).
The Beatles fee was $90,000. The gross from ticket sales was split: the Beatles got 65%, the City of San Franciso (venue owner) got 15%, and the local promotion company got the remaining 20%. (I think the opening acts got only fees, no part of the gross.) That amounted to less than $10,000, and so they lost money on this concert. (Had they saved some of the posters, unsold tickets, etc., they probably could have sold them later for enough to make a profit!)
There were 4 opening acts, they played for 87 minutes (about 22 minutes each), including setup times. The Beatles were driven from the park directly to the airport, and were in Los Angeles before 1am.
So, the most popular band in the world couldn’t afford to hire a horn section… or some string players… or a single sitar player? Perhaps attendance at that last show was so underwhelming because word got out that the Beatles were phoning it in, doing a show that wasn’t much different from their 1964 show.
What would have been the point? No-one had been able to hear the music over the screams since about 1963.
Also, do you really think that a concert attendance of over 24,000 (roughly calculated from t-bonham@scc.net’s numbers), was underwhelming? In 1966? And with very expensive* tickets by the standards of the time? (again going by t-bonham@scc.net’s numbers)
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*In early '70s Britain I could see the top bands of the day, like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, in a relatively intimate venue (about 2,000) for the equivalent of about one dollar. If The Beatles were charging $$4.50 to $6.50 in 1966 they were very pricey - but then, they were The Beatles..
Originally written for the Stones to perform, according to Lennon.
But yes, they were very much into the American ‘50s rock and roll and must have felt that as long as they had to play to a mostly non-listening audience they might as well open and close with something that was fun and rockin’.
Ellis, the whole notion of the headlining act bringing along a major stage show besides themselves was still mostly in the future, at least for the rock/pop category. The normal expectation in 1966 was still that you would just stand there and play. And yes, the live shows for the Beatles had fallen into a vicious cycle over those 2 years, with a huge part of the audience not there to hear the music but to scream at the lads (the acts of the time did not pack the 5-story megawatt-range sound stacks of latter-day shows, anyway). The Beatles as live performers were really at heart a club/theater band, not an “arena” band, and by 1966 they were really weary of what the live concerts had become.
No, that figure sounds decent in and of itself - though it’s still less than half that of the famous Shea Stadium show a year earlier; I was alluding to the “42% unsold seats” that makes it sound as if the group were struggling. Clearly they were generating a pile of money and I just wonder why more wasn’t put into the presentation. Your point about the music not being heard is a reasonable one, but there again, could not some expense have been allotted to building a more effective sound system? My hunch is that the band’s management were caught in an awkward moment in the summer of '66 when the Beatles were in transition from enjoying a predominately adolescent/teenage following to broadening that appeal to include 20-somethings.
By 1966 the Beatles did whatever the Beatles wanted. Brian Epstein would have been losing control over them even if he didn’t have major drug and other issues.
Audiences for all bands were predominantly screaming girls. My first concert was in 1967 headlining The Beach Boys and the girls screamed throughout. The culture had to change, the definition of a concert had to change, and the concept of touring had to change. All three things happened pretty quickly. The San Francisco bands that could have gone to The Beatles in 1966 started performing longer concerts and free-form solos based on album cuts instead of singles for a more adult audience who were on drugs that made them appreciate three-hours of music. (or that sentence.) The first light shows, primitive by modern standards, also appear around 1966. You couldn’t do those in stadiums at the time. That needed development. They were for clubs or ballrooms. Places The Beatles couldn’t possibly play without being killed. They were too famous for the world.
By 1970 a fairly modern looking touring culture had emerged. That was too late for them. And they didn’t need touring to promote an album. As I said in another thread, the world stopped each time a new Beatles album came out. What more could touring do? They did the sensible thing by retreating into the studio and away from the public eye.
If they had stayed together, they likely would have taken the same path in the 70s as the Stones and Pink Floyd, with the ever more elaborate stage shows and lighting systems. That just wasn’t possible in 1966. If anything, they stayed out there too long. Nobody knew this was going to be the last chance to see them. They’d done three American tours in three years and hit the point of diminishing returns for the culture of the day. They recognized it first, and were ahead of the rest of us again.