I just realized that the only “live” Beatles footage I’ve seen is their classic TV show performances. What were they like live, especially later on in their career when they were doing amazing things? How did they do songs like “dear prudence” and “I am the walrus” live?
They didn’t. The last live performance (not counting the rooftop show) was in 1966.
Wow! I had no idea - I just assumed that they kept performing. Interesting.
I have a copy of every existing concert recording of The Beatles, and after 1964, the quality of their performances dropped. There really isn’t a concert on tape that’s worthy of public release. There are some good concerts that are marred by poor recording and screaming girls, there are some great recordings that are marred by poor performance. They gave a show in Germany in 1966 that is so poorly played and sung, you have to wonder why they bothered. It’s embarrassingly bad. Even on the Budokan laserdisc, they’re pretty bad.
To have heard what they sounded like when they were great, live, would have been on the theatre tours of England in 1963.
What made them get worse later on, other than lack of playing live much?
Why’d they stop playing live later on, anyway - just because they didn’t have to?
Lack of practice (they never practiced), too large venues with too little amplification and overwhelmingly loud screaming. They couldn’t hear themselves over the screaming, and the audience couldn’t hear them, either. After awhile, they stopped caring. By the 1965 and 1966 tours, they were, well, to put it like John described it, “Satyricon.” It was a get-fucked-up-and-laid party from start to finish, with the concert taking up only 30 minutes of their day.
They stopped playing after the Candlestick Park gig in San Francisco in 1966 because they were just sick of being on display, having their concerts picketed by the KKK and religious fanatics, not being heard, not having any new music that could be performed easily live. They were just sick and tired of the dog-and-pony show, and they refused to go out anymore.
That’s when I saw them, in Philadelphia. Were they any good? Let’s see:
the sound was tinny
they played for a very short time
people were screaming
it was thunderstormy, hot and humid and lightly drizzling with rumbles of thunder
we were so far away we could only see them with binoculars
and …they totally killed!
Of all the concerts I’ve seen in my life, this is the one I remember most fondly. I still have my ticket stub.
That answer your question? 
For a review of one of their earlier performances see post #20.
I should add that it’s probably a mistake to think that they didn’t play much. These were four of the most insanely busy people in any line of work. After they got famous, Brian Epstein had them on tours up and down the backbone of England for weeks and months on end. They were on countless TV and radio shows. They had two of their own series on the BBC. They were always going somewhere and doing something, taking brief stops at Abbey Road to make new records, then it was back on the road.
When they became an international phenomenon, and were jetting around and playing stadiums, is when it got out of hand. It was mainly Beatlemania that killed their desire to continue performing. The first real break they had in their career was after they left the road in '66, and after “Revolver.” They had several months to themselves for the first time since they were Quarrymen. In “Anthology,” Paul said (he refers to The Beatles in the third person) “God bless 'em, those boys worked their little cotton socks off!”
That is impressive.
Not really. I also have a copy of every known radio and TV broadcast, and a copy of every known studio outtake and alternate mix from their career to escape, in excess of 400 CDs of just the rehearsals from the filming of “Let It Be” and every known issue and variation on every released album from every country. That’s impressive. 
WOW.
Is this strictly a private collection?
Is it the biggest in the world?
Yes, it’s a private collection, and no, it isn’t the biggest one in the world. Many of mine are reference reproductions and vinyl-to-CD transfers for evaluation and comparison. I’ve just been collecting them since the '70s. I forgot to mention the colored vinyl and picture discs. I don’t have the 78s that were pressed in India, but so few people in the world do, you might say that on average, neither does anybody else. There have only been two of them photographed, that I’ve seen. I believe there are six.
I think (I don’t know not having gone to the trouble a being born then) you want to see the Beatles good live, you have to go back to the Cavern Club. Didn’t sound like they were that great, but it sounded like they were a good drunken, three chord R&R band.
And yeah I’d say they lost interest when they wern’t doing Twist and Shout, but Dear Prudence. And the like. No point in doing the later stuff to a sadium full of people screaming.
My sister saw them at the Finsbury Park Astoria in 1961.
There was so much screaming throughout that she couldn’t hear them. :smack:
There are Beatles tribute bands, like American English, that could give you an idea of what they might have been like live.
I thought you might find it interesting to know that the group only performed the vast majority of their songs once, properly, on the day they were recorded. This is true of much of the 1965-and-later music. They would turn up at the studio, and John or Paul would have new songs to work on. They’d routine them first, then start recording until they got a satisfactory take. Then they’d overdub on top of that. Once it was finished, they never played it again. Occasionally, they weren’t even finished learning the song when they started overdubbing on a take. “I’m So Tired” is one. On the tape of the master take, at the very end you can hear George asking John a question about how to play it, but the sound cuts off. And that’s the take they used!
Oddly, there are no accounts of the group rehearsing at one of their houses, after the Quarrymen days. It’s not mentioned once in any of the scores of books I’ve read. John and Paul would get together to work on their songs, or later, to put the finishing touches on them before they went to the studio. Most often, the first time George or Ringo heard a new song was at Abbey Road, before the red light went on. The first time the others heard a new George song was at the end of a session where “I had to do ten or twelve John or Paul songs before they’d do one of mine.” And only begrudgingly. On “Don’t Bother Me,” you can hear George in the intro, telling them “It’s too fast!” but they kept on going anyway, and that was the take they overdubbed on. They couldn’t wait for it to be over.
They did get together at George’s house, with their wives and some friends, to demo their new crop of songs for The White Album, which they’d written largely while on sabbatical in India. But these were acoustic performances, which they taped and did rudimentary sound-on-sound overdubbing on George’s Ampex. Ringo gave a copy of the compiled tape to Peter Sellers, which is why we collectors have heard it. Some of the recordings were on “Anthology.”
There are acetates of demos performed by George for “Old Brown Shoe” and “Something,” on which he plays piano and guitar. They rehearsed the latter during “Let It Be” filming, but it wasn’t finished yet. There’s a humorous section in the tape where George can’t think of what she “attracts me like…” John suggests “a pomegranate…” A couple of months later, he had it worked out, and did the demo, which would have been pressed on four acetates, which he would have given to the others to learn on their own, and the first time they all played it would be when sessions for “Abbey Road” convened.
Would the fairly recent development of custom-fitted, in-ear monitors have helped with the insane noise levels?
I don’t think in-ear monitors would have helped, because the mixing techology that they are designed to be used with didn’t exist then. John, George and Paul each had one unmiked amplifier, and Ringo had an overhead mic. This, and the vocal mics were fed to a Bogen PA system, or its equivalent. Later, in stadiums, they’d be plugged into the big PA, but that didn’t help any. The technology for stage monitors did not exist. It’s probable that even if they did, an engineer couldn’t have turned them up loud enough to drown out the screaming onstage without going into feedback.
Performing over all that screaming must have been a thankless task. I don’t know how they lasted as long as they did.
This from the early years of Beatlemania gives some idea of the insanity.