In The Beatles - Anthology, George says they were doing a lot of complicated and cool stuff in the studio that was really hard to translate to a live performance. He tells a funny story of shaking his leg like Elvis (in concert) to time the girls’ screams to cover up stuff they were screwing up.
The Beatles played the Finsbury Park Astoria on these dates:
December 24 through 31, 1963
January 1 through 11, 1964
November 1, 1964
December 11, 1965
They also played the Majestic Ballroom in Finsbury Park, April 24, 1963.
In 1961, they were still paying their dues. All of their 1961 gigs were in Liverpool, except two in Wallasey and Bootle, and then they made their first trip to Hamburg between April 1 and July 1. When they returned, they simply blew the roof off the place, although the places they played were men’s clubs, ballrooms, basement clubs such as The Casbah, run by Pete Best’s mum, The Cavern, and anywhere else that would have them.
It would be interesting if you could ask your sister which of the actual Finsbury Park shows she attended, though.
Wow. This is so negative that I have to ask if you have any cites for this.
You can find this sentiment expressed in any number of books on The Beatles. John’s comment on the tours being like Satyricon are in “Lennon Remembers.” There are descriptions of the touring in “The Love You Make” by Peter Brown, “The Beatles” by Bob Spitz and many, many others. I didn’t make up a word of it, it’s an amalgam of all the accounts I’ve ever read.
Probably the overall best live Beatles recordings are from the BBC radio, when they were halfway between being the most popular band in Liverpool and being the most popular band in Britain. Those and other BBC performances 1963–1965 were released on the album Live at the BBC in 1994.
Sorry! :o :smack:
It was 1963, but she doesn’t remember when…
On either the Tonight Show or Letterman, Ringo was asked what it was like to play a concert when he was in the Beatles, and he said it was horrible. He said that all he could do was just tap out a beat, if he tried to do any more than that, it was drowned out by the noise of the crowds, throwing the rest of the band off.
if you want some idea of how ridiculous playing live had become for the Beatles, watch film of John Lennon playing the organ during “I’m Down”, at the Shea Stadium. With his elbow.
It must have been a very tired joke by then.
mm
I’m too young to know anything of Beatlemania, but some of those girls look like they’re in pain! How could the Beatles evoke such hysteria with “Twist and Shout”?
He wasn’t exactly randomly banging away with his elbow. And as sloppy as the performance was, it was still remarkably tight. Link This performance just looks like four guys having a hell of a great time together. And as great as they were as a studio-only band, they were fantastic performers, IMO.
Here’s a poorly-kept secret: most of the music in the Shea Staduim film was looped later in a studio because the performance and sound was so sub-par. If I remember correctly, there are only two songs in it that aren’t redone.
A very funny portrayal of Beatlemania can be seen in the movie I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Funny because it scarcely exaggerates what it was like at the time.
Although I used to do sound engineering, I’m no historian of audio technology. But I feel safe in saying that the quality of sound systems available in the mid-sixties was primitive to say the least. Fishbicycle or someone else may correct me, but I don’t think that many other musical acts played places as large as Candlestick or Shea before the Beatles. The stadiums’ existing sound systems were designed to reproduce speech, not music, and didn’t do a particularly good job even with speech.
Look at this picture from Shea. The leaning rectangular yellow thing at the extreme right is a speaker enclosure. I can’t tell for sure, but I would guess that it contains four or five 10- or 12-inch cone-style speakers. It may not even be a 2-way system (i.e., no tweeters). From the YouTube clip and other pictures, it seems that there was a ring of a couple dozen of these speakers to fill the 56,000 seat stadium. They may have augmented the stadium’s existing system, but it probably wouldn’t have made much difference.
I would guess that if the Beatles had been playing to a completely empty stadium, that sound system would have had about the volume and sound quality of a transistor radio with a 3" speaker for anyone sitting in one of the upper decks. Add 55,600 screaming fans, and you might as well just stay home and listen to the records.
Except that they were the Beatles!
Also, if you’re into Beatles tribute bands, don’t miss the Fab Faux. They’ve got a website and there are plenty of videos on youtube. They play the later stuff live, which I think is fantastic.
I saw them in Shea Stadium. It was nothing special. And I love live music.
Ignore the music for a moment, and concentrate on how much the communication between them (especially from Paul) is done visually, using the guitar. This shouldn’t be necessary during normal performance, and indicates that this was the only way they could communicate.