Published in · 5 min read · Oct 7, 2018
We were the best live band in the world before we were famous. Nobody could touch us John Lennon.
The Beatles first made their name as a live band. Their residencies in Hamburg and Liverpool earned them devoted local fan base before they were even close to obtaining a record contract.
When George Martin auditioned them, at Abbey Road in July 1962, he was unimpressed with their limited musicianship but won over by their energy and charisma. These were qualities that had thrilled live audiences. Martin sensed that these would compensate for rudimentary technique.
Four years later The Beatles had unprecedented mastery of the recording studio but their stage work, the keystone of their initial appeal had markedly declined. Put simply, the bigger they got, the worse they sounded live.
In small clubs like the Cavern they created an extraordinary rapport with their fans through the raw energy they produced on stage. As the venues got bigger, this intimacy dissipated. They became increasing remote figures producing a sound so poor that it was often difficult to distinguish one song from another.
The Beatles never formally gave up touring. They simply played the last contracted concert of their 1966 world tour in San Francisco and did not arrange any new dates. There was no public announcement.
In a 2016 interview promoting Ron Howard’s documentary Eight Days A Week: The Touring Years, Ringo Starr told Mojo: “The Beatles were never gone. And they could have come back.”
They did, of course, later return to the stage for one celebrated impromptu swansong — the rooftop concert at the Apple Headquarters in Saville Row. But in their final four years as a band, the prospect of The Beatles going on tour became increasingly remote.
There were three key reasons why they stopped playing live: poor sound, exhaustion and unease about their personal security. All three came to a head during their chaotic 1966 World Tour.
In February 1962 The Beatles played at a youth club in Liverpool, using the church hall. The venue was modest but fit for purpose. With its low ceiling and wooden floors it provided excellent acoustics for the local fans who managed to squeeze in.
Two years later they travelled to Washington DC in the immediate wake of their triumph on the Ed Sullivan Show. A concert was hastily arranged in a venue used for basketball and boxing. It set the template for all the live shows that were to come:
An 8000-voice choir performed last night at Washington Coliseum in the premiere of what is likely to become an American classic. Call it in B for want of a better name. The choir was accompanied, incidentally, by four young British artists who call themselves the Beatles. Their part was almost completely obscured by the larger choral group,
The ‘thin voices’ of the visiting group could not compete with the thousands of screaming teenagers. This problem would plague The Beatles for their remaining time as a live act.
The Beatles first tour of America in February 1964 consisted of two television appearances and two concerts: in Washington & New York. Their return for a full tour in August created an unprecedented demand for concert tickets.
To meet this demand, local promoters arranged the biggest venues available. In most cities the only auditoriums physically capable of accommodating tens of thousands of fans were sports stadiums. Unfortunately, this created major sound problems as amplification technology was not yet ready to fill these vast spaces. In many cases the (distorted) sound came through the stadium’s PA system and was a sonic mess. It was also incapable of competing with the incessant screaming.
On stage, The Beatles were reliant on their own puny amplifiers. Crucially they could not hear each other play. Ringo Starr could only keep the beat by watching the gyrating rear ends of his fellow band mates. John Lennon later described how this adversely affected their musicianship:
In 2016 Giles Martin (son of George) remastered tapes from the 1965 tour for the soundtrack of the new documentary ‘Eight Days a Week’. The sound is far superior to that heard by fans at the time — or indeed by The Beatles themselves. As Paul McCartney has said,
“We couldn’t hear ourselves when we were live, as there was so much screaming going on.”
One option might have been to have played at least some smaller gigs — Paul McCartney did with Wings a decade later. By this point, however, The Beatles were trapped by the scale of their success. A chaotic return to the Cavern in August 1963 had demonstrated that there was no route back to intimacy of their club-playing days.
2. Exhaustion
By 1966 The Beatles had endured nearly three years of relentless Beatlemania. Elation at their initial success had soured as they faced night after night of screaming ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ over the screams of teenage fans.
Amidst all the adulation, The Beatles became increasingly self-conscious about their sloppy playing. They were embarrassed by their famous performance on the Ed Sullivan Show, for example and knew that America had only seen a pale shadow of the live band that had thrilled audiences at the Star Club and the Cavern.
Of course, most of the girls who attended Beatles concerts were not there to appreciate the subtleties of the musicianship. Whatever the band played was good enough. This mean that there was little incentive for them to put in the work necessary to improve. Nor did it help that Lennon, especially, hated rehearsing. When Paul later suggested regular sessions to prepare for Magical Mystery Tour he responded with great umbrage: “We’re grown men!”.
The Beatles first came to the US came four months after the Kennedy assassination. From the outset they were uneasy about threats to their safety and the ‘bigger than Jesus’ controversy made touring the US increasingly tense.
Live concerts were potentially dangerous as security was often chaotic. A particularly unpleasant experience in the Philippines heightened this sense of vulnerability.
On August 29 1966, The Beatles played the last concert of their US tour — it would prove to be their final scheduled concert.
