The Beatles' 1966 US tour

• 1. Introduction

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  The Beatles' 1966 US tour ended not with a triumphant farewell but with a firecracker thrown onstage in Memphis and a drummer accidentally singing into the counterweight of a microphone stand. Nineteen performances across North America in August of that year, 17 in the United States and two in Canada, marked the third and final time the band would tour the continent. What brought them there was a world tour already bruised by death threats in Tokyo and a near-riot in Manila. What followed them across America was a controversy sparked by a single remark John Lennon had made months earlier in a London newspaper interview. By the time the tour ended in San Francisco on the 29th of August 1966, George Harrison was heard to say on the flight home that he was no longer a Beatle. The questions worth asking are how a band at the height of their powers came to that point, and what it means that their last paying audience ever was a crowd of 25,000 people in California, with 7,000 empty seats behind them.

• 2. The Road to America

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  Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, announced the North American tour in early March 1966, while in New York. It was planned as the band's third consecutive summer visit to the US, and it formed the second leg of a larger world tour. The first leg had already left deep marks. In Tokyo, the band received death threats and were confined to their hotel suite between engagements. In Manila, they were manhandled by citizens and military personnel after a perceived slight to Filipino First Lady Imelda Marcos.

  At that point the band had already privately agreed to stop touring. The Manila episode confirmed what they had been feeling: their tours had grown too large and too fraught for anyone to manage safely. When journalists asked George Harrison after Manila what the group planned next, he said: "We're going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans."

  That sardonic prediction would prove more accurate than anyone hoped.

• 3. The "Jesus" Firestorm

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  John Lennon had made the remark in February 1966, in an interview with Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard for her series titled "How Does a Beatle Live?". Cleave noted Lennon's interest in Christianity and religions, and he spoke at length about what he saw as the church's decline. His exact words were: "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I'll be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me." In the UK and initially in the US, the comments drew no serious reaction.

  The trigger came on the 29th of July, when the American teen magazine Datebook reprinted Cleave's article with the most incendiary line placed prominently on the cover. Christian fundamentalists, particularly across the US South, reacted with outrage. Led by WAQY in Birmingham, Alabama, radio stations organised bonfires where listeners were invited to burn Beatles records and merchandise, and several initiated outright bans on the band's music.

  Epstein flew to New York and gave a press conference on the 5th of August. He told reporters he was prepared to cancel shows if any promoter wished to back out, but according to Beatles road manager Neil Aspinall, none chose to do so. The controversy also overlapped with the backlash over the so-called butcher cover, a photograph Capitol Records had quickly withdrawn from the band's North American LP Yesterday and Today. Adding to the charged atmosphere, a comment Paul McCartney made in a radio interview on the 1st of August, describing Americans as obsessed with money, circulated widely and darkened the mood further.

  Derek Taylor, the band's former press officer, wrote in his column for Disc and Music Echo that America was not a safe place for the Beatles to be visiting at that moment. Richard Goldstein, reporting for The Village Voice from London, noted that Revolver, the band's new album, seemed to be everywhere in the city, as if Londoners were rallying around the group in response to the hostility coming from the US.

• 4. Threats and Atmosphere

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  Early August in America brought the band's arrival into a country already unsettled. Race riots had broken out in Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha and Philadelphia. Charles Whitman, a former US Marine, had carried out a killing spree in Texas. The Beatles were walking into a country that felt, in Taylor's words, not too settled at the moment.

  When the band arrived in Chicago on the 11th of August for the start of the tour, Epstein and press officer Tony Barrow arranged a press conference at the Astor Tower Hotel so that Lennon could address the controversy directly. Lennon stated that he had only been commenting on the decline in churchgoing, that he had made a mistake in comparing the Beatles' following with that of organised religion, and that he "never meant it as a lousy anti-religious thing". The conference was broadcast on all the major US television networks and by ITV in the UK.

  In a separate private meeting, Epstein asked Datebook editor Art Unger to surrender his press pass, worried that the magazine and the Beatles' management would be accused of staging the controversy as a publicity stunt. Unger refused. According to Unger's own account, Lennon backed him fully when they later spoke.

  Lennon's public apology reduced some of the pressure. WAQY cancelled its planned Beatles bonfire, scheduled for the 19th of August, and some stations lifted their music bans. But the controversy hung over every remaining date on the tour. Lennon was asked about it at press conference after press conference, and the strain on him and his bandmates became increasingly visible.

• 5. Memphis and the Firecracker

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  The most charged stop on the tour was Memphis, Tennessee on the 19th of August. The city council voted to cancel the two scheduled shows at the Mid-South Coliseum rather than allow municipal facilities to be used to, in their words, "ridicule anyone's religion". Epstein pressed ahead regardless. The Ku Klux Klan nailed a Beatles LP to a wooden cross and vowed vengeance. Conservative groups staged further public burnings of Beatles records, and around 8,000 locals attended an anti-Beatles rally elsewhere in the city. Members of the Klan demonstrated outside the Coliseum on the day of the shows.

  The afternoon concert passed without incident. Then, during the evening performance, an audience member threw a lit firecracker onto the stage. It did not strike any of the band members. But the sound was enough. Tony Barrow later recalled that everyone at the side of the stage, along with the three Beatles performing, immediately looked at John Lennon. Barrow said: "We would not at that moment have been surprised to see that guy go down." Barrow described the day as one marked by a "nasty atmosphere" and a "very tense and pressured kind of day".

  Lennon had made a half-hearted joke about the Memphis concert at an earlier press conference. The reality of being on that stage, knowing what the crowd outside had been doing hours before, was something altogether different from a joke.

• 6. Crowd Chaos and Logistics

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  Cleveland's Municipal Stadium hosted nearly 30,000 fans on the 14th of August. As the Beatles began "Day Tripper", more than 2,000 fans broke through the security barriers separating the audience from the elevated stage. The band stopped playing and took shelter backstage. It took thirty minutes for security to restore order. Commentators at the time drew a connection between the episode and the race riots that had recently taken place in Cleveland's east side.

  Los Angeles provided a different kind of chaos. After the concert at Dodger Stadium on the 28th of August, the band was unable to leave for roughly two hours. Around 100 private security personnel had been assigned to handle a crowd of 45,000 fans. Approximately 7,000 of those fans broke through the fencing and blocked the armoured van arranged for the band's exit. Two separate attempts to fool the crowd with decoy vehicles failed before the local police were able to help the Beatles escape. Some fans were injured and others arrested.

  In private meetings with Epstein, Lennon and Harrison had made clear they were no longer willing to stay silent about the Vietnam War. At the time, 90 per cent of Americans still supported their country's involvement in the conflict. At the Toronto press conference on the 17th of August, Lennon stated his support for American draft-dodgers fleeing to Canada. When the band reached New York on the 22nd of August, Lennon again criticised US involvement, Harrison denounced war in general, and Lennon stated that all four Beatles believed US participation in Vietnam was wrong. The Shea Stadium press conference the following day descended into an argument between journalists over the band's political stance.

• 7. The Last Night in San Francisco

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  Candlestick Park in San Francisco, California was the site of the Beatles' final paid concert, on the 29th of August 1966. The band took the stage at 9:27 pm to an audience of 25,000, with 7,000 tickets remaining unsold. A local company, Tempo Productions, handled the arrangements. Because of the reduced ticket sales combined with the band's prearranged $50,000 performance fee and the added cost of hiring an orchestra to satisfy the local musicians union, the concert ran at a financial loss for the company.

  McCune Sound Services of San Francisco provided the sound equipment, and their log-book entry for the job includes the note: "Bring everything you can find!" Mort Field, who mixed the sound from a dugout at the venue, recalled that the Beatles showed no concern about audio quality. At one point, Ringo Starr sang into the counterweight of the boom stand microphone at his drum kit rather than the microphone itself.

  Each member of the band brought a camera to the show, aware it was their last. McCartney asked Barrow to make a rough audio tape from the field. Barrow ran out of tape during "Long Tall Sally" and did not flip it over, so the bootleg recordings that now circulate widely are missing part of the final song. Barrow gave the original tape to McCartney and kept a single copy locked in a drawer in his office desk.

  After the show, an armoured car took the band to the airport. They flew to Los Angeles, arriving at 12:50 am. During the flight, Harrison said: "That's it, then. I'm not a Beatle anymore." He later described what the tours had become: "every race riot, and every city we went to there was some kind of a jam going on, and police control, and people threatening to do this and that." Author Jonathan Gould noted that San Francisco held a particular significance as the venue for the final show, since the city would host the first Human Be-In in January 1967, an event sponsored by the Family Dog collective, whose vision was to make San Francisco "America's Liverpool".

• 8. What the Tour Left Behind

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  Press coverage throughout the tour, typical of the era, concentrated on audience sizes, the volume of fans' screams, and box office receipts. Reporters devoted less attention to the music than to the spectacle of Beatlemania appearing to recede. The high-pitched screaming that had defined earlier tours was reduced, and journalists speculated about the movement's end.

  Lennon and Harrison both noted during the tour that their American crowds now included more young men than before. Harrison welcomed the shift. He attributed it to the band's musical development on Rubber Soul and Revolver, and the broadened audience helped seed what would become an identifiable new youth culture in the US, one that found organised expression in student demonstrations at Berkeley from late 1966 onward.

  Ticket sales at some venues told a complicated story. At Shea Stadium, attendance came in at around 45,000, roughly 10,000 below the world record the band had set there in August 1965. Author Nicholas Schaffner later wrote that while the numbers fell short of the 1965 total, selling as many tickets as the Beatles did in 1966 remained something no other act at the time could have come close to matching. Epstein's press release on the 28th of August claimed that by the end of the tour, 400,000 people would have seen the band across all the shows. The shows were not failures. They were, in every measurable sense, enormous. They were simply the last ones there would ever be.