The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl

• 1. Introduction

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  The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl reached number two on the American Billboard chart in 1977, even though its recordings were 12 and 13 years old. It was the first live album the band ever issued with official approval. That is strange for a group whose concerts were famous for shrieking crowds. The tapes had been made long before and judged unfit for sale. Why did they sit unused for so long? What did it take to coax listenable sound out of them? And what does it mean that, on this record, the audience is nearly as loud as the band?

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• 2. Tapes in the Vault

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  In February 1964 Capitol Records wanted to record the Beatles at Carnegie Hall in New York. The American Federation of Musicians would not give the approval it needed, so the plan collapsed.

  Six months later a second chance arrived in Los Angeles. KRLA disc jockey Bob Eubanks booked the band for the 23rd of August 1964 at the Hollywood Bowl. Capitol recorded the show, hoping to release a live album in America.

  The tapes disappointed. Their sound was too poor for commercial release. Capitol rescued only a 48-second excerpt of "Twist and Shout", which it placed on the 1964 documentary album The Beatles' Story.

  Cameras told a better story than the microphones. High-quality black-and-white film of the 1964 show was made and kept. Excerpts of "All My Loving" and "She Loves You" from that night later appeared in The Beatles Anthology documentary series in 1995.

  A year later the band returned to the same venue during its 1965 American tour. Capitol recorded two performances this time. The sound quality of those tapes was just as disappointing. Three concerts were now on tape, and none of them could become an album.

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• 3. Hunger for a Live Album

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  By the 1970s the Beatles stood among the few major recording artists of the 1960s who had never released a live album. Fans noticed, and their demand kept growing.

  In a 1971 Rolling Stone interview, John Lennon accidentally stirred things up. He mistook an obscure Italian compilation, The Beatles in Italy, for a concert record. His words were: "There's one in Italy apparently, that somebody recorded there." A minor frenzy followed.

  Meanwhile the Hollywood Bowl tapes lay untouched in a Capitol vault. That same year, American producer Phil Spector rescued the Get Back tapes that became the Let It Be album. The Hollywood Bowl tapes were then handed to him to see whether he could build something from them. Either he never finished, or his work fell short. Another six years passed without a release.

  The fans found their own route. A complete tape of the August 1964 show slipped out of the vault in the early 1970s. It became the source of a popular bootleg LP, Back in 64 at the Hollywood Bowl. Its sound was below professional standards, but it satisfied desperate collectors, and for years it was the standard recording of that summer's tour.

  The push to act came from a rival label. It planned to release Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962, a poor-quality mono recording that was 15 years old. Capitol's president, Bhaskar Menon, decided to look at the Hollywood Bowl tapes again. The job landed with producer George Martin, who was asked to assemble a listenable official live album.

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• 4. Making the Album

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  George Martin heard the tapes and liked the performances. He was less happy with how they sounded. His first obstacle was practical: the concerts had been captured on three tracks, and he needed a working three-track machine to play them.

  Once he found one, it overheated while running and melted the magnetic tape. Martin and recording engineer Geoff Emerick solved the problem with a vacuum cleaner, blowing air across the deck to keep it cool. The recordings were copied onto 16-track tape, where they were filtered, equalized, edited, and mixed.

  The original sleeve credits the recordings to the 23rd of August 1964 and the 30th of August 1965. That is not the whole truth. "Ticket to Ride" and "Help!" were recorded on the 29th of August 1965. "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" is a composite, stitched together from parts of both 1965 nights.

  Many songs from those concerts stayed off the record. From the 1964 show, the album left out "Twist and Shout", "You Can't Do That", "Can't Buy Me Love", "If I Fell", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", and "A Hard Day's Night". From the 1965 show, it left out "I Feel Fine", "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby", "Baby's in Black", "I Wanna Be Your Man", and "I'm Down".

  Some of those performances found other homes. "Baby's in Black" from 1965 became the B-side of the "Real Love" single in 1996. The 1964 take of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was mixed into the studio version on the album Love in 2006. Those two, plus the 1964 "You Can't Do That" and the 1965 "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby", reached an album in the 2016 reissue.

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• 5. A Late Chart Run

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  The New Musical Express chart in the UK placed the album at number one after its release as a vinyl LP on the 4th of May 1977. Capitol issued it in the United States and Canada, and Parlophone handled the United Kingdom. Eight-track tape and cassette versions appeared at the same time.

  By the 12th of June 1977 the Beatles were at number two on the Billboard chart. They were one of three live albums in its Top Ten. Barry Manilow Live sat at number seven, and Marvin Gaye's Live at the London Palladium at number nine.

  France received a single drawn from the LP. It paired "Ticket to Ride" with "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" on the B-side.

  The record sold well far beyond Britain and America. It reached number three in Austria and number four in Norway. West Germany placed it at number 10, and Australia at number 12. In Japan it went all the way to number one on the Oricon LP chart.

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• 6. Judging the Noise

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  Al Rudis, reviewing the album for The Miami Herald, admitted that every song already existed on other Beatles albums in better quality. Even so, he expected fans to want this one. He believed they were "bound to pull it out again" years later to show their grandchildren. He blamed the sloppiness on primitive amplification and monitoring, yet felt the excitement of the fans and the "bemused wonderment of the boys" came through.

  Cliff Radel of The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote about the "harpyesque screaming" that lasts the entire record. As the album goes on, he said, the screams become white noise, and "their presence never completely departs." He praised George Martin for a "fine job" with the three-track tapes.

  The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop poll of American critics voted the album the 26th best record of 1977. The poll's supervisor, Robert Christgau, placed it 12th on his own list. He wrote that the sound "rings clearly and powerfully through the shrieking" and that "the songs capture our heroes at their highest." He also found the arrangements "tighter (faster, actually) than on record."

  Later writers were warmer toward the sound. Rob Sheffield called it a tribute to the screaming girl fans, saying they "deserve to be the lead instrument on a Beatles album of their own." AllMusic critic Richard S. Ginell admired the band's playing amid the chaos but lamented the separation of music from crowd noise.

  In 2015 Uncut put the album on its list of the "greatest lost albums". It called the record "scarcely a hi-fi listening experience" and praised the "raw, R'n'B-weighted tracks". It also noted the "Great between-song patter, as well."

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• 7. Screams as an Instrument

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  Rolling Stone saw something unexpected in the "nonstop screaming of fans". It argued that the album anticipated a generation of British shoegazer bands such as My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain. In both cases, "catchy songs almost completely drowned out by white noise" were the result.

  Michael Hann of The Guardian made a similar comparison. He described "the screams of thousands and thousands of teenagers, screams that blanket the music in sheets of white noise, for all the world like William Reid's feedback on Psychocandy."

  One listener took the idea personally. As a child, My Bloody Valentine guitarist Kevin Shields heard the album and was fascinated that the band's music was largely hidden beneath the crowd. He later said this was one influence on his aim to create "the most beautiful songs with the most extremeness of physicality and sound". The result was the fuzz-drenched sound of albums like Loveless, released in 1991.

  Shields went further than inspiration. On the My Bloody Valentine song "Clair", released in 1987, he sampled the audience screams from the Beatles record and buried the song beneath them.

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• 8. Live at the Hollywood Bowl

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  In 2016 a call from Capitol Studios gave the story a new turn. Producer Giles Martin, son of George Martin, was told that Capitol had found Hollywood Bowl three-track tapes in its archive. After transferring them, he noticed an improvement over the tapes kept in the London archive.

  He had also been working with a team led by technical engineer James Clarke on demix technology. In his words, it offered "the ability to remove and separate sounds from a single track." The Hollywood Bowl material was an ideal test.

  The result was Live at the Hollywood Bowl, a remixed and remastered version of the album with four extra songs. It came out on the 9th of September 2016, timed to the documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, directed by Ron Howard. The date was seven years to the day after the remastered core catalogue and The Beatles: Rock Band were released.

  The 1977 album had never been officially released on compact disc, so this was its first CD appearance. Several tracks went on sale and streaming early, and pre-orders opened on the iTunes Store. A digital download and streaming versions arrived on the same day. A vinyl edition followed on the 18th of November 2016. A music video of the performance of "Boys", sung by Ringo Starr, promoted the reissue.

  Gwilym Mumford of The Guardian noted that the original 1977 album was regarded as one of the weaker Beatles records. He felt the 2016 remix strengthened both the melodic and the muscular, proto-punk side of the band's live sound.

  The public agreed in numbers. The reissue reached number three on the UK Albums Chart and number seven on the US Billboard 200.

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