The stage début of ‘Yesterday’ took place in the unlikely setting of a TV variety show broadcast from Blackpool, the seaside resort north of Liverpool. Blackpool Night Out was an independent television programme presented by comedian brothers Mike and Bernie Winters, broad family entertainment featuring comics, dancers and singers. Televised live, the show was watched by millions of people across the country. So it was that the band took the stage at the Blackpool ABC on Sunday 1 August 1965 to promote Help! Halfway through their set, George announced that Paul was going to sing the next song alone. He made the introduction with a sarcastic reference to another popular TV show, Opportunity Knocks, in which neophyte acts tried to break into the big time by winning the votes of a television audience: ‘And so for Paul McCartney of Liverpool,’ George said, in impersonation of presenter Hughie Green, ‘Opportunity Knocks!’
‘Thank you, George,’ muttered his friend, now alone on stage with his acoustic guitar. A spotlight focused on Paul as he mimed to the EMI recording of ‘Yesterday’, a song so sad that the girls in the audience momentarily ceased screaming. At the end John led the other band members back on stage, handing Paul a joke bouquet of flowers that came apart in his hand. ‘Thank you, Ringo,’ Lennon said snidely to McCartney. ‘That was wonderful.’
SHEA STADIUM
From Blackpool to New York! The show the Beatles played two weeks later at the William A. Shea Municipal Stadium in New York City was nothing less than the first ever stadium pop concert.
Hitherto, British pop bands worked their way up from clubs to dance halls before establishing themselves on a national circuit of cinemas and theatres. Some – the Hammersmith Odeon, the London Palladium – were larger and more prestigious than others, holding around 3,000 people, and occasionally bands played the Royal Albert Hall, which seated over 5,000, but few artists ever played anything larger. The Beatles, being unique, had played to bigger audiences in North America – 18,700 at the Hollywood Bowl; 20,000 at Empire Stadium in Vancouver, big arenas by modern standards – but no music act, British or American, had ever attempted to put on a show in a sports stadium. No act had the pulling power to fill so many seats and, technically speaking, it was impossible to amplify a band adequately in such a capacious venue.
It was Sid Bernstein who had the chutzpah to make history. Having successfully booked the Beatles for two shows at Carnegie Hall on their first visit to the United States, the ebullient New York promoter realised he could have sold those seats many times over. He started talking to Brian Epstein about putting the boys on at Madison Square Garden in ’65. The Garden then held 17,000 people.* When he did his sums, Sid saw that even this venue wasn’t large enough to accommodate all the New Yorkers who might want to see the boys perform. ‘I’m changing my mind. I’d like to do them at Shea Stadium,’ Sid told Brian over the telephone, referring to the home of the New York Mets.
‘How big is that?’ asked Epstein.
‘Fifty-five thousand seats,’ replied Sid. This meant that the Beatles could play to as many people in one night as they could over three weeks at Carnegie Hall. When Brian had digested the data, he expressed cautious excitement.
‘I don’t want an empty seat in the house, Sid.’
‘Brian, I’ll give you $10 for every empty seat.’
Neither Sid nor Brian needed to worry. All 55,600 tickets – priced around $5.00, plus taxes – sold. Not only would the Beatles at Shea Stadium be the biggest show any act had played, it would be the Beatles’ highest-earning single engagement at $180,000, worth about $1.2 million in today’s money (or £802,352).
Sunday 15 August 1965 was a beautiful late summer day. Fans started arriving early, girls dressed in light dresses, tanned from the long holidays, many accompanied by their parents. Gradually the layers of bleacher seats filled, the noise level escalating as thousands of girls decided to start screaming early. They carried on screaming through the sunny day, through all the support acts – a peculiar selection of singers, jazz bands, disco dancers and celebrity announcers – enjoying a collective and prolonged hysterical fit. Many got so worked up they fainted. Late in the afternoon the Beatles boarded a helicopter in Manhattan and were flown out to the gig, everybody crowding the windows to peer down at the horseshoe-shaped stadium. In the sulphurous gloaming, 55,000 fans looked up at the red, white and blue chopper hovering overhead and, realising the Beatles were on board, many took flash pictures ‘to create a momentary display of dazzling light that lit up the evening sky’, as Tony Barrow later wrote. When they landed, the boys were transported to the stadium in a Wells Fargo armoured truck.
Around a quarter past nine, when the temperature had dropped and it was properly dark, Ed Sullivan, whose company was filming the show, sidled on stage to make the introduction. ‘Here are the Beatles!’ White noise. ‘Here they come.’ Louder noise. Unlike a modern stadium show, where the audience’s first view of the act is the moment they appear on stage, the Beatles ran out of the tunnel under the stands, as if they were about to play a baseball game, sprinting across the diamond to take their places on the stage. Another way in which this seminal stadium show was arranged more like a sports event than a rock concert, as we have become accustomed to, was that fans weren’t permitted to sit or stand in front of the stage. Everybody was seated back in the bleachers, though virtually the entire audience was on their feet now, screaming, many girls trying to scale the mesh fence penning them back while fatherly cops tried to persuade them to be sensible and get down.
John, Paul, George and Ringo, wearing beige, army-style tunics with black trousers and Wells Fargo badges, looked happy and excited. Ever the professional, Paul paused to thank Mr Sullivan for his introduction, then joined the others in their usual short, frantic set, a set that looks puny and amateurish in such a vast space when viewed today on DVD, especially so in comparison to the thunderous stadium concerts Paul McCartney now plays. Each short song was prefaced with a few corny words of introduction. ‘We’d like to carry on with a song from Yesterday and Today,’ said George, for example, referring to the Capitol album of that name. ‘This one is a single as well, and it features Paul singing a very nice song called “Yesterday”.’ The sound was appalling, like listening to somebody singing down the telephone from Australia. Normally the Beatles used 30-watt Vox speakers on stage; for Shea they had special 100-watt speakers, but the music was essentially relayed via the PA system, as used for baseball announcements. Also, the acoustics in an open-air stadium are different to a theatre. Sound is blown about with the wind. And, of course, there were no Jumbo screens to help the fans see the performers. Despite all these shortcomings, almost everybody at Shea had a great time. Among the thousands straining to see and hear were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who went on to perfect the stadium rock tour with the Rolling Stones in the Eighties and Nineties. A bank of white lights were shining directly at Paul, making him sweat profusely on what was already a warm evening. The show was being filmed by cameramen standing directly in front of the stage. Nevertheless, all the Beatles had a ball, with John behaving much as he had back at the Kaiserkeller when he got over-excited: pulling faces, speaking in tongues and stopping short to comment on what he saw. ‘Ah! Look at ’er. Ah!’ he said as he watched cops chase a stray fan running across the diamond. By the time they came to the last song, John was playing the organ with his elbows and laughing his head off, George giggling along with him. Paul, ‘sweating cobs’ under the lights, as they say in northern England,* remained focused, as if he had done it all before, though even he had to laugh at the end.
After New York the Beatles played a series of arena concerts across North America, working their way west to California where five days had been set aside for rest and recuperation. The boys ensconced themselves in a house in the Hollywood Hills, where they hung out with actor Peter Fonda and members of the Byrds, and where John