LENNON SLURS, “SHUT UP WHILE HE’S TALKIN’” WHEN MCCARTNEY’S INTRO IS INTERRUPTED BY SCREAMS
Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand with Lennon, John’s voice was underamped and didn’t take leads of his own, though that would be fixed for the next broadcast (actually taped earlier on 9 February and aired on 23 February) with Twist And Shout.
It was Paul’s turn to be undermiked when they did I Saw Her Standing There in a segment filmed in Miami’s Deauville Hotel on 16 February, John’s harmonies almost submerging Mccartney’s lead. That performance did give them a chance to present a couple of songs (This Boy and From Me To You) not included in their previous Sullivan sets, and in some ways it has the best fidelity of the three Sullivan stints, as there’s less screaming and Starr’s drums were better recorded.
The 2003 DVD, The Four Complete
Historic Ed Sullivan Shows Featuring The Beatles, has all of their 1964 appearances and the sole occasion on which they again performed on the programme (on 14 August 1965, broadcast on 12 September of that year). It also includes the entire episodes, mixing the likes of comedians (among them, Morecambe & Wise), Cab Calloway, and Acker Bilk with the star attractions. Future Monkee Davy Jones can even be seen in a spot featuring the cast of
Oliver! So, there’s no need to track down unofficial iterations of The Beatles’ audio.
Yet the DVD doesn’t have a 16 February Miami rehearsal, in front of a highly audible audience, that wasn’t broadcast, though the video’s long done the collector rounds.
Featuring the same six numbers they’d perform on the actual Miami broadcast, it was actually fortunate this wasn’t aired, since Mccartney’s microphone cut out almost entirely on I Saw Her Standing There, leaving Lennon’s occasional harmonies as the only vocals. Even when Paul’s mic was fixed, John’s was notably louder for the whole show. The problems were largely fixed for the broadcast, including the height of Lennon’s mike, which was so low he almost had to squat to reach it for She
Loves You.
While the rehearsal performances (sound quality aside) are essentially similar to those on the broadcast, one wonders if John was taking more liberties with his between-song patter than he would have on official airtime. He slurs “shut up while he’s talkin’” when Mccartney’s intro to I Want To Hold Your Hand is interrupted by screams. More controversially, he then goes into his “cripple” imitation, making a distorted face and crooked leg kick when Paul urges, as he habitually did in Beatlemania concerts, the crowd to clap their hands and stamp their feet.
Mccartney does give Lennon a disapproving look and shake of the head, also perhaps part of a routine that had virtually become scripted by 1964. Even by the laxer standards of 60s years ago, however, this bit might have been considered too offensive for US television.
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The best film of The Beatles in performance on their first trip to the US – and, arguably, the best Beatles concert film ever, despite some sonic deficiencies – was made not for network television, but by CBS for a closed-circuit TV broadcast at their first proper American concert on 11 February in Washington, DC. It features their full-length 12-song set, including three tunes (Roll Over Beethoven, I Wanna Be Your Man, and Long Tall Sally) they didn’t play on the Sullivan shows. Had it not been for these, we wouldn’t have any film from the US trip of George or Ringo on lead vocals, as they took on Roll Over Beethoven and I Wanna Be Your Man respectively.
When The Beatles left London just a few days earlier with the knowledge that I Want To Hold Your Hand was No 1 across the Atlantic, they nonetheless might have felt it could have taken at least a little while for young American fans to scream as wildly for them as they did back home. If anything, the crowd at the Washington Coliseum screamed yet louder. Since the group were in a boxing ring, they rotated their setup every few songs so everyone had at least a few minutes of being able to see
The Beatles head-on, Starr actually moving the drum kit himself at times.
When they opened with Roll Over Beethoven, Harrison’s singing could hardly be heard owing to an out-ofcommission microphone. An unfazed
George simply moved over a bit to a better mike near the end of the first verse without betraying any frustration or missing a beat. Such foul-ups didn’t stop there, and Ringo could hardly be heard at all when he took his Starr turn for I Wanna Be Your Man on an outof-order mike.
There’s almost a newsreel flavour to the film, which, though eminently watchable, is dark and grainy with flickers, boasts just a few functional camera angles, and couldn’t have the relative clarity and better instrumental balance of the Sullivan shows. “I was part of the crew, hauling cable and setting up camera positions, but primarily setting up microphones and audio cables,” remembers Steve White. “We couldn’t hear the director over the crowd. We couldn’t hear The Beatles. It was put together quickly and felt more like a wrestling remote. In [a] shot of the ring/ stage, notice the cameraman is trying to press the headset to his ears to block out some of the crowd noise.”
Despite the daunting and sometimes almost amateur-like conditions, the band delivered a tremendously exciting set. Adrenaline might have understandably sped up the usual tempos, especially in Please
Please Me and Till There Was You. Yet in no other film do you see The Beatles as audibly pleased and happy at their reception. After the first verse of This Boy is met with a swell of screams, some of them turn back in apparent surprise to see where the noise is coming from; during All My Loving, John seems to glance at Ringo to share his marvel at the hysteria.
All My Loving itself is a highlight as Paul and George step to their microphones at precisely the right time to pick up their harmonised vocals after the instrumental break. While Lennon usually got more quips in during their onstage announcements than the others, Mccartney offers a good one in his intro for Please Please Me, which had come out more than a year earlier in the UK and would soon be dropped from their live set: “This song was released in America, it didn’t do anything. It was released later again, and... well, it’s doing something, you know?” That even got a big onstage laugh from John himself.
While parts of the film have been used in numerous documentaries, this inexplicably hasn’t come out in its entirety on home video formats. itunes issued it as part of the digital Beatles Box Set in 2010 and made it available separately in 2019. That still marks its only official release, though many fans would prefer it as a physical product rather than a download.
Had things worked out differently, there might have been a more professional audio-only recording – and even official release – of performances from the far more famous concerts The Beatles gave just a day later. On the evening of 12 February, they played two shows at New York’s fabled Carnegie Hall. Capitol Records – now as eager to Capitol-ise on the group as it was indifferent to their American prospects just a few months earlier – intended to record both sets for a live LP.
On 29 January, a Capitol press release announced that “Voyle Glimore, Artists & Repertoire Vice President for Capitol said he would fly to New York and personally record the Carnegie Hall concerts. The resulting album – to be titled ‘The Beatles At Carnegie Hall’ – will probably be issued in April”. Permission was granted by Brian Epstein and concert promoter Sid Bernstein, with Carnegie Hall to be paid a munificent $300 to record the event and another $500 to use the phrase “recorded at Carnegie Hall” on the album cover.
Ultimately and sadly, the concerts weren’t taped by Capitol, apparently because of objections by the American Federation Of Musicians, though the label would record performances by The Beatles (some eventually issued) at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964 and 1965. If the AFM’S goal was to curtail a British Invasion that would seriously cut into concert and record sale revenues by US artists, they were seriously unsuccessful. The Beatles would remain the most popular musical act in the world throughout the rest of the decade, and dozens of other British rockers would follow to score tons of American hits, often touring the continent to huge audiences.
Although they performed one of their Ed Sullivan spots in Miami, most of their week in Florida was an actual and, by this time, rare holiday for the Beatles (see panel). Just three days after returning to London, they were back at EMI starting to work on their third album, much of which would be used on the soundtrack to the film that shared the LP’S name,
A Hard Day’s Night. From 25 February to 1 March, they finished about half the album and two tracks from their upcoming Long Tall Sally EP. Many years later, early takes of You Can’t Do That and And I Love Her showed up on Anthology 1, Harrison already putting the electric 12-string Rickenbacker he’d acquired in the US to use. He even plays it on the solo of this earlier, more rockoriented arrangement of And I Love Her, though he’d work out a more appropriate Mediterranean-flavoured riff for the final version.
Considering the whirlwind of the previous two months, and the pressure to record material for a movie they’d start to film in just a week, it’s kind of insane they also fitted in a nine-song BBC radio session on 28 February (broadcast on 30 March). Six of the tracks appear on Live At The BBC (though From Us To You, a rewording of From Me To You, is edited), and perhaps much more of this session than the 7 January one was given official release owing to its superior sound quality. Five of the songs were the only Beatles performances that were kept in the main BBC Sound Archive (and then on a vinyl disc, not an original tape), at a time when most such recordings weren’t preserved.
By this time. The Beatles were both featuring fewer and fewer surprise selections in their BBC sessions and varying less and less from both their studio versions and previous BBC performances of the songs. This did mark the first time You Can’t Do That was played outside of EMI, and maybe Lennon’s slight slip on the lyric of the first line (where he has something to tell instead of say) is why a later BBC take from 14 July was chosen for On Air – Live At The BBC Volume 2. It’s a shame no otherwise commercially unavailable 1964 BBC sessions, or for that matter other unreleased material from the year, have been officially issued online, as itunes did for The Beatles Bootleg Recordings 1963.
As March began, however, The Beatles had other things on their mind than preparing more creative sets for their BBC sessions, which were dwindling in number anyway. On 2 March, they began filming
A Hard Day’s Night, another key stepping stone to taking their popularity and influence to a yet higher, unprecedented level…
“WE COULDN’T HEAR THE DIRECTOR OVER THE CROWD. WE COULDN’T HEAR THE BEATLES”