Beatlemania took its toll on The Beatles and was seemingly the reason the Fab Four quit touring.
The Beatles’ final concert took place on August 29, 1966 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Though they played to 25,000 fans, there were seven thousand unsold tickets and the show was a bust, with the concert losing Tempo Productions money. Hiriing the orchestra to satisfy a local musicians union, as well as paying The Beatles their at-the-time $50,000 expenses, left the company spiralling into an unaffordable situation. But it turned out to be the final gig the band would ever play, bar their performance on the roof of Abbey Road Studios. Fans who have listened to The Beatles’ final performance in the United States were less than impressed.
Though the group would go on to release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band a year later and revolutionise the music scene of the 1960s, their performances in the lead-up were less than stellar. Despite playing well, fans are a little shocked to see they only played eleven songs, with two being covers of other artists. A full setlist can be found below.
- Rock and Roll Music (Chuck Berry cover)
- She’s a Woman
- If I Needed Someone
- Day Tripper
- Baby’s in Black
- I Feel Fine
- Yesterday
- I Wanna Be Your Man
- Nowhere Man
- Paperback Writer
- Long Tall Sally (Little Richard cover)
A post to the r/TodayILearned subreddit had fans discuss the problems of the tour up to that point, including the lacklustre songs and the “crap” venues. One user wrote: “In addition, they only played 11 songs, and the first and last songs were covers.”
Another replied: “Not that you could hear anything anyways. Listening to the audio of the Shea gig, I’m super impressed by how good they played. Not like they could even really hear themselves, let alone anyone else in the band.”
A third added: “The sound systems at the venues they played were crap; suitable as PA’s, no good for music. It’s the main reason they stopped touring; they couldn’t play small venues anymore – the price of superstardom – and the big halls and arenas didn’t have the audio.”
Some fans of the band praised the decision to quit touring, suggesting their interests and influence were better reserved for the studio. One user wrote: “The Beatles quitting playing live shows is one of the best decisions they ever made.”
Another added: “Ringo said that playing live made them worse musicians because you had to keep it basic in the studio. His example was he stopped doing fills on his toms because no one was going to hear that in concert between the screaming and the shitty PAs.
“Once they knew they never had to replicate what they did in a studio to a live audience, it allowed them to become a lot more intricate.” Fatigue within the band for the Beatlemania feeling also contributed to their reason for retiring from the stage. Harrison, during a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles, is believed to have said: “That’s it, then. I’m not a Beatle anymore.”
He later added: “We’d been through 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… and [us] being confined to a little room or a plane or a car. We all had each other to dilute the stress, and the sense of humour was very important… But there was a point where enough was enough.”
