Beatles (41 page)

‘I could still do it again today. The Beatles are as popular in the States as they ever were. I’ve offered them one million dollars for two shows at the Shea Stadium. That offer still stands. It would have to be exclusive in the USA. One million dollars. That’s my offer.’

Exactly a year later, in August 1966, they did their fourth and final American tour. This was again a shorter one, but it made most money of all. Nat Weiss, who had been appointed head of Nemperor Artists in New York, helped to organize it. He had been practising as a divorce attorney in New York for 15 years when he met Brian Epstein, socially, and through him became interested in pop music. In June 1966 Brian decided to bring all the NEMS bits and pieces in America under one office. Nemperor was named after the cable address of Nems.

It was just before this tour that John’s remark about Jesus Christ hit America. He had originally said that the Beatles ‘were now more popular than Christ’ several months previously in a Maureen Cleave interview in the London
Evening Standard
. No one had objected or remarked on it publicly. But when it was reproduced and went round America, out of context, it caused a furore.

‘A friend rang me to say they were burning Beatle records in Nashville, Tennessee,’ says Nat Weiss. ‘I rang Brian and said I thought it serious enough to warrant his arrival in New York.’

Brian was very worried, as the Ku Klux Klan came out and Beatle effigies were burned throughout the Bible Belt. He considered cancelling several appearances, even though it would have meant paying back one million dollars. ‘I didn’t want any chance of the boys being harmed, whatever the cost.’ But the promoters and mayors and local officials said there would be much more trouble from fans if any concerts were cancelled. A slight retraction was put out from John, saying he hadn’t meant it, and the tour went off as planned. The concerts in the Bible Belt were the best of all.

Their other foreign tours during these two years included France, Italy, Spain and Germany (a huge welcome in Hamburg). From Germany, in June 1966, they flew to Tokyo for their one and only Japanese series of concerts. The Japanese Beatle fans turned out to be the most knowledgeable of all, judging by the programme they produced for the concerts. This was the most lavish and exhaustive programme from any of their concerts anywhere. It contained, amongst other academic information, the title of every song they’d ever sung up to that time and its chart position. Nobody in London had ever worked it out in such detail. Brian kept a copy of it in his desk as a work of reference.

From Japan, they returned home via Manila in the Philippines, and wished they hadn’t. This visit resulted in the first and only scene of real violence throughout their touring career. All those times they’d nearly been killed in Britain and America was due to over-affection. In Manila they were kicked and punched by officials and police. This was the result of a supposed act of discourtesy towards the president’s wife. She expected them to turn up at the palace after she had invited them. They said they’d never been invited. The president’s wife was very hurt.

In Britain, Beatlemania hardly abated. The switchboard at University College Hospital was jammed when Ringo had his tonsils out. Hourly bulletins were issued. Thousands of fans wrote asking for his old tonsils. Ringo announced that no one was getting them. They were to be burned.

In October 1965, the Queen and Prince Philip were on tour in Canada. One of the biggest stories of the tour in the British press was when Prince Philip was quoted as saying that the Beatles were ‘on the wane’. This got headlines everywhere. The London
Evening Standard
did a poll to find out if it was true – five out of seven said it wasn’t true. A couple of days later, Brian Epstein got a personal telegram from Prince Philip in which he explained that what he’d really said was ‘I think the Beatles are away.’

It shows that famous personages were still coming out with Beatle references, and were very worried if they came out wrong. But more than that, it shows there was now a bit of wishful thinking around. Everybody was sure the Beatles must be on the wane. They couldn’t possibly keep up the same pace.

But they were waxing as strongly as ever. After each wave of bubble-pricking, they brought out yet another record that went straight to number one. In December 1965, when ‘Day Tripper’ came out and went direct to number one, it was their tenth consecutive number-one record in the British charts.

That same month, December 1965, they started what was to become, although no one said so at the time, their last British tour. They did one concert after that, on 1 May 1966, at Wembley, which is the last live concert the Beatles have done in Britain.

At long last, one of their singles didn’t immediately reach number one, although after a week it did. This was ‘Paperback Writer’ in June 1966. Even more surprisingly, because it was much better, ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’, in February 1967, didn’t get to number one at all. Perhaps by that time the fans knew they were never going to see the Beatles singing in the flesh again.

Their last live appearance anywhere in the world was at the end of their American tour, on 29 August 1966.

‘During that last show in San Francisco,’ says Nat Weiss, ‘Brian was very sad and almost pathetic. It was the first time I’d ever seen him pathetic. He suddenly said, “What do I do now? What happens to my life? That’s it. Should I go back to school and learn something else?”

‘He was obviously greatly saddened. Then he took hold of himself and said no. He
would
carry on and do something.’

There was no denial or confirmation about giving up touring when they came back to England. This led to some confusion, and rumours began spreading that they were splitting up.

The fan club and
Beatles Monthly
were swamped by letters from fans. Mrs Harrison, George’s mother, got so fed up answering the same query that she had several hundred copies of a letter duplicated, saying they were
not
splitting. She said they were very busy on an LP, which would keep them going all over Christmas. ‘So I think this proves that they have no plans what-so-ever for parting company. All my best wishes. Louise Harrison. (Mrs)’

They had decided some time before to stop touring, but it was difficult, because of contractual arrangements, to say so straight away. Arthur Howes, for example, had been hoping for another British tour. British fans had felt out of it for a long time. Since their first number-one days, they had been seen live by far more people in the States, on their four tours before huge open-air audiences, than on their seven tours round the smaller British halls and theatres.

There was no definite agreement with Arthur Howes that they had to get out of, just the natural expectation he had that they’d go on for a bit longer.

‘In this field,’ he says, ‘I look upon the life of an artist as five years. I know, because that’s how it always happens. After five years, their generation has grown up and there are new artists with new audiences. The Beatles are different. The Beatles will last for ever. They’ve no need to worry. But I did, when they stopped touring in 1965. They didn’t even do three years of touring.’

In Britain a full house at the biggest theatres in Manchester, Birmingham or Glasgow is only around the 2,500 mark. The biggest theatre in Britain, of the type used for packaged shows, is the Hammersmith Odeon, which seats 4,000.

Even ten full houses in Hammersmith still wouldn’t equal a
full house at the Shea Stadium, which, as we have seen, attracted 55,000 for the Beatles’ first concert there.

Because of the high percentage the Beatles took – 50 per cent in the end – and also because they toured for such a comparatively short time, Mr Howes made more from touring Cliff Richard than he made from the Beatles. Between October 1958 and February 1963, Cliff Richard did eleven tours with Arthur Howes. Between February 1963 and December 1965, the Beatles did seven tours, six of them with Arthur Howes.

‘The biggest thing the Beatles did was to open up the American market to all British artists. Nobody had ever been able to get in before the Beatles. They alone did it. I had brought over lots of American stars, but nobody had gone over there. They just weren’t interested. By opening up the States, the Beatles made an enormous amount of money for this country.’

Once it was made clear to Arthur Howes and to various other people that touring was over, the Beatles let it be known publicly. One of the reasons given was that their music had developed so much, using full orchestras and electronic devices, that they couldn’t possibly perform it on stage any more.

This is true, but the most important reason was that for a long, long time they had hated what they were doing. They disliked dragging round the world, appearing publicly in a glass box like a peep show. They disliked performing on stage in the same old way. They thought it was a farce, a mockery.

Neil and Mal, their road managers, disliked the tensions, the panic and chaos of it all.

‘Open-air concerts in the States were terrible,’ says Mal. ‘We were in this baseball field once. There they were, stuck out on their own in the middle of the field with 30,000 kids screaming and waiting to hear them. I said to the promoter, where’s the outlet, chief? He said, what. They play guitars, don’t they? He hadn’t realized they used
electric
guitars. We had a right panic getting electricians to lay on wires in time.

‘When it looked like rain in the open air I used to be scared stiff. Rain on the wires and everybody would have been blown
up, yet if they’d stopped the show, the kids would have stampeded.’

‘We learned always to go on at the very last minute, if not later,’ says Neil. ‘If we went too early they just got mobbed on the way from the dressing room. But if they had to run like mad after they were supposed to be on, people would get out of the way and let them through. We did this with our first Ed Sullivan show in New York. He was sweating like a pig, convinced we were going to be late. It was a live show as well. He blamed me for it all, for just doing it.’

‘Touring was dangerous sometimes,’ says Ringo, ‘but we never thought about it. A plane did catch fire once in Texas and scared everyone. We flew from Liverpool to London once with a window open. We were a bit worried when our death was predicted on a plane in the States. That wasn’t nice.’

This was by a woman who had predicted President Kennedy’s death. Some of the other acts refused to go on the Beatles’ plane. Mal wrote his last letter to his wife, Lil, convinced he was going to die.

‘There was one near escape at the Cow Palace in the States,’ says Ringo. ‘The crowds surged forward and got on the limousine we were supposed to be in. They squashed the roof in. We could have been killed, but we were safe in an ambulance with seven sailors. That’s how they were smuggling us that time.

‘It was just one long hustle. You’d have a hustle with the police, then the theatre people, then the hotel people. We always thought we were safe when we got into our hotel rooms, but we’d have to contend with the hotel staff as well, wanting autographs. You could see them thinking why not, what’s the matter with you, you’ve only worked half an hour today. But we’d probably travelled 2,000 miles since the last half-hour concert and not eaten or slept properly for two weeks.

‘The American police could be as bad as anybody, demanding autographs. I caught one once going through our pockets.’

George says that as early as the first big American tour, in
August 1964, they were all beginning to dislike it. Even making the tours shorter didn’t make them any more enjoyable.

‘It was like the end of a cycle. In Hamburg we had played for up to eight hours at a stretch, loving it all, getting to know each other and what we could do. It was a real freak-out in those days, the things we did were really wild.

‘Back in Liverpool we were doing shorter hours, but it was still as enjoyable. We were part of the audience. We lived our lives with them. We never rehearsed an act. We had to get more polished eventually, but the Cavern was fantastic. It was so spontaneous, all jokes and laughs. It was so intimate.

‘Then came touring, which was great at first, doing an even shorter, more polished act and working out new songs. But it got played out. We got in a rut, going round the world. It was a different audience each day, but we were doing the same things. There was no satisfaction in it. Nobody could hear. It was just a bloody big row. We got worse as musicians, playing the same old junk every day. There was no satisfaction at all.’

‘It was wrecking our playing,’ says Ringo. ‘The noise of the people just drowned anything. Eventually I just used to play the off beat, instead of a constant beat. I couldn’t hear myself half the time, even on the amps, with all the noise.

‘We’d get put in silly positions in the halls so we’d be too far away from each other. On stage we used to play things faster than on the records, mainly because we couldn’t hear what we were doing. I used to come in at the wrong time sometimes because I’d no idea where we were at. We just used to mime half the time to the songs, especially if your throat was feeling rough.

‘In the end no one enjoyed touring. You can’t really. Once you’ve got to manufacture it, it doesn’t work. You’ve got to give to receive. Some nights we’d feel it had been terrible. We didn’t give anything. That was when we decided we should give it up, before others started disliking it as well.’

‘When we were away from it for a while,’ says John, ‘it was like the school holidays. You hadn’t done any work for a bit and
you’d just remember the laughs. You’d quite look forward to it again. Until you got back and were fed up.

‘It’s like the army, whatever the army’s like. One big sameness which you have to go through. One big mass. I can’t remember any tours.

‘We’ve had enough of performing for ever. I can’t imagine any reason which would make us do any sort of tour ever again.’

Paul says they would do a live stage show, if they could think of a way of doing a stage show that was completely different. But nobody can think of a new way. It looks as if Sid Bernstein will be keeping his million dollars.