Paul McCartney Said He Was Usually Optimistic About The Beatles Touring, but One Performance Changed That
Paul McCartney said he was usually optimistic about The Beatles touring, but one performance changed that forever. At the height of Beatlemania in 1966, the Fab Four were getting sick of performing for audiences who only wanted to scream and run at them. Touring the world had taken its toll on their mental and physical health.
Paul was usually optimistic about The Beatles touring until one performance
The Beatles experienced many frightful things while touring the world during Beatlemania. They almost got killed in Manila, their plane caught fire, they got death threats in Memphis, and everywhere they went, it was constant pandemonium.
In Here Comes The Sun: The Spiritual And Musical Journey Of George Harrison, Joshua M. Greene wrote that during a concert in Kansas City in September 1964, “hundreds of screaming fans broke through police barriers and attacked the band’s mobile dressing room.
“To restore order, police retaliated by attacking the mob with rubber billy clubs… The Beatles had managed to survive the circumstances of their career thanks to a limitless supply of friendship and an ability to laugh at anything, even tragedy—but the humor had gone out of their lives.”
Paul wrote about The Beatles touring in The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. He explained that he was usually the optimistic Beatle who said, “Don’t worry, guys. It’ll blow over. We’ll figure it out.”
However, his views quickly changed after The Beatles performed at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Their chaotic performance was the “catalyst for the shift from playing live to focusing on the studio,” Paul wrote. “When we all got totally fed up.
“Finally, I agreed with the other three and was as pissed as they were. We’d been stuck in a steel-lined meat wagon, sliding around just like cattle in a boxcar, as we were being taken away from Candlestick Park. That was the last straw. We’d had it.”
The Beatles realized that touring had become ‘impersonal’
According to George Harrison, fans had extinguished the fun of touring a year before Candlestick Park. By the time The Beatles performed at Shea Stadium on August 15, 1965, they didn’t care what would happen. Touring had become “impersonal.”
A day after the concert, a reporter asked John Lennon, “Does it bother you that you can’t hear what you sing during concerts?” He replied, “No, we don’t mind. We’ve got the records at home.” It was the usual witty remark, but The Beatles hated it underneath.
A reporter asked George how he felt about the near riot at Shea Stadium. He replied, “It was very impersonal. Worst of all . . . we really didn’t care anymore.”
Nothing particularly awful happened at Candlestick Park in 1966. It was the usual mayhem. However, something in The Beatles snapped that day, and they cut touring out of their lives forever.
Once the band was aboard their plane following the performance, Greene wrote that George said to his bandmates, “Well, that’s it. I’m finished. I’m not a Beatle anymore.” None of the screaming fans who attended that day knew they’d be the last crowd to see The Beatles perform.
The band returned to the recording studio and began their experimental phase
In The Lyrics, Paul said sometimes people thought “the focus on studio work had begun to take its toll, keeping The Beatles from playing concerts.” That wasn’t the case.
“It’s exactly the opposite,” Paul explained. “The live playing was taking us away from recording.”
When The Beatles returned to the recording studio after cutting out touring, they realized they had abundant time. So, they began to experiment. It was just them, their producer George Martin, and an engineer. Six artists who were “making something, diligently and carefully, having a lot of fun and a lot of artistic freedom,” Paul wrote.
“Out on the road it was pretty much the opposite. We were bundled into a car or a hotel room or suffocated in a lift or stuck in a crowd with everyone screaming.”
Cutting out touring was the best decision The Beatles ever made.
