49th Anniversary of the Last Beatles Concert: Candlestick Park

"It was like being in the eye of a hurricane, so there was never a time when you thought, you thought, 'what's going on?' you know, that's it, that was about as deep as it got, 'what is happening?' or what, you'd suddenly wake up in the middle of one, a concert or a happening and you think 'How did I get here?' you know 'the last thing I remember was playing music in club and then next minute this' but we never thought about it too much, because it was an ongoing thing, it was happening to us and it was hard to see, and we were just in the middle being ushered from room to room." -John Lennon, 1975

Candlestick Park in San Francisco, California became the last place to witness the glory of The Beatles live in concert. With the exception of the rooftop performance atop Apple Studios near Piccadilly Circus in London in January of 1969, this day marks the last time John, Paul, George, and Ringo played together to a roaring crowd of thousands. It's now a bygone era, one that can never be recaptured and that fans like me are continually trying to understand in addition to, I suspect, Paul and Ringo who are still trying to understand. The tours only lasted four years, barely spanning 1962 to 1966, with only two of those years consisting of international gigs. Candlestick Park was the tipping point for the boys. In The Beatles Anthology and subsequent interviews after the Beatles' split, the concerts get a bad wrap. By 1966, The Beatles were struggling to generate relevant music for a changing decade as thousands of young girls screamed for the long-gone music of who had increasingly become emotionally and intellectually much older men. Experimentation with drugs, London's underground culture, and Eastern philosophies changed the band's dynamic and goals. John was only a few short months away from recording the game-changer: "Strawberry Fields Forever." With this song, the bopping black and white mop-tops were faded like the television screens they graced in 1964 while the brightly colored soldiers of Sgt. Pepper entered the fray. The point is, with the final concert at Candlestick Park, The Beatles fundamentally changed in every way. 

But let's not be too hasty to skip the touring years in favor of the psychedelic creative energies to come in the latter half of their career. John, with the quote above, might have felt overwhelmed by Brian Epstein's relentless touring schedule, but it deserves so much more credit than it gets. The diverse song-scape of the post-1966 Beatles often beats out the earlier years in terms of interest and study. But without the incredible momentum generated by girls mercilessly separating their hair from their scalps, beginning in the dark, dank clubs of the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, Germany, the genius that we now understand as the  four lads who shook the world would have been more than understated; it would have been nonexistent. 

And so, it is on the 49th anniversary of this momentous occasion that I make the case for the early Beatles. The prequel is just as important as the sequel in most cases, and understanding the chaotic whirlwind of a 1960s rock n' roll tour makes the second half of The Beatles' career that much more meaningful. It explains everything, the choices they made in their music, the subject matter of their songs, the entire message they projected to the world, which because of their fame, affected every corner of the globe. Epstein's touring created the vacuum that allowed The Beatles to flourish in every way.