At San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, on August 29th, 1966, The Beatles played their last ever live show. Except for their impromptu gig on top of Apple Corps’ London Headquarters, this would be the last time we see The Fab Four deliver a live show and the reality is, it felt somewhat like a waste.
Why? Well it was for the very reason that forced it to become their last live show. In 1966, Beatlemania was at fever pitch. Sell-out crowds would scream with glee as the band set foot on stage and wouldn’t let up until the last chord was struck. While you would assume admiration for the band would be welcomed, in this case, the hysteria had reached an almost deafening and distracting point.
The band often wondered if they were there for the music at all, or rather to just catch a glimpse of them. A question that became increasingly tough to address in 1966 as well, for the band’s appetite for creative experimentation had become insatiable. No longer interested in penning sweet pop songs, they wanted to delve further into the music and battling fan screams on stage wouldn’t allow that.
“In 1966 the road was getting pretty boring,” Ringo Starr simply stated in The Beatles Anthology documentary, adding “It was coming to the end for me. Nobody was listening at the shows. That was OK at the beginning, but we were playing really bad.”
And so on that Californian night, in August of 1966, the band looked at each other, and subconsciously acknowledged that this was it. “We placed our cameras on the amplifiers and put them on a timer,” George Harrison later shared of The Beatles’ final show at Candlestick Park, per Rolling Stone. “We stopped between tunes, Ringo got down off the drums, and we stood facing the amplifiers with our back to the audience and took photographs. We knew: ‘This is it – we’re not going to do this again. This is the last concert.’ It was a unanimous decision.”
It was largely a relief for Harrison, who had never made any bones about his distaste for touring. Unlike John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Harrison wasn’t exactly a natural showman. He was the most introspective of the four and felt a lot more comfortable in the safety of the studio, where musical ideas could actually be heard.
An attitude that is entirely at odds with the fact that Harrison was the very first Beatle to play America. Yes, he boldly went where none of the other Beatles had gone before and played America in 1963, in what was a spontaneous solo gig.
In that year, just before The Beatles turned the corner and experienced world domination, each member of the band set off on one last individual holiday. Harrison chose to visit his sister Louise Caldwell in Southern Illinois, where under her guardianship, he bathed in all of the American stereotypes that he would soon grow tired of.
Cinema drive-ins, diners and rockabilly gigs were all on order for Harrison’s American adventure, with the latter providing him somewhat of a warm-up show. On September 28th, watching blues band The Four Vests, he stepped foot on stage, strapped a guitar on and jammed with the American band.
A crowdmember from the evening, John Mahoney, recalled that Harrison would grow in confidence on stage, eventually introducing a number, “and with that English accent he’d catch everybody’s attention. He’d grin a little bit and everybody liked him.”
Six months later, Harrison would be back with his fellow Beatles, playing the Ed Sullivan show where it was clear, the boy who played alongside The Four Vests was no ordinary Brit, this was one quarter of the most important band music would ever see. And despite his charming grin, he wasn’t even the face of the operation.