The mystery of The Beatles’ Candlestick Park bootleg: ‘We never identified the thief’
The Beatles’ story is chocked full of mysteries and unanswered questions. Despite being one of the biggest and certainly one of the most important groups to ever grace the airwaves, new information surrounding the Fab Four seems to keep revealing itself. Admittedly, the band’s career was such a whirlwind of success that the group could not be expected to remember every detail from their trip through the marmalade skies. One of the great mysteries of the band concerns their final-ever concert at Candlestick Park.
In the early days of The Beatles, the group had crafted an incredible live show. Their time spent in Hamburg, playing largely to sailors and gangsters, gave the Liverpool lads excellent experience in creating a captivating performance style that they carried throughout their careers. However, when the band achieved mainstream success, and Beatlemania started to set in, their shows were largely pointless, as you could not hear the music over the legions of screaming fans.
Although having millions of fans screaming at you in adoration is, on the face of it, a pretty nice problem to have within the music industry, the band became tired of playing these live shows. So, in 1966, they made the decision to retire from touring entirely and focus solely on their studio work. Their last ever public concert, aside from the infamous rooftop gig in 1969, was held at the since-demolished Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29th, 1966.
With a setlist containing classic Beatles tracks like ‘Yesterday’, ‘Day Tripper’, and ‘Paperback Writer’, as well as covers of Chuck Berry’s ‘Rock and Roll Music’ and Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’, the concert must have been something to behold. Paul McCartney, knowing that this would be the final public performance of The Beatles, took photographs onstage and of the crowd, and he also asked the band’s press manager, Tony Barrow, to record the set on a hand-held tape recorder.
Being made on a portable tape recorder, the quality of the recording was far from being professional quality. Then again, the tape was never meant for public consumption. “Back in London, I kept the concert cassette under lock and key in a drawer of my office desk,” Barrows later revealed, “Making a single copy for my personal collection and passing the original to Paul for him to keep.”
By all accounts, therefore, there should only be two copies of this recording in existence, one owned by Barrows and one by McCartney.
In the years that followed the Candlestick Park concert, however, recordings of the show started to appear on bootleg releases. While it is certainly possible that somebody in the audience had recorded the set of their own accord – as was fairly common during the 1960s and 1970s, with the advent of compact cassette tapes – Barrows’ recording cuts out partway through the final song ‘Long Tall Sally’, which also happens on the vast majority of bootleg releases.
“If you hear a bootleg version of the final concert that finishes during ‘Long Tall Sally’, it must have come either from Paul’s copy or mine,” Barrows shared, “But we never did identify the music thief.” If Barrows is correct in his claims that only he and McCartney had access to the recording, then one of them must have leaked, shared, or duplicated the tape at one point or another, as there are numerous Beatles bootlegs out there of the Candlestick Park concert.
Ultimately, the fact that the recording was, somehow, released out into the world is not hugely surprising; The Beatles are among the most bootlegged artists of all time. Although the recording is certainly not of a high standard, taken from an old cassette tape on a hand-held recorder, it is still notable for fans of the band, given that it was the last full-scale public performance ever held by the iconic band.
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