The two cover songs The Beatles performed at their final paying concert
By 1966, The Beatles were the world’s most successful and prolific band. About to embark on a North American tour that would be their last, the Fab Four had their pick of songs to play from a treasure chest of hits in their own catalogue to include in live shows, including from their new album at the time – Revolver.
But adding songs from the new album was unlikely, given the inability to reproduce the experimental Revolver cuts on stage. And as for the older material they had, even that was growing stale, at least according to one outspoken Beatle. George Harrison told Entertainment Tonight in a 1987 interview that he thought the repetition of playing the same songs led to the band losing some of its fire.
“We sang the same songs a lot; we still had a laugh. It was still good fun though,” George said. “But you know the – that side of it, of playing like as a musician lost the edge there because we just played the same tunes that we play recorded, go around the world singing the same ten songs and every year, we’d lose one and add a new one, and it got a bit boring being fab.”
Yet they were on such a roll that they embraced adding cover songs from early albums, having written and recorded only original tunes on their previous two albums prior to the final tour. The Beatles were gearing up for a live run that would see them play 19 shows over 17 days in the US and Canada.
Their setlist leaned mostly on originals, with eight Lennon-McCartney songs. One – ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ – went as far back as 1963, which, in Beatle years, represented a seismic span between then and 1966. The original tunes added to the setlist also included ‘If I Needed Someone’, the only Harrison-penned song the Beatles ever performed live.
That left room for two cover songs on tour, including their final scheduled August concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, California. And both tunes were from artists with strong ties to the band’s earliest influences.
The Beatles opened their final show with ‘Rock and Roll Music’, a classic originally written and recorded by rock pioneer Chuck Berry in Chicago back in 1957. The Fab Four recorded the song themselves, capturing it in just one take in October 1964 in Abbey Road’s Studio Two, and it appeared on the Beatles For Sale album. Just a year earlier, they also recorded Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ for the With The Beatles album.
The band’s love for Chuck Berry was evident. Not only did they record two of his songs on Beatles albums, Harrison openly pledged his admiration for Berry throughout his life. He included ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ in his last-ever tour, a 12-show run through Japan in 1991. John Lennon performed Chuck standards’ ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ and ‘Johnny B. Goode’ alongside Berry on The Mike Douglas Show in 1972.
After opening their final concert with ‘Rock and Roll Music’ in San Francisco, the Beatles rolled off nine straight original tunes from ‘Yesterday’ to ‘Nowhere Man’ and ‘Paperback Writer’ – the only new song they performed and one that reached number one in nine different countries during the summer of 1966.
Five times on that 19-show tour, the Beatles closed their set with ‘I’m Down’, an original Lennon-McCartney showstopper that Paul sang very much in the style of his idol Little Richard. On the other shows, including at Candlestick Park, they swapped ‘I’m Down’ in favour of a Little Richard cover, ‘Long Tall Sally’.
Like Chuck Berry, Little Richard’s influence was very much part of the Beatles’ early discipline. The pre-fame Beatles ran into Little Richard in 1962 in Hamburg, Germany, where both were performing.
“I’ve just finished a tour with The Beatles, in fact, I toured with The Beatles right before they made their first hit, and I was the star of the show… you wouldn’t believe it,” Little Richard said in a 1964 interview. “They had never made a record at the time, and I was with them for 15 days, and that was right before they got their start.”
The Beatles had recorded ‘Long Tall Sally’ in Abbey Road’s Studio Two during a session where they put together three songs in three hours. Like with ‘Rock and Roll Music’ later that year, the band perfected ‘Long Tall Sally’ in just one magical take in the studio during a stretch when they recorded a mix of songs that would appear on the A Hard Day’s Night album and movie. An entire 1964 repackaged Beatles album in Canada even went by the title, Long Tall Sally.
Following Little Richard’s death at age 87 in 2020, Paul McCartney honoured Richard’s influence on himself and the band. “From ‘Tutti Frutti’ to ‘Long Tall Sally’ to ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’ to ‘Lucille’, Little Richard came screaming into my life when I was a teenager,” McCartney tweeted. “I owe a lot of what I do to Little Richard and his style, and he knew it. He would say, ‘I taught Paul everything he knows.'”
But Paul wasn’t done with the tune that would become the last song the Beatles ever performed live before they stopped touring for good. McCartney played ‘Long Tall Sally’ 48 years later when his 2014 Out There! tour stopped at Candlestick Park. His concert was the stadium’s final scheduled event before it was demolished. As he played the Little Richard cover (again), images of the Beatles’ 1966 concert there flashed on the screen behind him, adding to the undeniable nostalgia of the moment.
According to setlist, an archive of concert setlists from throughout music history, ‘Long Tall Sally’ was the second most performed live song ever by the Beatles with 251 send-ups, with ‘Twist and Shout’ coming in first (377). While the most played Lennon-McCartney song by the Beatles with 211 performances was ‘She Loves You‘, three of the iconic band’s four most-played live songs ever were covers.
The third, in addition to ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘Long Tall Sally’? Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven.’
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