“Hysterical”: When David Crosby roadied for a Beatles concert in Los Angeles
By 1966, Beatlemania was taking its toll. While press reports of waning ticket sales were embellished, the ‘bigger than Jesus’ controversy in the USA’s bible belt, songwriting ambitions exceeding their live expectation, and the feverish fan hysteria showing no signs of abating, the decision to cease their punishing touring schedule was already decided by The Beatles, despite some initial resistance from Paul McCartney, as they closed their US tour at San Fransisco’s Candlestick Park that year.
“Nobody was listening at the shows. That was OK at the beginning, but it got that we were playing really bad, and the reason I joined The Beatles was because they were the best band in Liverpool,” Ringo Starr confessed on 1995’s Anthology. “Where we ended up on a huge crazy pedestal was not really in my plan. My plan was to keep playing great music. But it was obvious to us that the touring had to end soon, because it wasn’t working any more.”
He added: “On the last tour of America, the most exciting thing was meeting people who came to the shows, not the shows themselves. We’d played the stadiums, we’d played to the big crowds, and still, we were only doing our thirty-minute show!”
The delirium that followed the Fab Four was witnessed firsthand by countercultural provocateur David Crosby. Accompanying The Beatles on their way to Los Angeles’ Dodgers Stadium for their penultimate commercial show in August, The Byrds guitarist managed to nab a front-row seat by the six-foot stage on the ground’s second base.
The KRLA concert promoters had put together an impressive bill. Boston-based garage rockers The Remains opened, followed by soul singer Bobby Hebb, treating the crowd to his hit ‘Sunny’, the Brian Epstein-managed The Cyrkle made an appearance, and The Ronettes whetting the appetites further with their classic R&B strut.
Starting their set shortly after 9.30pm, The Beatles ripped through a barely half-hour set as if wanting to get the show out the way. Sticking to their established set with no deviation, they opened with Chuck Berry’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Music’, McCartney fronted ‘She’s a Woman’ and his de facto solo piece ‘Yesterday’, John Lennon belted out ‘Nowhere Man’, George Harrison his ‘If I Needed Somone’, and Ringo stepped up to dual vocal and drum duties for ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’. Considering cuts like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows‘ had been dropped that summer, the setlist was proving spectacularly outdated.
The Beatles were getting sloppy, but they knew it didn’t matter, as any bad note or fluffed line would be lost in a sea of screaming noise. Reflecting on the madness during the filming of 2022’s Immediate Family documentary, Crosby recounted his naive effort of tuning Harrison’s twelve-string guitar: “‘Stop that’, he said. ‘It doesn’t need to be in fucking tune, they can’t fucking hear it!” Sure enough, Crosby saw for himself how right Harrison was, and the exhausting ordeal of being ‘Fab’. “The audience never stopped screaming, they couldn’t hear a fucking thing. It was hysterical.”
The Beatles’ tours were going nowhere, and turning themselves into an exclusive studio project instantly ushered the creative juice they needed to enter EMI Studios of November that year to start cutting the psychedelic masterpiece ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and setting the stage for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band‘s sonic innovation.
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