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Ladies and gentlemen

Honoured by their country

decorated by their Queen

and loved here in America...

Here are the Beatles!

Shea Stadium New York 15th August 1965

Thank you very much. We'd like to carry on now

with a song which was one of our records a few months ago

This song is called I Feel Fine

I never felt people came to hear our show

I felt they came to see us

Because from the count-in on the first number

the volume of screams

would just drown everything out

Vox made us special big amplifiers for that tour

They were 100 watts

We went up from the 30 watt amp to the 100 watt amp

Neil Aspinall Tour Manager That was miked up, I think, to the big speakers round Shea Stadium

so the audience weren't necessarily listening to the sound from the stage

They were listening to what was coming from the PA system

We were just working off the normal columns, which were...

So it can't have sounded too good

Can you hear me?

We'd like to do a slow song now

It's also off 'Beatles VI' or something. I don't know what it's off

I haven't got it

It's a waltz, this one. Remember that

Anyway, the song's called, hopefully enough... aah, look at her!

It's called Baby's in Black

The next song we'd like to sing...

John was having a good time. He was into his comedy, which was great

The great thing about John, if there was ever a tense show -

which that undoubtedly was -

you can't play to that many people for the first time and not be tense -

his comedy would come in and he'd start the faces

The shoulders would start going and it was very encouraging

because at least we're not taking it seriously

If you look at that footage and see how we are acting

or reacting to the place

it's very big, it's very strange

I feel that on that show

John cracked up, just went mad

Not mentally ill, just got crazy

If you see him, he's playing the electric piano with his elbows

It was a really strange thing

We did I'm Down

I did the organ on the record and decided to play it on stage for the first time

I felt naked without a guitar and George couldn't play for laughing

I was doing it for a laugh

It was marvellous, the biggest crowd we'd ever played to

The biggest live show that I think anybody's ever done

and it was fantastic

That was a good experience, the first really big open air...

"Wow, look at this!" you know

I didn't think about it like that at the time

I personally didn't realise that it was the first really big open air...

You know, 55000 people

Even now it's a big crowd, 56000

But then-it's like old money - it seemed like millions of people

60000 people

They told me it was 70

On one or another trip, we met Elvis

It was one of the highlights of our visit

but by the time we'd got near his house we'd forgotten where we were going

We were in this Cadillac limousine

You know, in LA, everything goes round and round and round

Then I think we were going along Mulholland...

We had a couple of cups of tea in the back of the car

By the time we got to Elvis's house we forgot where we were going

It didn't really matter where we were going

Bel Air, actually. The meet was arranged and we were going to see him

I was pretty excited about it all and then we arrived

We pulled up at these big gates - we're going to see Elvis!

We all fell out of the car, just like in a Beatles cartoon

All in hysterics... trying to pretend we weren't... silly

In the house, Elvis was sitting on a couch, playing a Fender bass -

plugged in an amplifier - watching the TV

And it was "Oh, there's Elvis"

It was Elvis. He just looked like Elvis

He was the King, wasn't he? It was Elvis

This is Mr Hips, you know. Hip-swivelling man!

Wow, you know, that's Elvis!

He was playing Mohair Sam all evening

He played it endlessly on a jukebox. It was the record of the moment for him

So it was great to see he's a music fan, he's not just...

because that was one of our big records of the moment too

He had a TV going all the time, which is what I do anyway

In front of the TV, he had a massive Fender bass amplifier

with a big bass plugged in it

He was playing bass all the time with the picture up on the TV

so we just got in there and played with him

We plugged in whatever was around and we all played and sang

I never jammed with Elvis at all

John said he'd... - John jammed with Elvis

It must have been when we went out of the room

I think it was because he had a bass there, so I thought...

So I thought you know... bass, hey, this is interesting

Ringo played football with him - Yeah, I played football with Elvis

Round about 10 or 10.30...

Priscilla was brought in

She had a long thing on... and a tiara

I've got this picture of her like... as a sort of Barbie doll

with kind of purple gingham and a gingham bow in her very beehive hair

I spent most of the party trying to suss out if anybody had any reefer

I think it wouldn't have mattered to me if she was there

Because it was him I came to see

I don't remember the boys he had with him

All his gang-the Memphis Mafia or whatever they call them

He was surrounded by these sycophants

"I'm going to the loo now." "OK, Elv, we'll go with you." Strange

I was so angry that he wasn't making any music, as he should have been

We were asking about this, just making movies

and not doing any personal appearances or TV

I think he enjoys making movies so much

If we don't do personal appearances, we get bored quickly

He says he misses it a bit

He was great, just how I expected him

It just sort of faded out, you couldn't get close

It's not like we could have become good friends, it was impossible

We weren't buddies or anything, but he was really nice

He was a nice guy, he was very slim, you know

He was really good. I'm glad I met him

It was one of the great meetings in my life

The saddest part is now, years and years later

we found out that he tried to have us banished from America

because he was very big with the C.I.A. and everything

It's very sad to me that he felt so threatened

That he thought, like a lot of people, that we were bad for American youth

In '62 we were touring in a van and people were laughing at us

That's how our careers started. They were laughing at us in Scotland

Then they got interested and got to really listen and like us

Then this screaming thing started

They used us as an excuse to go mad

The world did, then blamed it on us

We were just in the middle, in a car or hotel room. We couldn't do much

We couldn't go out, we couldn't do anything

For us it was a drag - we knew they wouldn't hear anything

because it's just like a riot, not like a show

It felt dangerous because everybody was out of hand

Even the cops were just caught up in the mania

It was like they were this big movie

We felt trapped in the middle while everybody else was going mad

We were actually the sanest people in the whole thing

The realisation was kicking in that nobody was listening

That was OK in the beginning

but even worse than that is that we were playing so bad

We were now a big band. When we went 'Whooahh' and shook our heads

everyone went mad

I don't really think it was that bad

I was playing just shit

all I could do was... hold down the off-beat

I couldn't come off that, really

because if you went to do anything on the toms, it was just nothing

There was no noise

I just felt that we were playing really bad

I'd joined the Beatles because they were the best band in Liverpool

I wanted to play with good players and that's what it was all about

First and foremost, we were musicians

George Martin Record Producer Their musical creativity showed no signs of flagging

On the contrary, they were becoming more and more productive

The work they were giving me was much more interesting

They were finding new frontiers all the time

Our whole attitude was changing

We'd grown up a little

I think grass was really influential in a lot of our changes

Especially with the writers

Because they were writing different stuff, we were playing differently

We were all expanding in all areas of our life

opening up to a lot of different attitudes

The direction was changing away from the Thank You Girl poppy stuff

the early stuff - From Me to You, She Loves You

All the early stuff was directly relating to your fans

kind of saying, please buy this record

Thank You Girl, PS I Love You, it was all very that

There came a point where we'd done enough of that and branched out

into songs that are a bit more surreal, more entertaining

Other people were arriving on the scene who were a little bit influential

I don't really know whether we'd been influenced

Dylan was starting to influence us quite heavily at that point

When it got sort of contemporary as it were, a contemporary influence

I think Rubber Soul was about when it started happening

It was just around that period

when we were all getting into different kinds of music

George's became Indian

We were all listening to classical music and various types of music

other than our own and our rock'n'roll roots

and George moved into the Indian thing

He'd give you a better explanation of just when it was

During the filming of Help!

there were some Indian musicians in a restaurant scene

and I kind of messed around with the sitar then

During that year, towards the end of the year

I kept hearing the name Ravi Shankar. I heard it about three times

About the third time I heard it, a friend of mine said:

"Have you heard Ravi Shankar?"

So I went out and bought the record

and that was it, I just felt...

It felt very familiar to me to listen to that music

It was around that time I bought a sitar

I bought a cheap sitar in a shop called India Craft in London

It was lying around. I hadn't figured out what to do with it

When we were working on Norwegian Wood it just needed something

and it was quite spontaneous, from what I remember

I just picked up the sitar, found the notes and just played it

We miked it up and put it on and it just seemed to hit the spot

They were getting more and more interested in unusual sounds

They were trying out new instruments and saying to me:

"What ideas have you got for this?"

Yesterday had been the first time we used other instrumentalists on records

The only person who'd played with them before was me

Now we had a group of other musicians

so we weren't averse to using other people or other sounds

Rubber Soul was an indication of the way things were going. A great album

That's my favourite-at the time I think it was the best we'd made

We certainly knew we were making a good album

You know the cover, the photo where we looked stretched

That was the kind of thing that we were all very into

That kind of random little exciting thing that would happen

The photographer, Bob Freeman, had taken pictures at John's house

We just had our new gear on, the polo necks

We were doing straight mug shots, four of us all posing

Back in London, he was in someone's flat

He was showing us a little carousel of slides

and he had a piece of cardboard that was album cover size

He was projecting the photographs on to it, planning an album cover

We'd just chosen the photo. We said "That one looks good"

We all liked ourselves in one particular shot

and he was just winding up when the card it was on fell back a bit

It elongated the photo and we went "Can you do it like that?"

He said "Yeah, I could print it like that" so we thought, that's it... Rubber Soul!

So there's no great mysterious meaning behind all of this

It was just four boys working out what to call their new album

I don't see too much difference in Rubber Soul and Revolver

To me, they could be volume one and two

Maybe I'm wrong, I haven't played them right back to back

but they were both very pleasant and enjoyable records for me

It has that quality because it's the follow on

and we were just starting to really find ourselves in the studio

You know, what we could do, which was...

over just being four of us playing our instruments and the vocals

Their ideas were beginning to become much more potent in the studio

They started to tell me what they wanted and would press me for ideas

More ways of translating those ideas into reality

We'd be well into the album and we knew I'd be doing a number somewhere

We'd say "Have you got a song?" or "We've got this for you"

I thought it might not be a bad idea...

rather than giving him a very serious song

because he wasn't that keen on singing

I remember the idea coming up just before going to sleep

That little twilight moment when silly ideas come into your head

I just thought of Yellow Submarine

By then, I'd started writing myself

but it was hard to bring your songs in when you had Lennon and McCartney

It was a bit of a joke because I'd bring these songs I'd written

and they'd laugh because I'd re-written an old standard again

I was great at re-writing Jerry Lee Lewis songs

I didn't have many songs. They were more or less the ones I had written

I've always had a couple I was working on or thinking about

and in the later years I did have a huge backlog

but in the mid-60s I didn't have too many

George went through the same problem as I did with his first songs

but that didn't last long

Then we started coming up with great songs. Which one of us was on Revolver?

That was the point where you discover you're not actually...

you're paying more money to the taxman...

You're so happy that you're finally earning money, then you find out...

In those days we paid 19s.6d. out of every �1

There were 20 shillings in �1

That was with super-tax, surtax and tax-tax and stuff

It was ridiculous

A heavy penalty to pay for making money

It was on Revolverthat we have the track Tomorrow Never Knows

which was a great innovation

That's me in my Tibetan Book of the Dead period

and the expression Tomorrow Never Knows was another of Ringo's

I was self-conscious about the lyrics of Tomorrow Never Knows

so I took one of Ringo's malapropisms like Hard Day's Night

to take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics

John had a song which was all on the chord of C

which we thought a perfectly good idea, like Indian music is all on one chord

I wondered how George Martin would take it-it was a radical departure

At least we'd had three chords and maybe a change for the middle eight

Suddenly this was just John strumming on C rather earnestly

In those days there was no technology like there is now

There were two guitars, bass and drums, and that was it

If we did stuff in the studio with the aid of recording tricks

then we couldn't just reproduce them on stage

Nowadays you could do Tomorrow Never Knows, have all the loops on a keyboard

You could have as many pianists, drummers and orchestras as you wanted

But in those days we were just a little dancehall band

and we never thought of augmenting ourselves

The hard stuff was the complicated harmonies, hard to do live on stage

Like for instance Nowhere Man

Nowhere Man was OK, wasn't it? - It was OK, but it was hard

Circus Krone Munich

Somewhere between albums and tours... I had a dentist, anyway...

One night, John and his wife Cynthia

and Patti and myself were having dinner at this guy's house

This fellow, for some reason or other,

had obtained lysergic acid diethylamide 25

which at that time was not illegal

It was a legally obtained medication

But we didn't really know about it

I seemed to recall that I'd heard vaguely about it

but I didn't really know what it was

He just put it in our coffee

He didn't know what it was, just...

It's the thing with middle class London swingers who'd heard about it

They didn't know it was different from pot or pills and they gave us it

He advised us to stay. We thought it was for an orgy and we didn't want to know

It became a bit seedy to me

As if he was trying to get something happening in his house

There was some reason he didn't want us to go

Then he said "Leave your car here, I'll drive and you can come back later"

I said "No, we'll go in my car," and we drove. This guy came as well, in his car

We got to the nightclub

We were just insane. We all thought there was a fire in the lift

Just a little red light and we were all screaming, all hysterical

We went up to the floor where the discotheque was

The door opens and we all go aaaaaah!!

We felt lke the elevator was on fire or we were going into hell or something

We were all in hysterics, crazy

Then we got out at the top and everything was OK

We sat there, probably for hours, and I ended up driving everybody home

It was daylight and I was driving a Mini with John, Cynthia and Patti

I seem to remember we were doing 18 miles an hour

And I was really concentrating

Some of the time it just felt normal

then suddenly it was all crazy

I really was frightened of that kind of stuff

When you're young, you're taught... watch out for them devil drugs

So when acid came round, we'd heard that you're never the same

It alters your life and you never think the same again

I think John was rather excited by that prospect. I was rather frightened

I thought this could mean that I'd never get back home

Oh geez, you know. It may not be the greatest move

So I delayed and was seen to stall a bit within the group -

because there was a lot of peer pressure

Day Tripper- That was a drug song, I just liked the word

The last Saturday Club show... - We'll ever do...

The last Saturday Club before Christmas, we'd like...

to wish everybody a very happy Crimble from all of us

and thank everyone who sent cards this week and all the other weeks

I hope you all have a happy Christmas and a very happy New Year

Nice of you to drop in today, lads - Oh, we weren't doing anything

Not at all, Brian. Like you said, Merry Christmas to you

We can't ask you to work today - No, it's not allowed

We'll play your record. Does it matter which side we play?

We Can Work It Out

Well, sort it out amongst yourselves then

Have you got it? - Yeah, I'm putting it on now

Here goes the needle on the record

Well, the mania was...

As we've said, it was pretty difficult to get around

Out of convenience, we decided we were not going to go in

Going to the TV studios to promote our records was too much of a hassle

We'll just make our own little films and we'll put them out

What was happening...

We really couldn't fit in all the live television shows

that people wanted us to do round the world: Shindig, Ed Sullivan Show

Top of the Pops, Thank Your Lucky Stars and stuff in France, Germany, etc.

So to accommodate those people

we decided that if we just made - we call them promo films -

a promo film of the individual songs

and sent that to TV stations around the world

That would fulfil their obligation, or that would do the job

The idea was that we didn't have to go out

We thought this was a great idea, to send the movies, the film

We didn't call them videos, they were just going on TV

We thought this was a great ruse

Let's do these and we can stay home

Ladies and gentlemen, here's a feature taped for us in England

by Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison

Hello, Ed, how are you?

I'm sorry we can't be there in person to do the show

but everybody's busy these days, with the washing and the cooking...

We hope you like it. One's called Rain and one's called Paperback Writer

The idea was to send them to America because we can't go everywhere

We'll send these things out to promote the record

These days, everybody does that

It's just part of your promotion for a single

so I suppose in a way we invented MTV

That's the first record with backwards music on it

Haneda Airport Tokyo 30th June 1966

This is a thing we never really talked about

Everywhere we were going in those days, it was a demonstration of something

Riots were happening

Plus people were demonstrating because the Budokan

was supposed to be a spiritual hall reserved for martial arts

Some Japanese say that your performances will violate the Budokan

which is devoted to traditional Japanese martial arts

and you set a bad example to Japanese youth

by leading them astray from traditional Japanese values. What do you think?

If a dancing troupe from Japan goes to Britain

nobody tries to say they're violating traditional laws

or that they are trying to spoil anything

We're singing here because we've been asked to

I'd rather watch singing than wrestling anyway

We're not trying to violate anything

and we're just as traditional anyway

In any town we went to, someone always had a grievance

Something was wrong

We were locked up in the hotel for a long time with merchants coming round

and showing us ivory and stuff like this

People go to Tokyo and do shopping. We couldn't get out of the hotel

I once tried to get out but a policeman ran after me. I did actually do it...

Paul and maybe Ringo got out one day and got in a taxi

The police caught them and made them go back to the hotel

But John and I actually got out

We made it down to the local market and it was great

We were looking at things and buying things

Then the police came and got us and said "Naughty boys!"

We were only allowed out at the time for the concert

when it was worked out like a military manoeuvre

"At 5.30 precisely we will knock on your door"

Exactly as scheduled. Then they said "You will line up outside the room"

"At 5.32 we will leave the door"

"We will now walk to the lift"

"At 5.33 we will be at the elevator"

"The elevator takes one minute and eight to get down"

"At 5.35 we'll be down in the car park"

Then they said "You will get in car with Mr Evans"

Then they had the seating arranged in all the cars

Amazing efficiency we'd never seen the like of in Britain

Just to be... how we were

They'd knock on the door and we'd never come out

It would just totally wreck their timing

You'd see all these guys going absolutely barmy

because we hadn't walked down the corridor at 7.14 and a third

We knew we were doing that to them

As we went to the gig, they had the fans organised

with police patrols on each corner

so there weren't fans haphazardly waving along the streets

They'd been herded on to corners and were allowed to wave from there

So you'd go along the street and there would be a little 'eeekk'

You would go a few more hundred yards and 'eeekk'

It was very strange. The audience were very nice

They're reserved but they were up on their feet, or they tried to be

but the police had telephoto lenses all around and anybody who stood up

and looked like they might run towards the stage or something

had their photograph taken

So the people were very restricted in how they could respond to us

But it was a warm reception

It was very nice but a bit clinical

Nippon Budokan Hall

Ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome the Beatles!

The close harmonies on things like Paperback Writerand Nowhere Man

were very hard to do on stage because it was just empty

There were no guitar notes to take it from

We had an eight-track by then, that was the problem

So we had the luxury of double tracking

Also, we were competing with the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and all that

I think it was around that time

All the voices were really like double tracked...

There was no way of doing it on stage really

Evening Performance 30th June 1966

You'd get to the point where it was particularly bad

Then we'd do our Elvis legs and wave to the crowd

and they'd all scream and it would cover it up

I think Paul already said that the screaming

covered a lot of worrying moments

The screams did cover a lot of of sins...

and those shows, it wasn't there

The second show was pretty good, but the first one was a bit of a shock

You mean we actually played better in the thirty minutes we had?

Yeah, I guess so

Well, that's probably true

Afternoon Performance 1st July 1966

I think it just started to hit everybody. I remember we had one meeting...

We were mainly talking about the musicianship going downhill

Never mind the boredom of doing it

There was always so much pressure, from the minute you opened your eyes

People trying to get at you for whatever reason

To be friends or to get an interview or to do a radio

The pressure was on from the minute you started

The Philippines was almost like a mistake from the very beginning

As soon as we got there, it was bad, bad news

I hated the Philippines

It was one of those places where you knew they were waiting for a fight

They were pushing you and, if you'd done anything, they would have...

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