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Every week, we present “ROCK REMEMBERED,” a deep dive into the hidden history of rock & roll, the stories behind the artists and songs that changed the world. Join host, “Boomtown Bill” Cross each Wednesday at 7 pm (Eastern) with an encore broadcast on Saturday at noon (Eastern).
Join us this Wednesday as we look at the sometimees successful and sometimes not "Turning Rock Stars into Movie Stars!"
2016's simultaneous release of Eight Days a Week and Live at the Hollywood Bowl reignited interest in the Beatles live shows. But these are not the only places you can find Liverpool’s favorite sons performing live.
Here’s an overview of all the other ways you can experience the Beatles in concert:
Live! at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany – It was in Hamburg that the Beatles said they really came together and honed their live sound. Fortunately, during their final stint at the Star Club (after Ringo had joined but before Beatlemania hit), the club’s stage manager recorded the group on a reel-to-reel tape deck with a single microphone.
The tapes then went missing for a number of years before resurfacing in the early 1970’s. The Beatles passed on buying the tapes themselves and also were not successful in trying to keep them off the market through legal means.
While the resulting audio is of poor quality, it does give you an accurate picture of what the group sounded like just before they hit it big. The recordings also feature a good number of songs the group never recorded any place else. These tracks have been released multiple times on vinyl and CD. As no one is exactly sure when the tapes were recorded (some time in late December is the best guess), there is no way to say which songs belong in which order. This, combined with the overall low fidelity, make Live! At the Star Club an item for hard-core Beatles fans only.
The Beatles Live at the BBC and On Air: Live at the BBC Volume 2 – In those heady days of the 1960’s, the Beeb (as it was called) would regularly host pop stars who performed live in the studio. As Britain’s most popular band by far, the Beatles were frequent guests. These sets (both double discs) capture the lion’s share of those performances. Not only do you get the Beatles performing a raft of great rock ‘n’ roll cover songs, the boys are playing without having to fight hordes of screaming fans to be heard. These are a must-have item for any serious fan of the Beatles music.
The Four Complete Ed Sullivan Shows Starring the Beatles – For American Baby Boomers, we marked our young lives as before and after the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan. In February of 1964, they made 3 consecutive Sunday night appearances (Feb. 9th, Feb. 16th and Feb 23rd) although the 3rd appearance had been taped at an earlier date. They made a return appearance on September 12, 1965.
These shows are available in their entirety on DVD and come highly recommended. Not only were the Beatles in fine form, but you can also experience the way TV of that era was still aimed at a mass audience, instead of a smaller demographic slice. So you’ll also see vintage live performances from Frank Gorshin, Cab Calloway, Tessie O’Shea, Mitzi Gaynor, Myron Cohen, Gordon McRae, Allen & Rossi and even Soupy Sales. Sullivan’s “really big shew” was definitely vaudeville’s last stand.
Pay particular attention to the Beatles’ very first appearance on February 3rd. Right after their opening segment, the next act is the Broadway cast of Oliver! singing “I’ll Do Anything for You.” Playing the Artful Dodger and singing lead on the song is a young Davy Jones, who would find his lasting fame in the Beatles’ knock-off group, the Monkees!
The Beatles on Ready, Steady, Go – Ready, Steady, Go was to British teenagers as American Bandstand was to kids in the U.S.A., except the acts usually performed live instead of lip-synching.
In the early days of home video, a VHS set of the Beatles’ live performances on the show was available. Unfortunately, a DVD version has never been made available. However, you may still find an old VHS copy at a thrift store on an internet auction site.
The Beatles in Washington, D.C. – After playing the first Sullivan show, the Beatles hopped down to Washington, D.C. for their first American concert at the Washington Coliseum on February 11, 1964.
This show was also broadcast live via closed circuit to American movie theaters. After the event, it was re-packaged with performances by Leslie Gore and the Beach Boys (from the T.A.M.I. Show event) and sent around to theaters.
This concert is available on DVD. It provides a great documentary of Beatlemania in the U.S. and also the low regard for rock musicians at that time. The concert is held “in the round” and the Beatles themselves (no stage hands available) actually have to move their own equipment every couple of numbers so they give everyone in the audience a chance to see them from the front!
Live in Paris – When the Beatles played two shows at 3 and 9 pm on June 20th, 1965 at the Palais de Sports to kick off their final European tour, both shows were broadcast by the French radio station Europe 1. As a result, complete recordings on these shows have been available on the “unofficial” market (did somebody say bootleg?) for many years. The audio quality is good and you can actually compare song performances from one show to the next.
Live at Budokan 1966 – The Beatles were actually the first musical act to play Budokan (which had been built for martial arts exhibitions). There was a great deal of controversy surrounding their appearance. Of course, once the Beatles played there, other rock acts (most famously, Cheap Trick) would follow in their footsteps.
The Fab Four’s first two shows in Japan were video-taped and then edited into a single show that was broadcast throughout Japan. As a result pirated versions of both the audio and video from these shows are widely available.
Anthology – Produced in 1995, this is both a 6-disc CD set and a 5-disc DVD set. The CDs presented rare outtakes and unreleased material while the DVDs chronicle the history of the group. You can find smatterings of live material on both
Get Back - Because the Beatles' final film, Let It Be, was unavailable for many years, director Peter Jackson was brought in to create a new version of the Fabs' final days. The result was a marathon 3-part, 7.75 hour documentary miniseries originally broadcast on Disney+ and then made available in several packages (some wildly overpriced) on home video. Watching the boys sit around a sound stage and then a recording studio, noodling, bickering and occasionally recording something worthwile can be a bit of a slog, but it does include the complete "Rooftop Concert," which turned out to be the last time the four ever performed live.
Let It Be – Following up on the Get Back project, director Peter Jackson then turned to refurbishing the original documentary That film was diected by Michael Lindey-Hogg and some felt the film was editted to make Paul McCartney look like the villain in the Beatles' break-up (the film originally hit theaters a short time after the break-up had been announced). Of course, subsequent years have revealed that the guys were all pretty much ready to go their separate ways; and after a brief period of public acrimony, all remained friends through the eyars.
This version of the feature film also played on Disney+ starting in the spring of 2024, but has yet to see any release on home video.
Some rare, yet to be released, gems:
Around the Beatles – This was a one-hour TV special made in Britain by ITV and broadcast in countries around the world in 1964. In America, it was shown on ABC-TV. The Beatles performed 7 numbers by themselves (including the only version of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” they ever recorded) and they also sang back-up for some of their musical guests (which included Cilla Black, P.J. Proby, and Long John Baldry). One of the highlights of the show was the Beatles performing in a send-up of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
While small portions of this show were included in Anthology, the complete show has never been re-broadcast nor has it ever been officially available on home video.
The Beatles at Shea Stadium - Footage of this show has been used in many retrospectives (including Howard's Eight Days a Week), but there was a one-hour TV special produced that captures the entire concert.
The huge wave of cash that American International Pictures was surfing with their Beach Party pictures (see what we did there?) did not go unnoticed in Hollywood, where imitation is the sincerest way they do business.
Columbia Pictures decided to see if they could catch the same wave with 1964’s Ride the Wild Surf. As AIP cast an East Coast Italian singer as their lead (Frankie Avalon), Columbia signed the guy widely thought to be a less than successful attempt to clone Avalon, Fabian.
Yet Columbia did not produce an even cheaper knockoff of a cheap drive-in flick. Strangely, Columbia actually released what many critics consider the best of all the surf, sand, and sex films that followed in the wake of the original Gidget.
First off, the film focuses on surfing in a way that no other beach picture ever did. The film, including the surfing footage, was shot on location in Hawaii instead of purchasing already-made surfing footage and shooting in California. In addition, Ride the Wild Surf used professional surfers dressed in suits that matched the movie’s male stars. Tab Hunter and Peter Brown also dyed their hair so it better matched the surfers doubling for them.
It’s important because the main plot of the film centers on a surfing competition that pits most of the males in the cast in an endurance contest to see who can last longest in Hawaii’s savage surf. The result is some spectacular surfing footage that the sport’s aficionados say is the best ever used in a mainstream Hollywood film.
The film is also not a comedy. There are no silly subplots with the possible exception of the thankless role given to Barbara Eden. She plays the film’s only “kooky” character. We know she’s kooky because she’s named Augustina or Augie for short. Because, sure, you totally buy a 20-something girl would be named Augie. She’s also an expert in martial arts because why not? She’s kooky, right? And she wants to build her own fireworks. Did we mention she’s kooky?
The rest of the cast gets involved in some seriously complicated love affairs. Tab Hunter is wooing island girl Susan Hart against her mother’s wishes. Fabian is trying to sweep Shelly Fabares off her feet, but Shelly is resisting because Fabian has no ambition in life beyond winning the film’s surfing competition. Peter Brown, the third of the male leads, is trying to convince Barbara Eden that he can be kooky too.
There seems to be some strange hair coloring going on in the film. After giving Peter Brown blonder hair to match his surfing double, producers asked Barbara Eden to dye her blond hair red so she would contrast with her love interest. They asked Shelly Fabares to go blond to contrast with Fabian’s dark hair. Susan Hart’s hair had to go jet black so she’d be believable as an island native.
The cast, which also includes Robert Mitchum’s son, James Mitchum, turn in performances that are better than you might suspect and the film treats the sport of competitive surfing seriously. The only musical number within the film is a Hawaiian hula performed very seductively by Ms. Hart. The title song, co-written by Brian Wilson (who also provided the title music for the first Beach Party movie) and sung by Jan & Dean makes its only appearance over the movie’s closing credits.
(BTW – Jan & Dean were originally supposed to appear in the movie as Fabian’s surfing buddies. Before shooting started, one of Dean’s friends was involved in a high-profile kidnapping case. His association with the singer received a lot of publicity and the studio moved to replace them with Hunter and Brown. They were still retained to sing the title track.)
Seriously, if you’re in the mood to see a serious beach picture or want a feel for what the surfing craze of the sixties was really like, track down a copy of Ride the Wild Surf and take that last ride!
You don’t need us to tell you that cutting down on sugar is beneficial to virtually all of us. But with the American diet so sugar-coated, how to do that? Here are some helpful hints.
1.) Start your day with protein – As a society, we’ve been conditioned to think of breakfast as a time for grain-based cereals. This is due to misguided health nuts like Dr. Kellogg whose theories have long been found to be false. Yet, our insistence on Frosted Flakes in the morning persists. This is bad because starting your day with carbs can spike, then crash your blood sugar, leading to food cravings not long after you eat. Instead, experts recommend starting your day with plenty of protein, like you find in eggs, yogurt or a smoothie with protein powder.
2.) Get a Good Night’s Sleep – Believe it or not, studies have shown that those who get a good night’s sleep consume significantly less sugar than those who sleep poorly.
3.) Be on Guard in the Grocery Store – The best not to consume products high in sugar is not to buy them and bring them home in the first place. If there are no cookies in the cupboard, you can binge on them later.
4.) Go for a Walk – research also shows that a 15-minute walk can reduce sugar cravings. Plus, it has other positive health benefits.
5.) If All Else Fails, at Least Make a More Sensible Choice – If you simply can’t defeat your sweet tooth, try picking a more healthful way to satisfy your sugar craving with fruits like blueberries, cantaloupe or grapes. Or chew a piece of gum.