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Beatles performance
When great melody meets harmony, it just captivates the audience.
Here is an especially good quality live recording I haven’t seen before.
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8 Replies
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Fab show, Jung! The little nose-scratching incident just before the 11 minute mark was cute.
I’ve always heard that a typical Beatles concert lasted only about half an hour, which is incredibly short compared to today’s concerts. But they were racing through their songs as if they were renting the place by the second, so the fans certainly got their money’s worth.
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Nice find, Jung. This sounds fantastic. Paul always looks so jolly.
“Roll Over Beethoven” is awesome.
John’s scream during “You Can’t Do That” is almost as good as Mona’s.
I still like MLT’s cover of “Til There Was You” better than the boys’.
This is kool. Nice one Jung.
JP
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Nice find.
Do we know where and when this was?
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Thomas, the video description doesn’t provide any details, but based on their appearance and the song selection it was almost certainly sometime in 1964.
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That’s the 17 June 1964 evening performance in Melbourne during the Australia tour.
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Thanks guys for your comments!
I found a few things remarked about the Beatles that I liked below:
BBC article: Why are the Beatles so popular 50 years on?
The Beatles’ gift was for harmony, and their vision was above all of harmony. And harmony, voices blending together in song, is still our strongest symbol of a good place yet to come.
December 26, 2011 by bucketoftongues
THE BEATLES – WHY ARE THEY SO GOOD?
It is true that The Beatles, more than Elvis, were perhaps the first globally popular group; they took advantage developments in global communications, and coincided with the Baby Boom making them the prime musical memory of the generation which made the largest culture mark since 1945. But this still leaves the question, why The Beatles? Why them and not The Animals or The Beach Boys or Brian Poole and the Tremeloes or Little Richard or the Rolling Stones..? What makes them stand out so spectacularly?
Answer is essentially this: The Beatles’ music is endlessly filled with the joy of its creation. Some bands have songs where you hear them discover how good they are (for example, “Porch” by Pearl Jam, “White Riot” by The Clash, “Phantom Of The Opera” by Iron Maiden, “Elephant Stone” by the Stones Roses and “The Four Horsemen” by Metallica). But most bands are lazy, or merely human, and once they have found their groove, rarely develop much further. Few do this continually throughout their career: Pink Floyd, Miles Davis.
But with The Beatles, what they did was make every song its own “freshly created universe”. Not only did they never repeat themselves, they used every trick of articulation to give as much meaning to their songs as possible. And since every song creates a fresh new world, there’s a sense of delight and wonder in so many of their songs, even in songs that are more downbeat.
This is of course most vividly seen in their best songs. “She Loves You” for example has so many hooks and touches that sparks fly of it, still, after almost fifty years. The tom-tom roll sets it careening, but the first two declarations of “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah!” are jerked back, heightening to an impossible tension (right from the very start!!), while the third iteration releases it into the first verse with superb momentum. The verses, sung jointly by Lennon and McCartney, just sizzles with their harmonised vocals, and in the chorus, the “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” absolutely soars.
I believe that much of this demand for freshness came from Lennon, who inspired by Lewis Carrol knew the effect of surreal juxtaposition. This sense of seeing things differently, and his uncertainty of whether it was genius or insanity, was immortalised in “Strawberry Fields Forever” as “No one I think is in my tree / I mean it must be high or low”. Lennon thus always sought out the different, strange, vivid, compelling. This vision, allied with McCartney’s perfectionist craftsmanship and superb musicianship (not to mention their outstanding singing and harmonisation), gave The Beatles the drive to constantly create something vivid, fresh and new, and the skill to do so. This is what gives their music the joy in its creation, and is what ultimately makes them so epically popular.
The Beatles: Best Songs of All Time:
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They might have been extra pumped as Ringo had just rejoined them after recovering from tonsillitis.
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This new documentary “McCartney 3,2,1” coming out on July 16th sounds interesting.
Didn’t know Paul got stuck playing the Bass because George and John didn’t want to!
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