Hear For Yourself Beatlemania!
Want to experience Beatlemania? Then you need to hear for yourself a live Beatle concert. But before you rush out to buy just any live disc available, be warned that a lot of these live bootlegs are for "historical" purposes only. In other words, recorded on a cheap cassette player from the top deck of Shea Stadium. This disc, however, is sure to please Beatlemaniacs with its excellent sound and fab musicianship, something that most of the live discs lack.
The disc contains two shows, recorded roughly a year apart. The latter, recorded August 29, 1965, is one of the two used for Capitol's Live At Hollywood Bowl album, released in the 1970's; this disc, however, contains the entire show.
The first half of the disc is taken from an appearance at the Indiana State Fair Coliseum, September 3, 1964. Speaking as someone who has attended many concerts there, including the one captured on this disc, I can say that as a concert hall, the Coliseum is a decent hockey rink. The acoustics are atrocious and, of course, the crowd noise is often overbearing.
Still, this disc is a remarkable document of the Beatles concert experience, taken from extremely clean sources, and very nicely packaged. The lads run through 12 songs at each show, opening both with a frantic Twist and Shout and ending with a manic screamer, Long Tall Sally and I'm Down, respectively. (By the way, the State Fair show was taped for a radio broadcast, only the station engineer ran out of tape midway through the closing number!)
Although the Beatles bemoaned the erosion of their musical skills due to the brutal onstage conditions, they sound surprisingly tight and polished on most of these 24 cuts. Especially surprising is the precision of the harmony vocals on songs like All My Loving. And Ringo's detractor's should listen to his consistently strong and accurate playing here; his drumming is particularly impressive on his vocal number, I Wanna Be Your Man. While the audience noise is, at best, distracting (and often overwhelming), I strongly encourage any Beatles fan to own this disc. It is a terrific representation of attending a Beatles concert, with all the excitement and incredible energy. As a bonus, the fidelity is better than many studio bootlegs and the musicianship is, by and large, impressive. No Beatles collection is complete without a concert recording, and this is as good as they come.
Tracks:
Can't find this disc? Another worthy live disc is Hollywood Bowl Complete on Yellow Dog. This disc contains both the 1964 and 1965 complete Hollywood shows that were edited into the one Capitol Records live LP. Can't find that one? Well, Capitol is planning to re-release the Hollywood album on CD soon. However, these boots are much more satisfying than the Capitol release (though hopefully Capitol will add updated liner notes) and worth seeking out.
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