Saturday, December 20, 2014

Live At The "Hollywood Bowl" 65

The Beatles performed two concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, California, USA in 1965. The first show was performed on August 29 1965 while the second show was conducted the next evening on August 30 1965.
Both shows were recorded by Capitol Records (as was the previous 1964 concert) in order to issue a live LP sometime down the road. Of course, there would be no live album during the Beatles' 1960s era and the live album would be issued down the road in the 1970s instead.
The August 29 show consists of an introduction "Twist And Shout"/ "She's A Woman"/ "I Feel Fine"/ "Dizzy Miss Lizzie"/ "Ticket To Ride"/ "Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby"/ "Can't Buy Me Love"/ "Baby's In Black"/ "I Wanna Be Your Man"/ "A Hard Day's Night"/ "Help!" and "I'm Down". The sound was recorded on a three track machine with vocals on one track, bass and drums on another track and the guitars and keyboard on the last track. There were issues with the microphones in which Paul and George's microphone was not functioning during the first four tunes (it took them that long to figure it out? Didn't the technicians do line checks back then?). Also, it seems that Paul was having issues with his bass amp as there is a point in the recording where Mal Evans is brought out to check the amp while John is stalling just before they play "Baby's In Black".
The next night's concert on August 30 1965 went much more smoothly with no vocal glitches although there seemed to be a problem with the guitar amps in some capacity. Otherwise, Capitol Records got a good recording from both shows and they were both used on the commercial recording although the liner notes do not indicate that the August 29th show as used when it was (in parts). The songs performed at both shows are the same.
The master tapes for both shows remained at Capitol Records until 1971 when they were shipped to Abbey Road. They remained there during the first half of the 70s as Apple had no plans to release the tapes. In early 1977, George Martin took the tapes to AIR studios in London and transferred them to 24 track and re-mixed, edited, and generally tried to clean up as much as possible on the 1964/1965 live tapes from the Hollywood Bowl.
The commercial Capitol LP "The Beatles At the Hollywood Bowl" was released in June of that year containing the last half of "Dizzy Miss Lizzie" (Aug 29), "Ticket To Ride" (Aug 29), the intro to "A Hard Day's Night" (Aug 29), "Help!" (Aug 29), the main intro/ "Twist And Shout"/ "She's A Woman (all Aug 30), the intro and the first half of "Dizzy Miss Lizzie" (Aug 30), "Can't Buy Me Love"/ "A Hard Day's Night" and the intro to "Help!" (all Aug 30).
"Baby's In Black" was released on the CD single "Real Love" in 1996 from the August 30 performance yet the intro to the song is from the August 29 performance.
Performances of both shows as well as the August 23 1964 performance can be found in it's entire form on the 2-CD bootleg "The Complete Hollywood Bowl Concerts 1964-1965" on the Midnight Beat label. There is also a 2-LP bootleg set entitled "The Beatles At the Hollywood Bowl - The Complete Shows" with the performances from the August 23 1964 and the August 30 1965 shows on the fake Electrola label.

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