 |
| Atlanta press conference AJC photo |
To read the transcript of the press conference click http://www.beatlesinterviews.org/db1965.0818.beatles.html
To see the 1965 tour schedule click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles'_1965_US_tour
To see the set list, click http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-beatles/1965/atlanta-stadium-atlanta-ga-3d4616f.html
To read more about the Bridges click here.
To read more about Baker Audio and Duke Mewborn click http://www.dmbeatles.com/forums/index.php?topic=8989.40
To read about John's observation that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus" click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_popular_than_Jesus
 |
| Add a dollar for stereo |
 |
| The contract |
 |
| Ralph, Cindy and Scott Bridges in 1965 Atlanta Magazine photo |
Mayor Ivan Allen, the Beatles, and the key Ethel Merman didn't get
 |
| Duke Mewborn in 1985 |
 |
| Commendation postcard |
 |
| The A7's at the base of the stage, Atlanta |
 |
| Pair of 1570 amplifiers |
 |
| Cannibal and the Headhunters obscuring a lovely Hub Switchboard somewhere in San Francisco |
 |
| Who cares? |
 |
| Frank Cloudt's obituary October 8, 1987 |
 |
| The Hidden house (still standing) where Cloudt prepared his triumphs |
The Next Voice You Hear
by Bob Foreman © 2014
“What it was, was the Beatles,” ran Celestine Sibley’s Constitution headline describing the August 18, 1965 concert held at the Atlanta Stadium the night before.
That the newspaper’s Society editor had been given this choice assignment made as much sense as anything else, since the barely discernible seismic culture shift that the “mop tops” had begun did not yet fit neatly into any identifiable editorial slot. Sibley’s lead was a throwback to Andy Griffith’s 1953 comic monolog about a hillbilly’s bewilderment with the sport of football. Bewilderment and a stadium were all the two had in common.
The intelligentsia of 1965 could hardly be expected to comprehend that the concert was a metaphor, a dry technical rehearsal for the Dionysian summer of love which would play on the world stage two years later, or that the Age of Aquarius had just dawned.
All the scribes agreed, however, that the mass hysteria which surrounded the event was more remarkable than the event itself.
Celestine: “One girl who had stuffed cotton in her ears and said she was there to scream, not to listen, set the pattern for thousands of them. They flung themselves into the air, trembling, jerking, squealing and flailing their arms about. Many burst into tears.”
Journal dramatic critic Terry Kay: “The real experience is watching the crowd, poor sobbing girls gnawing on fingertips, screaming in anguish at the simple pluck of a guitar string, or feeling an overwhelming urge to make a wild dash for their four idols.”
Journal radio-TV critic Dick Gray: “It would be difficult to imagine a more thrilling sound than the mass shriek that rent the night air when the Beatles first ran to the stage. The sound is unbelievable. You can’t hear individual voices or individual screams, just one gigantic shriek, like an anguished banshee howling into the world’s largest loudspeaker system. It sends chills up ones spine. The shriek was continuous the whole time the Beatles were on stage. During the last number, the stands fairly vibrated with motion and sound. Many of the teen-age girls had to be dragged away. One suspects the Beatles would play for nothing just to hear that scream.”
But they did not play for free. Their fee, including “the complete supporting show” was an astronomical $50,000 against 65% of the gate. With the average ticket scaled at five bucks, they sold 34,000 tickets, 2000 shy of a sell-out for a take of about $170,000. The 18,000 seats behind the stage were not put up for sale.
###
The Beatles had been brought to town by Ralph Bridges whose father had begun the Alkahest Lyceum System, a speakers’ booking agency, here in 1896. “Alkahest” is a hypothetical universal solvent.
Bridges and his wife Cindy under the name of Famous Artists had toyed with bringing the Beatles to Atlanta during their first U.S. tour the year before, but they weren’t certain that they could meet the very substantial $12,000 guarantee. A year later, it had quadrupled, the Beatles’ popularity had not diminished, and thus the Bridges bit.
“It’s a whole new world,” Bridges told Atlanta Magazine. “We knew they were the hottest rock and roll commodity of the century. But we really didn’t know, I guess. We had to have our home phone number changed right off the bat, and we added an unlisted line. We beefed up our office staff to handle the mail and had an automatic answering device put in. I wonder who’s booked who.”
The outstanding production team that Ralph and Cindy Bridges assembled could only have happened when Atlanta was still a small town. To inspect the New York security measures, the Bridges flew up with Atlanta Police Department Superintendent James Moseley to see “how the Yankees do it” at the Shea Stadium engagement three days before the Atlanta date.
In a 1985 AJC concert retrospective, Ralph Bridges recounted “that the show at Shea came within an inch of a full-scale riot, and it scared us to death.” In Atlanta, Bridges hired 150 uniform cops, and placed fifty of them on the field in a semi-circle in front of the stage, facing the house. They wore white gloves, helmets, carried nightsticks and more than half of the cops had cotton in their ears.
Celestine Sibley: “Officers feared a rolling human wave, and from time to time a few of the bleeding-madras-clad audience slipped from their seats and headed from the field, only to be turned back by police officers who circulated in the stands. The only tense moments came when officers ushered the mop-haired Englishmen on and off the field.”
“I didn’t really think we’d get by with it that well,” said Superintendent Moseley afterwards. “It was a real well-mannered crowd for that type of show.”
Society caterer Frank Cloudt was hired by the Bridges to satisfy the Beatles’ food rider. The Cloudt’s had been purveyors of fine food to Atlanta since the early 1930’s, and their gourmet grocery above Brookwood Hills included a piano, buffet and bar. Cloudt found the Beatles “lounging on army cots in their stadium dressing room, and he asked if it was true they wanted hamburgers. ‘Oh, no, not again,’ they cried.”
They dined on pork loin, leg of spring lamb and top sirloin along with corn on the cob (they had asked Cloudt for “corn on a stick”), fresh bean poles, and apple pie. “It was the best meal they’d had on tour,” they told Bridges.
Bridges’ assistant Janet Caldwell, who later worked for rock promoter Alex Cooley, recalled “that despite all of our fevered preparations,” they had not thought of everything. “Ringo decided to wash his hair, and we had to send out double-rush for a hair-dryer.” Bridges continues: “My wife Cindy had her stand-up hair dryer brought over from the house. That was real unusual in those days, boys generally didn’t use hair dryers.”
Buckhead’s beloved WQXI-- Quixie in Dixie-- was selected as Bridges’ “official Beatles station” and featured inch-by-inch reports on the tour’s progress. Disc Jockey Paul Drew traveled briefly with the boys and announced the Atlanta show.
But it was Atlanta’s Baker Audio that made the lasting impression. Baker was another dignified family firm which shared offices with classical radio station WGKA in “the House that Music Built” at 1140 Peachtree. They were primarily a sound system contract installer and had installed the permanent system in the new stadium. The Beatles carried no sound equipment.
Recalls Baker’s Duke Mewborn, “we gathered every piece of equipment we could beg or borrow, but we couldn’t anticipate how loud the crowd was. It was awesome.” Baker’s system array of Voice of the Theatre A7’s were driven by Altec-Lansing 1570 amplifiers. "We set up the sound system in the center of the field at the stage and provided a monitor speaker for the Beatles, because being a circular stadium and they being in the middle, all the sound would reflect back at them and cause problems, so the monitor would help wash that out, and they liked it very much," Mewborn said.
Stage monitors were feared at the time because of feedback. But Mewborn utilized cardioid-pattern microphones “which rejected ambient sounds coming from the sides or below.”
For the first time ever, the Beatles were excited actually to be able to hear themselves, and their manager Brian Epstein later termed the sound in Atlanta as “unquestionably the most effective during the tour: excellent.” The band commented on the sound quality during the performance, and although he was offered to join the tour, Duke Mewborn declined. He had his customers in Atlanta to tend to.
###
In a sense, the Beatles christened the new Fulton County Stadium which had been completed in April and had thus far contained mainly the swansong season of the Atlanta Crackers. At least one reporter noted the religious undertone of “four young singers performing the rites of Beatlemania on 36,000 youngsters at the concrete and steel alter.”
On the 90 degree Wednesday morning of the concert, “the $18 million fortress-for-a day appeared to be holding up well,” according to Walker Lundy’s Journal article “as trickles of teenagers, some with parents following respectfully behind, walked around and around the stadium, often kissing their tickets, others simply content with being near the building where the Beatles would be.”
The first fans to arrive were a pair of fifteen-year-old Floridians Bonnie Hensley and Marie Gainer, who appeared at 4:30 AM and who had skipped cheerleading practice to see the show. “We picked peas all summer to earn money for the trip.”
“Runner-up for early-bird honors was Ronnie Bowman, 12, of 154 Candler Road. ‘I thought I’d come on down,’ he said with an uncomfortable grin eyeing an approaching photographer. ‘I wanted to be first in line.’ Ronnie didn’t purchase his ticket until yesterday, extremely late as Beatle ticket-purchasing goes. ‘I was gonna go out and cut grass for the money, but my father gave it to me instead,’ he said happily.”
According to the Constitution, “B-day had arrived.”
Journal reporter John Askins wrote that “about 200 teen-agers were on hand Wednesday afternoon to welcome their idols at the airport, as were several newsmen, but the Beatles eluded both by having their limousines waiting out of sight near a remote runway.”
Around 2:20 several ecstatic girls got a brief glimpse of the Beatles speeding through the stadium gates in their black limo. “Reporters and photographers were besieged with pleas to ‘smuggle me in,’ ‘get me something of theirs-- anything, even a cigarette butt,’ and ‘sell me your pass.’
At 5:10 PM the Beatles walked into a hot sultry dressing room for the press conference, where the largest percentage of attendees were teen-age high school newspaper reporters, as the Journal’s Linda Green describes: “About 200 press members took Atlanta’s first official look at the Beatles, and judging from the intensity of the questions, one might gather the two could sustain a rather lengthy friendship.”
Beverly Blackwell, a 15-year-old Junior at Chamblee High covered the story for the Constitution. “Can you imagine what it’s like to go into a gigantic room with 190 other people, wait a few minutes, then shake hands with Paul McCartney, otherwise know as ‘the handsome Beatle?’ Well that’s the way it happened.”
“John wore his famous Mary Quant hat, Ringo seemed the happiest of the lot, and contrary to popular belief Paul’s eyes are blue and not hazel. George’s hair was the longest (which is pretty long). Questions were asked right and left and answered just as fast.”
Some of the exchanges were:
Q: “Can we look forward to any more Beatle movies?” John Lennon: “Well, there’ll be many more, but I don’t know whether you can look forward to them or not.”
Q: “How come you’re not hitting more Southern cities on your tour?” John Lennon: “We don’t know, you know. It’s not up to us where we go. We just climb in the vans.”
Q: “Where do John and Paul get their ideas for writing songs? John Lennon: “Out of John and Paul’s heads.”
Mayor Ivan Allen presented the group the key to the City, and said he never dreamed the group would appear in the new stadium. His teen-age son Beaumont was along and like the many editors hoped to grab an autograph from Ringo. The Q&A lasted about fifteen minutes, then the Beatles were taken backstage behind a chain of policemen’s hands.
###
Celestine Sibley reported that the concert opened with “an Atlanta team of musicians called The Vibrations playing for a fashion show which was narrated by a Britisher.” Cub reporter Beverly Blackwell continues:
“The actual show began precisely at 8:15 with King Curtis and his band on first. Following Curtis were the Discotheque Dancers; Cannibal and the Headhunters [from East Los Angeles]; then Sounds Inc., another name band from England.”
“Then THEY were announced on stage by Quixie DJ Paul Drew. Paul, John, Ringo and George walked onto the field and out to second base where the stage was (Hallowed Ground Forever More).”
“John was still wearing his hat. They started singing ‘Twist and Shout’ with John on lead at 9:37. During the next song ‘She’s a Woman’ Paul singing lead, Paul’s microphone started slipping and fell, with him right behind it.”
“Other songs they sang were ‘I Feel Fine,’ ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy,’ ‘Ticket to Ride,’ ‘Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby’ (the only one George sang), ‘Can’t Buy me Love,’ ‘Baby’s in Black,’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ (Ringo’s only song), ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ ‘Help!’ (their latest), and ‘I’m Down.’ Surprisingly enough, John played the organ on “I’m Down.” You could actually hear them playing and talking through the screaming. One girl almost clawed me to death when she learned I had shaken Paul’s hand!”
Reporter Dick Gray: “The Beatles worked hard. By the time they finished and jumped into the big, black Cadillac behind the stage, they all were soaking with perspiration and tired from jumping about the stage. But they weren’t too tired to wave ripped-up sheets to the screaming faithful as they sped from the field. They were grinning from ear to ear. Mr. Epstein confirmed this. He said the Beatles enjoyed their Atlanta performance more than any other they ever had done-- because they could hear themselves.”
###
“Two young ladies stood behind one of the dugouts, weeping piteously because a policeman wouldn’t let them jump down to touch the grass. ‘Honey,’ the officer said, ‘the grass grows just as green in front of your own house.’”
“A female walking from the stadium with her boyfriend was heard saying, “Crawford, if you were a girl you’d understand.”
“The consensus of more than 100 reporters, radio and TV newsmen who crowded into the dressing room: ‘Nicest millionaires we ever met.’”
Mayor Ivan Allen: “They’re excellent boys, the only improvement I’d make, I’d cut their hair a little bit.”
Promoter Bridges: “It’s the only time we ever had as much publicity for a show as we thought we should have. It was the biggest thing that ever happened to us.”
“One boy of around 13, sitting and waiting for someone, summed up his feelings of the entire situation by saying, “I wish they’d sing a song called ‘Shut Up.’”
-30-