GUEST POST BY GEORGE LARRIMORE 
Those teenage boys were part of the phenomenon called ‘Beatlemania.’ How big were The Beatles? When they first appeared on television, on the Ed Sullivan Show in February of 1964, one third of all the people in America watched. In April of that year all of the top five songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart were Beatles songs. In April of that year they had fourteen songs in the Hot 100. And they’ve sustained: The compilation of The Beatles #1 singles was the top selling CD of the decade between 2000 and 2010. In March 2013 American Idol devoted an entire show to their music.
On that day in 1966 The Beatles arrived in Memphis at around 2:30 in the afternoon after a flight from Boston where they had performed at an outdoor racetrack the day before. They paused for pictures at the Airport then went straight to the Coliseum where two shows were booked, one at 4:00 the other at 8:30.
It was just another stop on their third tour of America, playing to promote their newly-released album Revolver. They had met Elvis the year before so there was no need to stop at Graceland. What no one knew at the time was that these fourteen shows would be the end of The Beatles as a touring act. In just ten days The Beatles would play Candlestick Park in San Francisco then never play for the ticket buying public again.
There was a weird vibe in Memphis even before the concerts. Their spokesperson, Tony Barrow later called it “A nasty atmosphere. A very tense and pressured kind of day.” There had been death threats.
It wasn’t the music, it was what John Lennon (always known for his candor) had said to London’s Evening Standard in March of 1966: “We’re more popular than Jesus right now.” In the same interview he predicted the demise of Christianity and Rock and Roll, or both. In America there were calls for a Beatles boycott. Record burnings followed. Lennon tried to talk his way out of the controversy but it didn’t work. The media, then as now, love to build up idols. And then tear them down. By late summer the controversy was still front page.
Memphis, then as now, was in large part a conservative Christian city. It was often said back then that Memphis had “more churches than gas stations.”
That August day, a fundamentalist minister, Reverend Jimmy Stroud, was staging a rally outside the Coliseum. Six Ku Klux Klan members, in their hooded white costumes, held a sidewalk protest. Across town, at the Auditorium, a kind of anti-Beatles rally was about to begin. The next day’s headline in the Press-Scimitar read ‘Christian Youth Rally Jams Auditorium, Even as Beatles Play at Coliseum.’ Eight thousand young people (“a happy throng”) attended.
The Memphis City Council had already put the band on notice, voting to cancel the concerts. But that didn’t stick. Hunter Lane, Junior, a progressive member of the Council, contacted Pat Rainer, about to go into her senior year at Central High School and President of the local Beatles Fan Club (twenty members, all girls), asking if she wanted to present the band with a key to the city. The key, she says, was “about an inch long” so she went out and had a bigger, brassier one made.
Rainer had tickets for both shows on the “second or third row” for the afternoon show. And, like everyone else we’ve talked to, said the music was all but impossible to hear. Jack Chapman remembers, from his seat, that “They were the size of ants. And there was nothing but screaming.”
Larry Raspberry, whose band The Gentrys had opened at the Coliseum for another British band, Herman’s Hermits, says nobody took sound seriously back then. The Beatles music was played through the house public address system. “The same one they used to announce basketball games.”
Tickets for the shows cost $5.50, about $37.00 in 2016 dollars. And there were four opening acts. Ironically, neither show sold out. About ten thousand attended the afternoon show, the nighttime show drew twelve thousand five hundred.
Between shows the band held a news conference where Pat Rainer was planning to give them the key. She recalls George Klein sitting behind her and telling her she needed to make her move. She was suddenly “face to face” with Paul McCartney when she handed him the key. “I opened my mouth and I could not say a word. I could not speak.”
It was during the third song in the set (If I Needed Someone) that the most notorious moment of the Memphis concerts happened. A cherry bomb, that sounded to some like a gunshot, exploded in the crowd, injuring three people.
Karen Young Ockerhausen doesn’t remember much about the concert (“It was all a fog”) but she recalls the explosion. “It went off two or three rows in front of me.” She was so frightened that she immediately left the Coliseum.
On stage The Beatles clearly heard explosion, but kept playing. John Lennon (who acknowledged, ironically, “There had been threats to shoot us”) talked about the cherry bomb incident later in a interview. “Every one of us looked at each other because each thought it was the other that had been shot.”
According to the Press-Scimitar, writing the next day, a girl named Vicki Arnold, then sixteen, admitted she tossed the cherry bomb. She claimed a boy standing close to her had lit the fuse and put it in her hand and she had to throw it. But she later admitted she had brought firecrackers to the concert in her purse. She and a boy named Richard Henry Price were taken to Juvenile Court but were later released.
It has been debated for fifty years whether the cherry bomb incident made The Beatles finally decide that enough is enough. While it may have been a factor the whole story is a lot more complicated.
No doubt, for The Beatles, performing live was not what I had been when then they were playing all nighters in Hamburg or smoky gigs in Liverpool’s Cavern Club. By 1966 it must have felt like playing over the sound of a jet engine. The shows, each about thirty minutes long, could not have been satisfying. But the most important factor may have been that they were then, making music in the studio that could not be replicated on stage. While they had already made huge hit records their best music was yet to come. Sgt. Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band was a year away. Abbey Road, the White Album and Let It Be were not even in the gestation stage. All innovative, all of it ahead of the crowd. By 1967 the Beatles’ music was “all about the vinyl.”
Susan Weeks loved The Beatles so much that she and her cousin would play their albums to each other over the phone. Susan’s parents drove her to Memphis for the concert from Clinton, Mississippi. After dinner with her great-aunt they dropped her off at the Coliseum. She was by herself, wearing a Royal Blue jumper that her mother had made. Over that was a “psychedelic” tie that she had bought. From her seat, about halfway back on the main floor, she could tell the boys were wearing pinstripe suits and could tell what songs they played but couldn’t really hear the music. Not that it mattered. She was there. “I could not believe it was really them.”
Susan has been to hear Paul McCartney, now in his 70s, play the songs she loved when she was young. She still loves the music. So do her children. And on a shelf in her closet she still has that blue jumper and the psychedelic tie. She never washed the jumper because Paul McCartney “breathed the same air that was in that room” in August of 1966.
