"Ladies and gentlemen" "Honoured by their country decorated by their Queen and loved here in America..." "Here are the Beatles!" "Shea Stadium New York 15th August 1965" "Thank you very much." "We'd like to carry on now" "with a song which was one of our records a few months ago" "This song is called I Fee!" "Fine" "I never felt people came to hear our show" "I felt they came to see us" "Because from the count-in on the first number the volume of screams would just drown everything out" "Vox made us special big amplifiers for that tour" "They were 100 watts" "We went up from the 30 watt amp to the 100 watt amp" "Neil Aspinall Tour Manager That was miked up, I think, to the big speakers round Shea Stadium so the audience weren't necessarily listening to the sound from the stage" "They were listening to what was coming from the PA system" "We were just working off the normal columns, which were..." "So it can't have sounded too good" "Can you hear me?" "We'd like to do a slow song now" "It's also off 'Beatles VI' or something." "I don't know what it's off" "I haven't got it" "It's a waltz, this one." "Remember that" "Anyway, the song's called, hopefully enough... aah, look at her!" "It's called Baby's in B!" "Ack" "The next song we'd like to sing..." "John was having a good time." "He was into his comedy, which was great" "The great thing about John, if there was ever a tense show - which that undoubtedly was - you can't play to that many people for the first time and not be tense - his comedy would come in and he'd start the faces" "The shoulders would start going and it was very encouraging because at least we're not taking it seriously" "If you look at that footage and see how we are acting or reacting to the place it's very big, it's very strange" "I feel that on that show" "John cracked up, just went mad" "Not mentally ill, just got crazy" "If you see him, he's playing the electric piano with his elbows" "It was a really strange thing" "We did I'm Down" "I did the organ on the record and decided to play it on stage for the first time" "I felt naked without a guitar and George couldn't play for laughing" "I was doing it for a laugh" "It was marvellous, the biggest crowd we'd ever played to" "The biggest live show that I think anybody's ever done and it was fantastic" "That was a good experience, the first really big open air..." ""Wow, look at this!" you know" "I didn't think about it like that at the time" "I personally didn't realise that it was the first really big open air..." "You know, 55000 people" "Even now it's a big crowd, 56000" "But then - it's like old money - it seemed like millions of people 60000 people" "They told me it was 70" "On one or another trip, we met Elvis" "It was one of the highlights of our visit but by the time we'd got near his house we'd forgotten where we were going" "We were in this Cadillac limousine" "You know, in LA, everything goes round and round and round" "Then I think we were going along Mulholland..." "We had a couple of cups of tea in the back of the car" "By the time we got to Elvis's house we forgot where we were going" "It didn't really matter where we were going" "Bel Air, actually." "The meet was arranged and we were going to see him" "I was pretty excited about it all and then we arrived" "We pulled up at these big gates - we're going to see Elvis!" "We all fell out of the car, just like in a Beatles cartoon" "All in hysterics..." "trying to pretend we weren't... silly" "In the house, Elvis was sitting on a couch, playing a Fender bass - plugged in an amplifier - watching the TV" "And it was "Oh, there's Elvis"" "It was Elvis." "He just looked like Elvis" "He was the King, wasn't he?" "It was Elvis" "This is Mr Hips, you know." "Hip-swivelling man!" "Wow, you know, that's Elvis!" "He was playing Mohair Sam all evening" "He played it endlessly on a jukebox." "It was the record of the moment for him" "So it was great to see he's a music fan, he's not just... because that was one of our big records of the moment too" "He had a TV going all the time, which is what I do anyway" "In front of the TV, he had a massive Fender bass amplifier with a big bass plugged in it" "He was playing bass all the time with the picture up on the TV so we just got in there and played with him" "We plugged in whatever was around and we all played and sang" "I never jammed with Elvis at all" "John said he'd..." " John jammed with Elvis" "It must have been when we went out of the room" "I think it was because he had a bass there, so I thought..." "So I thought you know... bass, hey, this is interesting" "Ringo played football with him" " Yeah, I played football with Elvis" "Round about 10 or 10.30..." "Priscilla was brought in" "She had a long thing on... and a tiara" "I've got this picture of her like..." "as a sort of Barbie doll with kind of purple gingham and a gingham bow in her very beehive hair" "I spent most of the party trying to suss out if anybody had any reefer" "I think it wouldn't have mattered to me if she was there" "Because it was him I came to see" "I don't remember the boys he had with him" "All his gang - the Memphis Mafia or whatever they call them" "He was surrounded by these sycophants" ""I'm going to the loo now." "OK, Elv, we'll go with you." Strange" "I was so angry that he wasn't making any music, as he should have been" "We were asking about this, just making movies and not doing any personal appearances or TV" "I think he enjoys making movies so much" "If we don't do personal appearances, we get bored quickly" "He says he misses it a bit" "He was great, just how I expected him" "It just sort of faded out, you couldn't get close" "It's not like we could have become good friends, it was impossible" "We weren't buddies or anything, but he was really nice" "He was a nice guy, he was very slim, you know" "He was really good." "I'm glad I met him" "It was one of the great meetings in my life" "The saddest part is now, years and years later we found out that he tried to have us banished from America because he was very big with the C.I.A. And everything" "It's very sad to me that he felt so threatened" "That he thought, like a lot of people, that we were bad for American youth" "In '62 we were touring in a van and people were laughing at us" "That's how our careers started." "They were laughing at us in Scotland" "Then they got interested and got to really listen and like us" "Then this screaming thing started" "They used us as an excuse to go mad" "The world did, then blamed it on us" "We were just in the middle, in a car or hotel room." "We couldn't do much" "We couldn't go out, we couldn't do anything" "For us it was a drag - we knew they wouldn't hear anything because it's just like a riot, not like a show" "It felt dangerous because everybody was out of hand" "Even the cops were just caught up in the mania" "It was like they were this big movie" "We felt trapped in the middle while everybody else was going mad" "We were actually the sanest people in the whole thing" "The realisation was kicking in that nobody was listening" "That was OK in the beginning but even worse than that is that we were playing so bad" "We were now a big band." "When we went 'Whooahh' and shook our heads everyone went mad" "I don't really think it was that bad" "I was playing just shit all I could do was..." "hold down the off-beat" "I couldn't come off that, really because if you went to do anything on the toms, it was just nothing" "There was no noise" "I just felt that we were playing really bad" "I'd joined the Beatles because they were the best band in Liverpool" "I wanted to play with good players and that's what it was all about" "First and foremost, we were musicians" "George Martin Record Producer Their musical creativity showed no signs of flagging" "On the contrary, they were becoming more and more productive" "The work they were giving me was much more interesting" "They were finding new frontiers all the time" "Our whole attitude was changing" "We'd grown up a little" "I think grass was really influential in a lot of our changes" "Especially with the writers" "Because they were writing different stuff, we were playing differently" "We were all expanding in all areas of our life opening up to a lot of different attitudes" "The direction was changing away from the Thank You Gir!" "Poppy stuff the early stuff - From Me to You, She Loves You" "All the early stuff was directly relating to your fans kind of saying, please buy this record" "Thank You Girl, PS I Love You, it was all very that" "There came a point where we'd done enough of that and branched out into songs that are a bit more surreal, more entertaining" "Other people were arriving on the scene who were a little bit influential" "I don't really know whether we'd been influenced" "Dylan was starting to influence us quite heavily at that point" "When it got sort of contemporary as it were, a contemporary influence" "I think Rubber Soul was about when it started happening" "It was just around that period when we were all getting into different kinds of music" "George's became Indian" "We were all listening to classical music and various types of music other than our own and our rock'n'roll roots and George moved into the Indian thing" "He'd give you a better explanation of just when it was" "During the filming of He!" "p!" "There were some Indian musicians in a restaurant scene and I kind of messed around with the sitar then" "During that year, towards the end of the year" "I kept hearing the name Ravi Shankar." "I heard it about three times" "About the third time I heard it, a friend of mine said:" ""Have you heard Ravi Shankar?"" "So I went out and bought the record and that was it, I just felt..." "It felt very familiar to me to listen to that music" "It was around that time I bought a sitar" "I bought a cheap sitar in a shop called India Craft in London" "It was lying around." "I hadn't figured out what to do with it" "When we were working on Norwegian Wood it just needed something and it was quite spontaneous, from what I remember" "I just picked up the sitar, found the notes and just played it" "We miked it up and put it on and it just seemed to hit the spot" "They were getting more and more interested in unusual sounds" "They were trying out new instruments and saying to me:" ""What ideas have you got for this?"" "Yesterday had been the first time we used other instrumentalists on records" "The only person who'd played with them before was me" "Now we had a group of other musicians so we weren't averse to using other people or other sounds" "Rubber Soul was an indication of the way things were going." "A great album" "That's my favourite - at the time I think it was the best we'd made" "We certainly knew we were making a good album" "You know the cover, the photo where we looked stretched" "That was the kind of thing that we were all very into" "That kind of random little exciting thing that would happen" "The photographer, Bob Freeman, had taken pictures at John's house" "We just had our new gear on, the polo necks" "We were doing straight mug shots, four of us all posing" "Back in London, he was in someone's flat" "He was showing us a little carousel of slides and he had a piece of cardboard that was album cover size" "He was projecting the photographs on to it, planning an album cover" "We'd just chosen the photo." "We said "That one looks good"" "We all liked ourselves in one particular shot and he was just winding up when the card it was on fell back a bit" "It elongated the photo and we went "Can you do it like that?"" "He said "Yeah, I could print it like that" so we thought, that's it..." "Rubber Sou!" "So there's no great mysterious meaning behind all of this" "It was just four boys working out what to call their new album" "I don't see too much difference in Rubber Sou!" "And Revo!" "ver" "To me, they could be volume one and two" "Maybe I'm wrong, I haven't played them right back to back but they were both very pleasant and enjoyable records for me" "It has that quality because it's the follow on and we were just starting to really find ourselves in the studio" "You know, what we could do, which was... over just being four of us playing our instruments and the vocals" "Their ideas were beginning to become much more potent in the studio" "They started to tell me what they wanted and would press me for ideas" "More ways of translating those ideas into reality" "We'd be well into the album and we knew I'd be doing a number somewhere" "We'd say "Have you got a song?" Or "We've got this for you"" "I thought it might not be a bad idea... rather than giving him a very serious song because he wasn't that keen on singing" "I remember the idea coming up just before going to sleep" "That little twilight moment when silly ideas come into your head" "I just thought of Ye!" "ow Submarine" "By then, I'd started writing myself but it was hard to bring your songs in when you had Lennon and McCartney" "It was a bit of a joke because I'd bring these songs I'd written and they'd laugh because I'd re-written an old standard again" "I was great at re-writing Jerry Lee Lewis songs" "I didn't have many songs." "They were more or less the ones I had written" "I've always had a couple I was working on or thinking about and in the later years I did have a huge backlog but in the mid-60s I didn't have too many" "George went through the same problem as I did with his first songs but that didn't last long" "Then we started coming up with great songs." "Which one of us was on Revo!" "ver?" "That was the point where you discover you're not actually... you're paying more money to the taxman..." "You're so happy that you're finally earning money, then you find out..." "In those days we paid 19s.6d. Out of every £1" "There were 20 shillings in £1" "That was with super-tax, surtax and tax-tax and stuff" "It was ridiculous" "A heavy penalty to pay for making money" "It was on Revolver that we have the track Tomorrow Never Knows which was a great innovation" "That's me in my Tibetan Book of the Dead period and the expression Tomorrow Never Knows was another of Ringo's" "I was self-conscious about the lyrics of Tomorrow Never Knows so I took one of Ringo's malapropisms like Hard Day's Night to take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics" "John had a song which was all on the chord of C which we thought a perfectly good idea, like Indian music is all on one chord" "I wondered how George Martin would take it - it was a radical departure" "At least we'd had three chords and maybe a change for the middle eight" "Suddenly this was just John strumming on C rather earnestly" "In those days there was no technology like there is now" "There were two guitars, bass and drums, and that was it" "If we did stuff in the studio with the aid of recording tricks then we couldn't just reproduce them on stage" "Nowadays you could do Tomorrow Never Knows, have all the loops on a keyboard" "You could have as many pianists, drummers and orchestras as you wanted" "But in those days we were just a little dancehall band and we never thought of augmenting ourselves" "The hard stuff was the complicated harmonies, hard to do live on stage" "Like for instance Nowhere Man" "Nowhere Man was OK, wasn't it?" " It was OK, but it was hard" "Circus Krone Munich" "Somewhere between albums and tours..." "I had a dentist, anyway..." "One night, John and his wife Cynthia and Patti and myself were having dinner at this guy's house" "This fellow, for some reason or other, had obtained lysergic acid diethylamide 25 which at that time was not illegal" "It was a legally obtained medication" "But we didn't really know about it" "I seemed to recall that I'd heard vaguely about it but I didn't really know what it was" "He just put it in our coffee" "He didn't know what it was, just..." "It's the thing with middle class London swingers who'd heard about it" "They didn't know it was different from pot or pills and they gave us it" "He advised us to stay." "We thought it was for an orgy and we didn't want to know" "It became a bit seedy to me" "As if he was trying to get something happening in his house" "There was some reason he didn't want us to go" "Then he said "Leave your car here, I'll drive and you can come back later"" "I said "No, we'll go in my car," and we drove." "This guy came as well, in his car" "We got to the nightclub" "We were just insane." "We all thought there was a fire in the lift" "Just a little red light and we were all screaming, all hysterical" "We went up to the floor where the discotheque was" "The door opens and we all go aaaaaah!" "We felt lke the elevator was on fire or we were going into hell or something" "We were all in hysterics, crazy" "Then we got out at the top and everything was OK" "We sat there, probably for hours, and I ended up driving everybody home" "It was daylight and I was driving a Mini with John, Cynthia and Patti" "I seem to remember we were doing 18 miles an hour" "And I was really concentrating" "Some of the time it just felt normal then suddenly it was all crazy" "I really was frightened of that kind of stuff" "When you're young, you're taught..." "watch out for them devil drugs" "So when acid came round, we'd heard that you're never the same" "It alters your life and you never think the same again" "I think John was rather excited by that prospect." "I was rather frightened" "I thought this could mean that I'd never get back home" "Oh geez, you know." "It may not be the greatest move" "So I delayed and was seen to stall a bit within the group - because there was a lot of peer pressure" "Day Tripper- that was a drug song, I just liked the word" "The last Saturday Club show..." " We'!" "ever do..." "The last Saturday Club before Christmas, we'd!" "Ike... to wish everybody a very happy Crimb!" "e from a!" "of us and thank everyone who sent cards this week and a!" "the other weeks" "I hope you all have a happy Christmas and a very happy New Year" "Nice of you to drop in today, lads" " Oh, we weren't doing anything" "Not at all, Brian." "Like you said, Merry Christmas to you" "We can't ask you to work today" " No, it's not a!" "owed" "We'll play your record." "Does it matter which side we p!" "Ay?" "We Can Work It Out" "Well, sort it out amongst yourse!" "ves then" "Have you got it?" " Yeah, I'm putting it on now" "Here goes the need!" "e on the record" "Well, the mania was..." "As we've said, it was pretty difficult to get around" "Out of convenience, we decided we were not going to go in" "Going to the TV studios to promote our records was too much of a hassle" "We'll just make our own little films and we'll put them out" "What was happening..." "We really couldn't fit in all the live television shows that people wanted us to do round the world:" "Shindig, Ed Su!" "Ivan Show" "Top of the Pops, Thank Your Lucky Stars and stuff in France, Germany, etc." "So to accommodate those people we decided that if we just made - we call them promo films - a promo film of the individual songs and sent that to TV stations around the world" "That would fulfil their obligation, or that would do the job" "The idea was that we didn't have to go out" "We thought this was a great idea, to send the movies, the film" "We didn't call them videos, they were just going on TV" "We thought this was a great ruse" "Let's do these and we can stay home" "Ladies and gentlemen, here's a feature taped for us in England by Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison" "Hello, Ed, how are you?" "I'm sorry we can't be there in person to do the show but everybody's busy these days, with the washing and the cooking..." "We hope you like it." "One's called Rain and one's called Paperback Writer" "The idea was to send them to America because we can't go everywhere" "We'll send these things out to promote the record" "These days, everybody does that" "It's just part of your promotion for a single so I suppose in a way we invented MTV" "That's the first record with backwards music on it" "Haneda Airport Tokyo 30th June 1966" "This is a thing we never really talked about" "Everywhere we were going in those days, it was a demonstration of something" "Riots were happening" "Plus people were demonstrating because the Budokan was supposed to be a spiritual hall reserved for martial arts" "Some Japanese say that your performances will violate the Budokan which is devoted to traditional Japanese martial arts and you set a bad example to Japanese youth by leading them astray from traditional Japanese values." "What do you think?" "If a dancing troupe from Japan goes to Britain nobody tries to say they're violating traditional laws or that they are trying to spoil anything" "We're singing here because we've been asked to" "I'd rather watch singing than wrestling anyway" "We're not trying to violate anything and we're just as traditional anyway" "In any town we went to, someone always had a grievance" "Something was wrong" "We were locked up in the hotel for a long time with merchants coming round and showing us ivory and stuff like this" "People go to Tokyo and do shopping." "We couldn't get out of the hotel" "I once tried to get out but a policeman ran after me." "I did actually do it..." "Paul and maybe Ringo got out one day and got in a taxi" "The police caught them and made them go back to the hotel" "But John and I actually got out" "We made it down to the local market and it was great" "We were looking at things and buying things" "Then the police came and got us and said "Naughty boys!"" "We were only allowed out at the time for the concert when it was worked out like a military manoeuvre" ""At 5.30 precisely we will knock on your door"" "Exactly as scheduled." "Then they said "You will line up outside the room"" ""At 5.32 we will leave the door"" ""We will now walk to the lift"" ""At 5.33 we will be at the elevator"" ""The elevator takes one minute and eight to get down"" ""At 5.35 we'll be down in the car park"" "Then they said "You will get in car with Mr Evans"" "Then they had the seating arranged in all the cars" "Amazing efficiency we'd never seen the like of in Britain" "Just to be... how we were" "They'd knock on the door and we'd never come out" "It would just totally wreck their timing" "You'd see all these guys going absolutely barmy because we hadn't walked down the corridor at 7.14 and a third" "We knew we were doing that to them" "As we went to the gig, they had the fans organised with police patrols on each corner so there weren't fans haphazardly waving along the streets" "They'd been herded on to corners and were allowed to wave from there" "So you'd go along the street and there would be a little 'eeekk'" "You would go a few more hundred yards and 'eeekk'" "It was very strange." "The audience were very nice" "They're reserved but they were up on their feet, or they tried to be but the police had telephoto lenses all around and anybody who stood up and looked like they might run towards the stage or something had their photograph taken" "So the people were very restricted in how they could respond to us" "But it was a warm reception" "It was very nice but a bit clinical" "Nippon Budokan Hall" "Ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome the Beatles!" "The close harmonies on things like Paperback Writerand Nowhere Man were very hard to do on stage because it was just empty" "There were no guitar notes to take it from" "We had an eight-track by then, that was the problem" "So we had the luxury of double tracking" "Also, we were competing with the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and all that" "I think it was around that time" "All the voices were really like double tracked..." "There was no way of doing it on stage really" "Evening Performance 30th June 1966" "You'd get to the point where it was particularly bad" "Then we'd do our Elvis legs and wave to the crowd and they'd all scream and it would cover it up" "I think Paul already said that the screaming covered a lot of worrying moments" "The screams did cover a lot of of sins... and those shows, it wasn't there" "The second show was pretty good, but the first one was a bit of a shock" "You mean we actually played better in the thirty minutes we had?" "Yeah, I guess so" "Well, that's probably true" "Afternoon Performance 1st July 1966" "I think it just started to hit everybody." "I remember we had one meeting..." "We were mainly talking about the musicianship going downhill" "Never mind the boredom of doing it" "There was always so much pressure, from the minute you opened your eyes" "People trying to get at you for whatever reason" "To be friends or to get an interview or to do a radio" "The pressure was on from the minute you started" "The Philippines was almost like a mistake from the very beginning" "As soon as we got there, it was bad, bad news" "I hated the Philippines" "It was one of those places where you knew they were waiting for a fight" "They were pushing you and, if you'd done anything, they would have..." "Subtitles:" "Screentext"