Cincinnati press

From the collection of Sara Schmidt

From the collection of Sara Schmidt

photo by :  Glenn Hartong

What's Future For Beatles?  Count Money.
By David Bracey
The Cincinnati Enquirer August 28, 1964

What will they do when the wave of Beatlemania subsides?  Beatles John Lennon had the answer Thursday in a Cincinnati press conference.

"Count the money."

The four British singers sat it out in sweltering heat in a private room in Cincinnati Gardens while newspaper, radio and television men fired questions.

The Beatles -- Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Lennon, were cheerful and co-operative.  The conference, set up by publicity man, Dino Santangeio, was well organized; a contrast to the bedlam-like scene in Denver, Colorado the night before.

The Beatles answered questions on almost everything, sometime wittily, often seriously and occasionally in a manner that cut cocky questioners down to size.  Never, though did a Beatle crack border on malice.

When a television reporters asked what excuse they had for their collar-length hair, Lennon began:  "Well, it just grows out y'er head..."  McCartney cut in "We don't need an excuse.  You need an excuse."

A newspaperman from Dayton, who said the four ought to be able to handle a crowd of 30,000 without police protection, was told by Lennon, "Well, maybe you could. You're fatter than we are."

Somebody asked the boys what they thought of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater.  McCartney, baby-faced member of the group and their most ready speaker, admitted that he did not know too much about the American political scene.  But he said he thought  "Mr. Johnson was a better man."

As for British politics, he said he did not know too much about that, either.  Teen-agers stand up and scream piercingly and painfully when the Beatles appear.  Why?  They were asked.

McCartney said none of them knew, but he had heard teenagers pay to go to their shows just to scream.  "A lot of them don't even want to listen," he said, "because they have got the records."

A reporter asked what they thought of the psychiatrist who drew an analogy between the hysteria generated by their beat and the speeches of the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

Lennon said abruptly "Tell him to shut up.  He's off his head," (mad).

A questioner asked McCartney what he thought of columnist Walter Winchell.   McCartney answered bluntly:  "He said I'm married and I'm not."

"Maybe he wants to marry you,"  Harrison suggested.

Ringo Starr, the group's large-nosed drummer, was asked why he does not sing Ringo, who gave a rare public rendition the night before in Denver, commented, "I can see you haven't bought our lp's."

The four answered a question admitting that the show that comes after the show is sometimes the one to see.  They said they whopped it up until 4 or 5 in the morning depending on how much sleep they need.

What would they have done had they not become Beatles?

"We would have just been bad entertainers," Harrison said.  They all have had only one ambition, to be in show business.

Ringo said he could not see anything to replace their magical power other than a new generation of teenagers with different tastes.

Both sides of the party

I just think this is too cool.  Here are two photos of the Beatles leaving the airport in Cincinnati, Ohio.  You can see in the color photo that someone is  talking to Paul and about to snap a photo of him and I just so happen to own the photograph of Paul that was being taken!   

from the collection of Sara Schmidt

Hang on for Cincinnati!

Red Rock Beatle Memories

Finding photos of the Beatles at the Red Rocks concert was difficult, but finding photos of the fans at the concert was easy.   Here are some great photographs of Beatlemania at it's highest.   The color photo shows a girl in the middle of the crowd looking at the camera.  That is Connie Paris, who was a big Beatles fan and attended the concert at the Red Rocks with five of her friends from high school.  In March of 1968, Connie went missing after she was going to the Denver library to work on a school paper.    A few days later her body was found and it was apparent that she had been strangled to death.  Connie's murder has remained a mystery all of these years and so I want to dedicate this blog post to the memory of a Beatle fan who saw the Beatles in concert and her friends recall them all jumping up and down when the Beatles were on stage.    


Here are some memories I found scatted throughout the world wide web about this concert.

"I was there! With astonishing trust and understanding, my pretty cool parents bought my sister (13) and I (9) tickets, drove us to Red Rocks, waited for us in the parking lot, and probably heard the concert better than we did. They knew what the Beatles meant to us. Mom had even taken us to the airport to see them arrive. I can't imagine dropping a nine-year-old off for a concert today. I also can't imagine having to make a withdrawal from savings to buy a concert ticket ($6.50 a pop)." -- anonymous

"I was there! My mom bought tickets for me and my best friend, but her mother wouldn't let her go. I was 14, she was 13. So mom took me, and she loved the Beatles, thought John and Paul were geniuses!" -- anonymous

"I was 7....my mom took me.....biggest problem is that everyone stood nearly the whole concert......and all the teenie-bopper girls were screaming. Being 7 and nowhere near as tall as most of the crowd, I really didn't get to see or hear much.....but I was in heaven just being there. "–Stephanie

“The thing that sticks in my mind the most is the parking lot.” "Cars and buses were parked end to end. There were no traffic lanes, just a sea of vehicles parked as close together as they could possibly get. When it was over, exiting the parking lot took such a long time." –Holly H.

"I went with my best friend from Laramie and my mother drove us because she was afraid of all the traffic. We got there at 2:30 p.m. and the place was already about a third full," Diane L.

And here is part of a news story about a fan that was at the concert

Robert Boice was 6 years old at the show, brought along by his mom and sisters to celebrate the growing Beatlemania that had enveloped their home in Cheyenne. His family managed to get into the venue early by telling police they were tourists from Wyoming and knew nothing about the show.

"The license plate on our car and the way we were dressed really helped," Robert said. "We actually wound up in about the fifth row in the middle and were able to hear a lot of it. The best you could hear was the between-songs banter, which was mostly just one-liners from John, who was always so good at that stuff."

Robert's sister Jacklyn Boice listed some of the songs she remembered from the set in the journal she kept at the time: "Twist and Shout," "Roll Over Beethoven" and "Boys," which was done by Ringo. In all, she said the show was only about 35 minutes.

"The last song of the concert was 'She Loves You,'" she said. "Some girls began surging toward the railing, but the police held them back."