The Beatles: Washington, D.C. Concert (National General Corporation, Concerts, Inc., NEMS Enterprises, Ltd., fomed February 11, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, June 19) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing YouTube post of the first U.S. concert ever given by The Beatles on February 11, 1964 in Washington, D.C., available for viewing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TarF1_OIqMg&list=RDTarF1_OIqMg&start_radio=1. It’s a film I’ve seen before; the first time I saw it, or at least part of it, was at a screening of Beatleiana in 1980 at the California Theatre downtown to which my then-girlfriend Cat Ortiz and I went. Unfortunately, the day of the screening the people putting it on got a cease-and-desist letter from ATV Music, which then owned the rights to most of The Beatles’ originals, saying they weren’t allowed to show any sequences that included ATV-owned Beatles songs. So they had to re-edit the films hastily on the fly and show only The Beatles covering other artists’ songs and the handful of pre-ATV Beatles originals like “Love Me Do” and “P.S., I Love You” that were owned by Ardmore and Beechwood, EMI Records’ own publishing arm. Later we got a chance to see what was then billed as the only extant version of the film, which cut off abruptly during the penultimate song, John Lennon’s famous cover of the Isley Brothers’ hit “Twist and Shout.” (Actually The Isley Brothers didn’t do the original version of “Twist and Shout.” That was another Black group, The Top Notes, who recorded it for Atlantic in 1961 in a session produced by the young Phil Spector. But their version went nowhere commercially and the Isley Brothers had the R&B hit.) At the time we were told this was the only extant version of the film, and at one of the Los Angeles Beatlefest conventions we bought a bootleg LP of the concert on which the cover of “Twist and Shout” was replaced with a Beatles cover of another Isley Brothers’ song, “Shout,” taken from the soundtrack of a British TV show called Around the Beatles. (The Beatles didn’t play live on Around the Beatles; they lip-synched to their records, which for the other songs they played was fine because they’d all been released commercially, but alas the original recording of “Shout” was lost and all that survives is the version from the TV soundtrack, with fans screaming all over it.)

The version we watched last night bears a 2010 copyright stamp to Apple Enterprises, Ltd., the company owned by the two surviving Beatles (Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr) and the estates of John Lennon and George Harrison. The big surprise was that this version was complete, including not only all of “Twist and Shout” but the final song they performed that night, their cover of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” (I noted the irony that after John had performed his voice-busting number, “Twist and Shout,” Paul performed his. Any time The Beatles covered Little Richard, Paul sang lead because he had the voice for it and John didn’t; when John did a medley of Richard’s “Rip It Up” and “Ready Teddy” on his Rock and Roll tribute album, it was readily apparent why Paul had sung lead whenever The Beatles covered Little Richard.) The Beatles’ set list for the Washington, D.C. concert was “Roll Over, Beethoven” (a Chuck Berry cover on which George sang lead and, as always, got one of the lines of the lyric wrong: Berry had sung, “Reel and rock with one another,” while George sang, “Reel it, rock it, roll it over,” and to this day whenever you hear a band playing “Roll Over, Beethoven” you can tell from that line whether they learned it from Berry’s original or The Beatles’ version), “From Me to You,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “This Boy,” “All My Loving,” “I Wanna Be Your Man” (a song John and Paul gave to the Rolling Stones before recording it themselves, and not surprisingly it suited Mick Jagger’s voice better than it did Ringo’s), “Please Please Me” (the first Beatles single to reach number one on the British charts and their real commercial breakthrough), Meredith Willson’s haunting ballad “Till There Was You” from The Music Man (Willson’s widow said she got more royalties from the Beatles’ cover version than from the original musical), “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Twist and Shout,” and “Long Tall Sally.” Obviously this version had been run through modern sound processing equipment to reduce the sheer amount of audience noise (coming, the film documents, from boys as well as girls) and bring out the sound of The Beatles’ instruments. What most impressed me from this version was how good George Harrison and Ringo Starr were; there’s been a tendency to patronize them (even John Lennon, in one of his last interviews, said, “Paul and I were The Beatles. The other two could have been just anybody”), but George’s lead guitar parts and Ringo’s pounding drumming were not only key elements to their overall sound but quite impressive in their own rights. It's especially amazing how good The Beatles sounded when you realize what a hard time they had under unspeakably bad performing conditions,

They had amplifiers that were state-of-the-art for 1964 but look ridiculously puny today (the real revolution in amplifier design that made heavy metal possible was done by James Marshall in Britain in 1967; Jimi Hendrix, who felt a special bond with Marshall because his birth name had been James Marshall Hendrix, commissioned Marshall to build him the “stacked” amps that became crucial to his sound). They also didn’t have monitor speakers – the ones that face away from the audience and are there so the musicians can hear themselves and each other – because they hadn’t been invented yet, so they literally had to read each others’ lips to stay together in the songs. The Washington, D.C. concert on February 11, 1964 (three days after their explosive U.S. TV debut on The Ed Sullivan Show) was even worse from the standpoint of performance conditions than most of them. It was held in a sports arena that usually hosted boxing and wrestling matches, which meant that the audience was “in the round,” seated on all four sides of the venue. That in turn meant that The Beatles had to turn around themselves during the concert so they’d face each part of the audience during at least part of their set. Mostly that was done by their heavy-set road manager, Mal Evans, but there’s one shot early in the concert in which John Lennon is shown personally turning the turntable on which Ringo’s drum kit was mounted. Though at least this time Ringo had a riser for his drum kit – sometimes he had to sit and play at the same level as the other three – it can’t have been easy for him even to maintain his balance on that rickety platform, let alone drum with such savage energy. Also The Beatles discovered that one of the two vocal mikes wasn’t working during “Roll Over, Beethoven” – you can see George hurriedly scampering from the dead mike to the live one early on in the song – though the technical crew for the concert got it fixed later on and the Beatles were able to do the famous wing-back formation when two of them would be singing at the same mike but the necks of their instruments would be pointing in different directions because Paul has always played left-handed.

The Beatles’ Washington concert was filmed by a company called National General for distribution in movie theatres through a process called Electronovision, which broadcast closed-circuit black-and-white TV images to movie theatres. Electronovision usually broadcast (or narrowcast) sporting events – they made money from showing Muhammad Ali’s championship fights – but they also branched out into auto races (my father and stepmother took me to an Electronovision telecast of the Indianapolis 500 one year) and concerts, including this one by The Beatles and one from The Beach Boys in Santa Monica on March 14, 1964. My mother once saw an Electronovision telecast of Laurence Olivier playing the title role in Shakespeare’s Othello – a production that became infamous because Olivier made himself look so totally Black, including extenders in his nostrils to make his normally white nose look Black, he was accused of performing in blackface. Fortunately this production was also filmed in color, directed by Stuart Burge, and when I saw the film I thought that if you didn’t know who the star was, you’d have never guessed he was white. Anyway, The Beatles’ Washington, D.C. concert is a blessed survival of Beatlemania at its height, and certainly no one knew then that The Beatles would still have a major fan base 62 years later!