The Beatles "Live" in Munich, Germany, June 24, 1966 (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, aired July 5, 1966)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I had originally planned to run Charles and I the final two episodes of Game of Thrones, but that morning I got a package containing an elaborate release of a live concert by the Beatles from Munich, Germany on June 24, 1966. The advertisement had ballyhooed that it was a limited release and made it sound like it contained the complete concert -- not only the Beatles’ set but all the opening acts as well -- but the accompanying DVD contained only a 47-minute cut-down of the show aired on German TV on July 5, 1966. Also it was in black-and-white -- there’s another concert from the Beatles’ last tour from the Budokan Arena in Tokyo that was filmed complete for Japanese TV and is the only footage of the Beatles performing a complete set in color (though, alas, it’s one of their weaker performances -- Ringo said later that by the end of the tours he was so bored he was drumming only on the afterbeats, not really driving the band, and in that film he looks like he’s about to fall asleep and fall off the riser containing him and his drum set). The Beatles were in much better form in this Munich concert even though they were pretty loose -- the entry on this concert on the “Beatles Bible” Web site, https://www.beatlesbible.com/1966/06/24/live-circus-krone-bau-munich-germany/, said it was one of the first concerts on their final tour and they hadn’t had much time to rehearse (they had just finished recording Revolver and no doubt didn’t relish having to go out and perform their golden oldies live while they had a ground-breaking recording in the can). The opening acts weren’t identified on the broadcast -- any announcements as to who they were were left out of the version that aired -- and it was only from the “Beatles Bible” page linked to above that I was able to nail down who they were.

The show began with three songs by Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, a band Brian Epstein was pushing strongly even though, with their clean-cut looks,short 1950’s-style haircuts and use of two saxophones in their lineup, they sound like cutting-edge white rock ‘n’ roll … from a decade earlier. They did three songs, “Ain’t Love Good, Ain’t Love Proud,” “You Can’t Love ‘Em All,” and a version of the classic blues “See, See, Rider” with some lyrical tweaks -- but compared to the great versions of this song (by Ma Rainey, who wrote it and had the young Louis Armstrong in her backup band; Ray Charles; and Mitch Ryder), this one’s pretty lame. Things picked up with the next band, The Rattles, who dressed “mod,” had Beatle haircuts and got five songs on the telecast, perhaps because they were the local German band (they actually sang in American-accented English but their announcements and between-songs patter were in German) added to the bill for the occasion, including “This Is the Love of My Life,” “Come on and Sing,” a cover of the Small Faces’ hit “Sha La La La Lee,” a reasonably good version of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” (which by coincidence the Beatles had also covered, though only for an ostensibly “live” but actually lip-synched BBC-TV show called Around the Beatles) and a closing bit apparently called “Bye, Bye, Bye.” Things picked up even more with the next act, Peter and Gordon, even though they had to bring in an orchestra to back them and reproduce the big pop-rock sound of their records. “Peter” was Peter Asher, brother of Paul’s then-girlfriend, actress Jane Asher, and the first song they performed here was “Woman,” a rock ballad that Paul wrote for them under the pseudonym “Bernard Webb” to see if he could get a hit without his or the Beatles’ names attached to it. Paul realized he’d been “outed” when a fan at a Beatles concert held up a sign that read, “Long Live Bernard Webb.” They only got one other song on the telecast, an O.K. but surprisingly sloppy cover of the Everly Brothers’ “Let It Be Me.”

Then it was time for the Beatles, and the telecast only included six of their songs: Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music,” “Baby’s in Black,” “I Feel Fine,” “Yesterday,” “Nowhere Man,” and “I’m Down.” (The other songs on their set were “She’s a Woman,” “If I Needed Someone,” “Day Tripper,” “I Want to Be Your Man,” and “Paperback Writer.”) The most interesting song on the program was “Yesterday,” which Paul had recorded as middle-of-the-road pop -- just his voice and guitar backed by a string quartet -- but live they played it in a totally different arrangement, still a ballad but a rock ballad, with electric guitars and Ringo drumming with sticks instead of the wire brushes a jazz drummer would have used on a song like this. There are a few slips where the Beatles forgot the lyrics -- John screwed up “Rock and Roll Music” and Paul, who rarely goofed, couldn’t remember his own “I’m Down” (a somewhat disappointing performance because it’s disorganized and it was played on guitars throughout -- John didn’t double on electric organ the way he did on the record and when they played it on their final Ed Sullivan Show appearance on September 12, 1965) -- and a weird sound mix that seems to favor Ringo’s cymbals over everything else, but any document of Beatlemania is welcome. What’s more, one of the big surprises of this concert is the relative sedateness of the audience; there are still a few screaming teenage girls but not the continual banshee roar of the Beatles’ 1964 and 1965 concerts (which Paul later likened to trying to play rock ‘n’ roll in front of a Boeing 747 being readied for take-off), and though South German TV did surprisingly few audience shots the ones they did include featured a lot of men who were listening pretty impassively (did their girlfriends drag them there?).