Denver’s Brush with the Beatles, George Martin, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney
Of all the rock ‘n roll stories that involve Denver, it’s surprising that the details surrounding the Beatles’ 1964 visit and the time the group’s members spent in the Mile High City outside the band are not more widely known and discussed by Denverites.
The Beatles’ show at Red Rocks Amphitheater in 1964 was the only concert on the American tour that did not sell out. The lineup for the show was the Bill Black Combo, the Righteous Brothers, Jackie DeShannon, and the Exciters, with the Beatles as headliners, of course. Rain was expected on the evening of August 26, and organizers were ready to move the show to the Denver Coliseum if necessary (G. Brown 17). But in spite of the less-than-stellar turnout and the threat of bad weather, Beatlemania was still in full force: New Musical Express columnist Chris Hutchins, in America with the Beatles, “got a taste of the danger in Denver when the car he was riding in was mistaken for the Beatles’ and wound up being ‘badly damaged’ by fans outside the Brown Palace Hotel” (Spitz 525).
Beatles’ producer George Martin, also on tour with the band in 1964, tells a similar tale: “The only time I was really frightened [in America] was in Denver,” says Martin. “Where we had flown [in] from, I forget . . . . But I do remember Denver. It lies about seven thousand feet up [sic], and to get into the airport the aeroplane [had] to do a fairly steep bank before it [landed]. George Harrison was scared out of his wits, alternately praying for deliverance and yelling, ‘We’re going to crash!’” (162).
Five Cadillacs met the Beatles’ entourage at the plane. But instead of going directly to the Brown Place Hotel, says Martin, the Beatles were driven around the outer edge of Stapleton Airport, along the fence-line, at the behest of Denver Mayor Tom Currigan. “The reason was soon obvious,” writes Martin. “All the way round, it was packed with fans, about ten deep, jammed up against the barbed-wire fence, like [a concentration camp] turned inside-out. We drove round for what seemed miles, about five feet from the fence, five feet from a sea of happy, screaming people all waving fanatically” (162).
Once the Beatles reached the Brown Palace, they found a similar scene. So many fans crowded the main entrance that limousines were sent to the front of the hotel as decoys so the Beatles could safely enter the hotel from the rear, through the kitchen entrance. Says Martin:
“The trouble was that all the photographers and newsmen had tumbled to what we were doing, and they piled in after us. A terrible mêlée in the kitchen resulted, with pots and pans flying in all directions. Brian [Epstein], the four boys, and I finally made it to a service lift, but before we could shut the doors the reporters, the most ruthless people on earth when it comes to getting a story, simply jammed themselves in with us.
“Even before the doors shut it was like the Black Hole of Calcutta, all pressed tight up against one another. Someone pressed the button to take us to the top floor, but the wretched lift, overloaded beyond endurance, managed a mere two and a half floors before deciding to call it a day. It expired between floors. Since we had hardly room, or air, to breathe, it looked distinctly possible that we might go the same way.
“Eventually [someone] forced open the gates of the floor above us; we got the top of the lift up, and climbed up one by one. But I had really been quite frightened” (163).
Martin says he was also frightened later that evening in the middle of the Beatles’ performance at Red Rocks Amphitheater. [1] During the concert, Martin and Brian Epstein wanted a “bird’s-eye view” of the show, so they climbed to the top of an equipment tower at the side of the stage (163). “Even beyond the amphitheatre we could see people perched on trees and so on, trying to see over,” says Martin.
“That was the moment when we realized just how vulnerable the boys were. We could see them below as little dots, but one sniper among all those people could have picked them off very simply. Nor is that some wild piece of overdramatisation. The whole thing was frenetic, fanatic, and slightly unreal, and Brian was already worried for their safety.
“After all, President Kennedy had been shot in 1963, and the Denver concert came after John Lennon’s celebrated remarks about the comparative popularity of Jesus Christ and the Beatles. [2] Knowing the religious fanaticism one can find in the States . . . didn’t help matters” (163–64).
The Beatles, Martin, and Epstein escaped Denver unmolested the following morning, flying safely to Cincinnati, the next stop on their 1964 American tour.
Martin didn’t let his fears keep him away from Denver and Colorado for too long, however. In the mid-seventies Martin began producing the band America — namely, the Holiday, Hearts, History, and Hideaway albums — once working at Caribou Ranch Studios near Nederland, Colorado, just west of Boulder. Owned by producer James William Guercio, best known for his work with the group Chicago, Caribou Ranch was a favored destination of countless artists throughout the seventies and eighties and the birthplace of many of rock’s greatest recordings. Martin says the idea of a “total environment studio” always interested him and that he loved the “creative freedom” of Caribou (266). “You were there to make a record,” explains Martin, “and the studio was yours for as long as you wanted it, any time of the day or night. It was very comfortable, with individual homely log cabins and a good studio with a Neve console. The only thing wrong was the time of year that I was there. In February Colorado can be pretty cold, and a macabre sense of humour could easily label it as an expensive labour camp! Our nickname for it was Stalag Luft III. However, it was a great idea that worked well” (266–67).
Martin’s time at Caribou Ranch is made immortal on the front and back covers of America’s 1976 album Hideaway: Gerry Beckley, Dewey Bunnell, and Dan Peek pose on a Caribou cabin balcony in the midst of swirling Colorado snow while Martin’s imprimatur hovers overhead like a guiding beacon.
As with George Martin, John Lennon’s tenuous ties to Colorado also include time spent at Caribou Ranch. In July of 1974, during his year-long “lost weekend,” when he was estranged from Yoko Ono and living with secretary/assistant May Pang, Lennon spent four days at the Caribou studios helping friend Elton John record a cover of the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Lennon added guitar and vocals to “Lucy” and “One Day (at a Time),” the latter a Lennon-penned track that appeared on the B-side of the single. Elton’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” sat at #1 for two weeks in January of 1975.
During his short stay at Caribou Ranch, Lennon is said to have visited the nearby town of Nederland to buy toothbrushes and then Boulder to look at cowboy boots. Unprepared for Caribou’s altitude, Lennon reportedly used oxygen during the recording sessions (M. Brown 10).
In April of 1967, just three years after the Beatles’ harrowing trip to Denver, Paul McCartney was back in the Mile High City to pay girlfriend Jane Asher a surprise visit on April 5, her twenty-first birthday. And it was in Denver, while following Jane around America (she was on tour with the Old Vic theater troupe), that Paul hit upon the idea for one of the Beatles’ major ventures.
On April 3, 1967, the day after the Beatles finished work on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Paul (accompanied by faithful assistant Mal Evans) flew to Paris, then boarded a direct flight to Los Angeles. From there he took Frank Sinatra’s private Lear jet to San Francisco, where he met and jammed with Marty Balin and Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane. The next day Paul flew into Denver to see Jane.
Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, in The Love You Make, say that Paul and Jane “spent the next day alone in the Colorado Rockies and later attended the theater in Denver. The next night Paul went to see Jane in a performance of Romeo and Juliet,” then headed back to Los Angeles the following day (240). After meeting with John Phillips and Cass Elliot of the Mamas and Papas and dropping in on Brian Wilson during a Beach Boys recording session, Paul boarded a plane for London. It was on his way home, write Brown and Gaines, that Paul’s “visions of all the things he had seen during [his] trip” inspired him to begin making notes for Magical Mystery Tour, the Beatles next project (241).
Barry Miles, however, records a somewhat different account. Miles, Paul’s longtime friend and biographer, says in Many Years from Now that after arriving in Denver, “Paul had his movie camera with him and it was two days later, while filming in a Denver park [most likely City Park], that he came up with using a mystery tour as the basis for a television special. Ideas quickly fell into place and it became a magical mystery tour . . .” (349–50). [3] Paul made notes about his plans for the film on the flight home to London, but the idea for Magical Mystery Tour, according to Miles, took shape in Paul’s mind when he was on foot in Denver, Colorado.
As individual artists, none of the former Beatles had strong connections to Denver and only George and Paul performed in the Mile High City. George, in 1974, played the Denver Coliseum with Ravi Shankar while Paul, in 1976 and 1993, respectively, played McNichols Sports Arena with Wings on the group’s Wings Over the World tour and Folsom Field in Boulder in support of Off the Ground. [4] Denver’s erstwhile promoter Barry Fey remembered John, George, and Ringo as “good, decent” men but had a different opinion of Paul (52–53). Fey, in his memoir Backstage Past, says that when Paul, before the Folsom Field show, refused to spend a few minutes with a boy from the Make-a-Wish Foundation as planned (sending out signed photos and CDs instead), he lost all respect for the former Beatle (52).
Nonetheless, John, Paul, George, and Ringo as the Beatles, along with their eminent producer George Martin, are essential threads in the fabric of Denver’s rich rock music history. Once upon a time, Beatlemania reared its weird, wild, wonderful, and wicked head in Denver, Colorado. It’s a tale that does not get talked about much, strangely enough. But it’s one that deserves to be remembered and even celebrated.
Above piece excerpted from the forthcoming It’s Only Music: A Musical and Historical Memoir.
[1] While I’ve always been aware that the Beatles appeared at Red Rocks in August of 1964 and then gave their last concert ever in San Francisco two years later, almost to the day, I never knew of the drama and danger that accompanied their short Denver visit — drama and danger very representative of what we all know now as Beatlemania and quite similar to events in the storyline of Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s 1978 film I Wanna Hold Your Hand (starring Nancy Allen), which follows a group of fans and their attempts to get to the Beatles inside a hotel. Is it possible that the Fab Four’s tribulations in Denver in 1964 directly inspired Zemeckis and Gale?
[2] Martin is mistaken. Lennon’s “Christianity” comments were made in March of 1966 but did not erupt into controversy until five months later, in August, two years after the Beatles’ only trip to Denver.
[3] Paul had been experimenting with filmmaking for more than a year and had collected all sorts of cinematic bits and pieces, just “a lot of unrelated ideas. I suppose it culminated in ‘Magical Mystery Tour’,” says Paul (Miles 296, 298). “It used to be called a mystery tour, up north. When we were kids, you’d get on a bus, and you didn’t know where you were going, but nearly always it was Blackpool. From Liverpool it was inevitably Blackpool . . . . Everyone would spend time guessing where they were going, and this was part of the thrill. And [I] remembered those [tours]” (350).
[4] Seven songs on McCartney’s 1994 album Paul Is Live were recorded at the Folsom Field show, including “Michelle,” “Penny Lane,” and “Live and Let Die.”
