The rise of Broadway musicals and Hollywood weakened Vaudeville’s business and eventually

killed it. But its methods and practices and the lessons we learned from its live event

management, contracting, promotion, sales, programming, etc., remained deeply embedded

in the entertainment business, and continued to influence it until this very day.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that we would see another live music industry surge that

could compare in size and scope to Vaudeville itself. But this time it would continually

and progressively lead to today’s lay of the land in the field. Enter Rock-n-Roll 2.0,

made in England.

American rock-n-roll music crossed the ocean on the radio waves and on the record grooves,

and entered the British youth culture in the mid to late 1950s. And soon, the Brits were

not only listening and dancing to it, but were also making it themselves, at the time

when the interest for the original form of the genre slowly waned in the States, and

the more pop version of it watered it down. But in Britain, the bands in the cities like

Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, and London kept the fire of this American music phenomenon

going with its original intensity, and eventually made it their own. Ballrooms, halls, and clubs

across Britain were jumping with the new beat, new sound, and new attitude, and rock-n-roll

became the soundtrack of the teenage generation there.

This newly found music intensity and freedom could not stay contained on the British Isles,

and it crossed the ocean back to the United States with a bang. “I Want To Hold Your

Hand” by The Beatles topped the U.S. charts in January of 1964, and the following month

The Beatles themselves arrived to America. On February 9th, 1964, 73 million people watched

them perform on The Ed Sullivan Show in New York City, the largest audience ever for any

television program of the time. Two days later they played their first American live venue,

Washington Coliseum, in Washington D.C., and then they were back in New York for two more

shows at Carnegie Hall before going back to England. The Beatlemania, and the subsequent

British invasion, has begun.

By April 1964, The Beatles held 12 positions on the Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles Chart,

including the top five. “I Want To Hold Your Hand” sold 5 million copies of the

singles records in the 7 months following its introduction on the charts. In August

of the same year, The Beatles returned to the States for a 32-show tour, in 34 days,

across the country. Each show was attended by 10-20,000 fans. A year later they came

back for a 10-show tour, this time performing only the stadiums and arenas. The New York

City’s Shea Stadium show was attended by the record 55,600 fans, with thousands more

who were turned away for the lack of available seating. They would return for one more tour,

in 1966, when they performed another 14 stadium and arena shows, before deciding to stop performing

live all together.

For the live music industry, the lessons of those few years were manifold. One was that

the new generations, from teenagers to twenty-somethings, were so passionate about their music, that

given the right artists and opportunities, they will spare no resource and effort to

gather with their likeminded peers to hear it live. That it wasn’t just entertainment

anymore; it was a statement, a declaration, a decision, an affirmation, a deliberate seeking

of the place where music would make them feel understood and a part of something entirely

their own. Just three years after the Beatles’ last American show at Candlestick Park in

San Francisco, we had Woodstock, where 32 acts performed for an audience of 400,000

fans. Though the festival lost money due to inexperience and a myriad of unforeseen circumstances,

not the least one of which was the sheer number of masses who travelled upstate New York to

attend, Woodstock showed that the live music industry’s potential is much greater than

we could even imagine to that point.

The other lesson the industry learned from the Beatles U.S. tours, was that rock-n-roll

is loud, but that its fans are louder, and that the whole PA thing had to be revisited

and revised, from the ground up. At their first live venue show in the States, at Washington

Coliseum, The Beatles had to move their amps and drums around the stage throughout the

show, facing different sections of the coliseum, so the audience in those sections could hear

what they were playing over the screams and shouts of the fans. When they returned to

the U.S. the following year, the custom-made amps that were made by Vox for that tour,

with the intention to boost their sound to “unprecedented” levels by the standards

of the time, proved to be greatly insufficient again, and were dwarfed by the screaming of

over 50,000 fans at the Beatles’ Shea Stadium show. Not even the Beatles themselves could

hear each other play at their Shea stadium performance,not to mention the audience. The custom amps

were made to produce 100 watts of power each, with the reasoning that at more than 3 times

the power of the Beatles’ regular 30-watt amps, that would be more than adequate. Wrong.

Try 1,000 watts each, 2,000 watts each, 5,000 watts each. And that’s just for the guitar

amps. Try a 100,000-watt sound system for a stadium show like that. That was hard to

imagine at the time. But we got there, learning from the mistakes and the struggles of those

that first carved the path.

Another lesson for the live music industry from this time was that the Vaudeville’s

model of opening acts and warm up groups prior to the main act’s performance still worked,

and still served multiple purposes well. Though the main acts’ performance would throughout

the years be greatly prolonged from the Beatles’ customary 30 minutes, the practice of introducing

and breaking-in new artists, or warming up the audiences through the use of opening acts,

persists in the industry to this very day. The Righteous Brothers, The Ronettes, Jackie

DeShannon, The Exciters, Tommy Roe, The Remains, were all Beatles’ opening acts on their

American shows. Today, like then in the 1960s, following the Vaudeville’s formula from

over a hundred years ago, virtually every up-and-coming act goes through the right of

passage of being an opening act.

And how about the financial end? How were the tickets priced? How much did The Beatles

charge? What was the bottom line and the lesson there? The concert promoters of the time were

already used to music stars like Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland charging the performance

fees of 10 – 15,000 dollars, which is 75 – 110,000 dollars in today’s money, that

made the live music business at that level a high stakes game even then. The loses could

be just as devastating as the wins were staggering. But The Beatles, led by their manager Brian

Epstein, pushed it to an entirely different level. The guaranteed performance fees for

their first full American tour in 1964 were 25-40,000 dollars, depending on the size of

the venue, which is 150-300,000 dollars in today’s value, plus a percentage of the

tickets sold, if more than the guaranteed amount. And that’s if the promoter was working

in the city that was on the planned route, and if he was fortunate or reputable enough

in the industry to be approved or asked to do it by Epstein himself. If not, the sky

was the limit so far as the fees go.

Charles O. Finley, at the time the owner of the Kansas City Athletics, a professional

baseball team, and the person who would eventually move the team to Oakland where they became

the famous Oakland A’s, decided in 1964 that having The Beatles perform at the baseball

stadium in Kansas City as part of their American tour, would be great for his baseball business.

Unfortunately, Kansas City was not on the list of the tour cities, and Charlie O., as

Finley was often called, was not in the live music business at all, and thus not on the

Epstein’s radar. His trip to San Francisco to meet Epstein after their first tour show

there, ended with Epstein refusing the offer of 100,000 dollars for the Kanas City Performance,

an unheard of amount of money for one performance at the time, about 750,000 dollars in todays

value. But Charlie O. was not deterred. A week later, while The Beatles were in L.A.,

Charlie O. wrote Epstein a check for staggering 150,000 dollars, or 1.1 million dollars today,

and Epstein just couldn’t refuse. On September 17th, 1964, on their originally scheduled

day-off, The Beatles performed at the Municipal Stadium in Kansas City. On the back of every

ticket, Charlie O. printed: “Today’s Beatles Fans are Tomorrow’s Baseball Fans”, making

it one of the early cross-promotion attempts that would eventually become the standard

practice in the industry.

Roots: Live Music Industry (Part 2)

Today’s Music Industry

Meet the Instructors