Beatles 50th Sullivan Anniversary Count Down…2 Days

Today, the sound problems. Notice anything missing in any of the Beatles stage photos either in New York or Miami? No? How about the guitar amplifiers…not a single one anywhere. As mentioned here before, “the sound” was a big problem for all three shows, and most of the problems were caused by the hidden amps. There are three areas of concern that intermingled to cause these problems…the band’s ability to hear their music and vocals, the audience’s ability to hear and the audio mix fed along with the pictures on the broadcasts. There was a concerted effort to make the sets really pop on TV and the set designer wanted to keep them clean by hiding the amps, but that meant putting them behind the scrim and miking them for air which would be fine for the broadcast mix, but the stage and house mix would suffer. I’ve been told that the house PA system at the time was not very good. It was quite adequate for audiences to hear dialog from actors, but it was not meant for music. Even Elvis had amps on stage when he performed there in the late 50s and as far as I know, this was the first attempt to hide the amps. The Beatles performances were totally live and in rehearsals, even without the audiences, it took a while to tweak the audio. But then, when the audiences came in, the screaming was so overwhelming that it drowned out that balance so another round of tweaking started. The audience was so loud, the cameramen could not hear anything in their headsets. The band had a #1 record and the performance had to match the sound on the radio. Brian Epstine and John Lennon were so flustered by the sound problems in the theater, even at the closed rehearsals, that he and the band went to the control room a couple of times to hear the playback of the rehearsal tapes just to make sure the broadcast audio was right. It did not help that the audio man’s grease pencil marks from the Sunday morning closed rehearsal had been erased prior to the 2:30 dress rehearsal. That lasted almost till the 4:30 taping of the performances to be inserted into the February 23 show.

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