The Beatles at Suffolk Downs August 18, 1966. Courtesy of Suffolk Downs
By Phil Hailer
It was a half-century ago – August 18, 1966, to be exact – when the Beatles last played in Boston. My brother Steve and I were in that non-capacity crowd of more than 25,000 who swallowed up about three-quarters of the Suffolk Downs race track that night.
By 1966, the worldwide yeah, yeah, yeah phase of Beatlemania bloviated into its third full year and started showing some stress cracks resulting in unsold concert tickets at venues like Suffolk Downs in East Boston. The Beatles had just released their “Revolver” album, which was awash in sophisticated psychedelic songs swirling with hidden meanings and a touch of sitar-laden musical mysticism thrown in for good measure. But they didn’t weed through any of those songs on their 1966 tour because they couldn’t replicate them properly live.
Besides, some fans still saw the Beatles simply in black-and-white terms as goofy moptops running through British train stations escaping from screeching flocks of pubescent “birds.” But by 1966, they had long left that station and found a different ticket to ride, dabbling in colorfully saturated new modes of creativity to transport their music to even higher artistic heights. In many ways, the Suffolk Downs concert was a microcosm of that tumultuous, transitional turmoil, and for good or ill, Steve and I were up to our necks in all of it.
It all started a few hours before the 8 p.m. concert when we went to stake out the Beatles at the Hotel Somerset, a once-grand palace near Fenway Park on the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Charlesgate East where Ted Williams used to live. When we got there, the sidewalk was jammed with rabid fans surrounding two black Cadillac limos parked at the main entrance waiting for the band to emerge.
Steve, however, sensed a decoy and sent me on what could have been a fool’s errand. “I’ll stay here, and why don’t you go around back and see if there’s anything going on,” he said. His street smart instincts struck a loud chord with me, just like the opening note for “A Hard Day’s Night,” so off I went.
As I wandered by myself far from the madding crowd down Charlesgate, the historic splendor of the Somerset was in full view on my left. The noise from screaming fans faded, echoing weakly off the towering concrete-and-steel ugliness of the Bowker Overpass that walled off the entire right side of the street. At the corner, I could only turn left on Newbury Street because submerged straight ahead was the new Mass Turnpike extension and it was in a full-throated roar with vehicles zooming by at maximum white noise decibels and speeds.
Continuing around the back of the hotel for about 150 feet, I looked down a dark, dirty alleyway and was stunned by what I saw; I froze in my tracks. My jaw dropped and my eyes popped out like a Tex Avery cartoon character as I came face to face with an idling Cadillac limousine with its headlights on.
I wasn’t there 10 seconds when a side entrance door suddenly flew open, as did the rear door of the limo, and in a flash, a mass of bodies with wild flying mops of chestnut brown hair raced out and barreled full bore into the limo, rocking it violently from side to side. I couldn’t make out any individual faces in the confusion, but I knew. I knew it was them. I FOUND THE BEATLES!
Stepping aside as the limo lurched forward, I pressed my face to a window. George Harrison looked back, or maybe it was John Lennon. I couldn’t really tell.
Steve recalls seeing the limo squealing up Charlesgate unannounced, with someone running after it: Me. But like a hapless car-chasing dog, I gave up as it rocketed toward Storrow Drive.
With the Beatles long gone, we jumped in our car and raced to East Boston. Good seats were awaiting us, or so we thought, because we got our tickets at a downtown agency that charged a $1 premium over the $4.75 face value. The agent said with a grin, “You guys are only four rows from the stage.” Technically, he wasn’t lying. We were indeed in the fourth row, but what he didn’t say was that the row extended all the way down to the starting gate for horse races; hence we were at least two furlongs (read: ¼ mile) from the stage that was set up on the edge of the infield in front of the tote board. They were great seats to see Old Paint thunder around the bend on his way to the homestretch, but not for a Beatles concert.
We missed most of the opening acts (The Ronettes, The Cyrkle, The Remains, Salem’s Bobby Hebb) because we were busy scrambling into the cheap seats in the upper grandstand so we would have some shot at seeing and hearing the Beatles.
We ended up only about one furlong (read:a little more than the length of two football fields) away and saw the entire 35 minute concert just fine. It was fab, if not gear, even if the Beatles didn’t use words like that any more. And the limousine that I chased earlier rumbled to the stage in a cloud of dust to whisk the lads away down the track, right by our original fourth row seats by the starting gate.
Little did we know then — and no doubt neither did the Beatles – that just 11 nights later in San Francisco they would play together in concert for the last time.
It’s been a long and winding road ever since that day 50 years ago, but on August 18, 1966, many of us were just happy to be there and believe in yesterday.