Bruno Coon, a fan of the Beatles, witnessed 50 years ago the last concert of the group, certainly a historic event. But the Californian, which at that time was only 12 years old, could not hear well because "when the Beatles came on stage hysteria broke", "It was pure chaos, shouting and tumult concert". However, Coon, who is now 62 years and has worked as a composer and music editor on films such as "Toy Story" and "Monsters University" (Monsters University in Latin America), is excited at the memory and says nostalgically: "It was absolutely exciting". On August 29, 1966 vibrated with him other 25,000 fans who filled the stadium with their shrieks Candlestick Park in San Francisco. They paid four to six dollars for tickets to attend the last concert that closed the third US tour of the Beatles.
It was a historic concert in which John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr came together for the last time on stage before thousands of people. It was a glitzy farewell. They started with Chuck Berry playing "Rock and Roll Music" and about 33 minutes after the performance ended with his version of Little Richard song "Long Tall Sally". They dispatched the hysterical mass with 11 songs, including "Yesterday" and "I feel fine". The band played on a small stage in the middle of baseball field surrounded by a fence two meters high, without maintaining contact with the crazed teenagers, something they had agreed with the tour promoter. Dozens of police guarded the scene and prevented fans jump out the fence, despite its continuing attempts. And he finished, the musicians marched in a direct airport limousine.
"The girls were screaming like crazy," says Rhonda Northrup, who also attended the concert. Coon was invited his classmate and his father accompanied them. Northrup, now a professor at Oregon State, remembers noticing some tension on the artists. "It did not seem they were quite comfortable. Ringo Starr turned around continually as if afraid of something." The last tour of the boys of Liverpool was not blessed by fortune. In July there was an altercation when the Beatles rejected the invitation of the president's wife Imelda Marcos. And John Lennon Estdos States got dismay fans and critics to ensure that the Beatles were better known than Jesus. The listlessly at concerts, did the rest.
Maybe the Beatles knew that the performance of San Francisco would be the last, the media speculated. McCartney recorded on a tape the concert and Lennon gave his camera on stage and immortalized that historic moment in several snapshots. The fans were the ones who did not see the end coming. "For me it was a real shock, we had not the foggiest idea," says the musician Roy Loney, 70, and co-founder of the rock group 60 "The Flamin 'Groovies". He saw the Beatles in San Francisco in three tours. "No I could not lose, changed our lives. For them we decided to form a group." But the sound at the last concert at Candlestick stadium was really bad, remember Loney, who was 20 at the time. "He sounded as if the music came out of a radio across the street."
In the study the Beatles resumed his plans until the official farewell McCarney, who announced in April 1970 that would not touch more with the band. The fans were hopeful that are reattached, but the murder of John Lennon in New York on December 8, 1980 destroyed all hope. Dave Seabury, Beatles fan 63, still regrets not having been with 13 years in the last concert. His parents would not let him. But the musician and artist was rewarded in 1986 when at a flea market for only a dollar bought some negatives with 72 photos in black and white Beatles. "I sensed they were only pictures," says Seabury. Now you are sure that the pictures, so far unpublished, were made 50 years ago at the last concert, but has not yet been able to discover who was the photographer.
Seabury raised $ 7,000 through the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter with it improved negative and made copies of "these incredibly poignant portraits". "John is the best-looking of all," he says. "But I see in many photos certain weariness and tension." Just 50 years after the concert Candlestick, it will open on Monday August 29 in San Francisco the exhibition "Beatles: Lost and Found Photos" ( "Beatles: photos Lost and Found"). And in commemoration of the "Fab Four", a band will play the 11 songs they played in 1966 for the last time. Seabury has spared no expense in the exhibition. "The Beatles changed us all, music and the whole world".
