Beatles documentary offers fresh look at touring years
http://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/Beatles-documentary-offers-fresh-look-at-touring-9207923.php
Most Beatles fans feel they know the story — four lads from Liverpool scrape around clubs, get a record deal, take America by storm. When John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr burst out of their British port city in the early ’60s, their music set off a cultural revolution whose ripples continue to shape pop culture more than 45 years after their breakup. It’s one thing, though, to vaguely understand they were a kick-### live act, that Beatlemania was mind-bogglingly intense, and they were a band of brothers — and quite another to experience it from the inside.
Oscar winner Ron Howard’s documentary, “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years,” tries to achieve just that. It boasts unprecedented access into the years culminating in their retirement from touring — including their final official concert, at Candlestick Park in 1966. The theatrical release includes the band’s entire, 30-minute 1965 Shea Stadium concert — shot on multiple 35mm cameras with the image restored to 4K and the audio remastered from soundboard recordings at Abbey Road Studios.
“Eight Days” enjoys interviews new (including with Sir Paul and Ringo) and old (including with the dear, departed John and George) and outtakes from other documentaries. But some of its most stirring elements come from crowdsourcing.
More than a decade ago, Apple Corps put out a call — later greatly boosted by social media — for fans’ footage and artifacts from that period. The result is a treasure trove of fresh, intimate views of the most influential band in pop music history.
Producer Nigel Sinclair said the 2014 Facebook appeal (the band’s page has 42 million likes) resulted in a deluge, though often in fragments.
“Sometimes when you piece footage together, you can reveal a truth that’s there,” the veteran producer says. “You watch Paul listening to a transistor radio, and we found another piece of footage and you realize he’s listening to John talking on the radio live; John’s in another room” doing the interview.
Sometimes they discovered startlingly immediate moments.
“In Australia, they’re playing ‘You Can’t Do That’ and a fan has a color camera that’s filming them,” Sinclair says. “George is singing, and in between he’s looking down at this person — who knows, maybe it was a pretty girl; he was 20, he’s a young man — so she keeps getting this dead-on eye contact with this Beatle. You feel, ‘This is a live moment, a magic moment.’”
The film offers ultimate proof of the Beatles’ power as live performers. So often, poor acoustics and impenetrable walls of teenage screams had obscured the quality of their playing. Not anymore. The Abbey Road Studios team led by longtime Beatles producer George Martin’s son, Giles, painstakingly polished the audio — largely from soundboards, rather than fan cameras — into the best, clearest-sounding tour recordings yet heard from the Fab Four.
The post-production sound team, including Chris Jenkins (a three-time Oscar-winning engineer), trod the fine line between bringing the audio up to today’s standards and altering it in any way that made it less Beatles. Jenkins and Sinclair both point out the unexpected muscle of, for instance, Ringo Starr’s drumming on a performance of “Boys.”
But what longtime fans may come away with, emotionally, is the confirmation of the brotherhood that was the Beatles. Those poisoned by the bickering of their Oscar-winning 1970 documentary, “Let It Be,” may find this a kind of antidote. The view from the eye of the hurricane finds them sticking together amid the swirling madness.
Larry Kane was 21, a radio reporter in Florida, when he was offered the chance to tag along with the Beatles on their first American tour in 1964. Kane bonded with them on the long road, in part over his, Lennon’s and McCartney’s shared loss of their mothers. Kane marvels at how human the fab fellas remained — comforting him, sincerely checking in with the opening acts their crowds were ignoring and displaying deep interest in current events.
“One of the real surprises of the entire tour was the intellectual curiosity of Ringo Starr,” Kane says. “How outspoken he was about racism, about war. He still is that way today. He’s a very serious person, much more than people thought. So was George.”
When the band learned their audience in Jacksonville, Fla., was to be segregated by race, they reacted swiftly.
“McCartney was the first one, when I mentioned the Gator Bowl, who got up and said, ‘We’re not doing that. We’re simply not going there if that’s the case,’” Kane says. “Then John chimed in, they all did. There wasn’t even a debate. It was just, ‘This is not going to happen.’
“They had a tremendous working man’s distaste for people who mistreated individuals. I think that had a lot to do with coming from Liverpool.”
Today, the Beatles remain potent enough to sell 2 million songs in their first week on iTunes, while movies continue to be made about them and their Cirque du Soleil show, “Love,” is in its 11th year in Las Vegas. The world’s fascination has endured, even among its most powerful people.
“I was an anchorman in Philadelphia for 40 years,” Kane says. “In 1980, at the end of the election, we set up interviews with Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. Carter … was depressed. He leaned over, he said, ‘Larry, when the interviews are over, can you spend a few minutes and tell me what the Beatles were really like?’”
