I tell this story every year. I don’t know why, so scroll on if you’ve heard it before.
Because my dad didn’t want me to go see the Beatles I was assigned an eight-hour shift in the onion fields south of town. Picking onions triggers tears, lots of them, so I cried and picked all day with a PB&J sandwich in my pocket for lunch. I was determined to get there, and lo and behold, Ramona Mitchell’s station wagon pulled up to my house before I had a chance to shower. In what felt like five minutes, we rode sixty miles beyond the big city toward the great coliseum where the Twins played baseball. Arriving at Metropolitan Stadium, we shuffled into the concourse, where the Underbeats were playing, we found out later, just outside the dressing room where the moptops were sequestered. We took our seats behind home plate in the second row, far from the centerfield stage but this was as good as it got. Cannibal & The Headhunters came and went along with a half dozen opening acts, all in a blur. Then, off to our right, the four diminutive black suits emerged, Paul and Ringo waving, John and George heads down in a beeline for the stage.
Within minutes the roaring of the crowd was overtaken by feedback from the Vox Super Beatle amps on stage as the lads launched into “I Feel Fine”. Matching the volume of the screaming audience, the combined effect sounded to me like a jet plane taking off, and my heart raced with an excitement I had never known. I was fourteen years old, and nothing would ever be the same after that night.
Critics talk about poor acoustics, a bad PA and the like. For me, it remains the best concert I’ve ever seen in seventy one years on planet earth. I’d seen the Dave Clark Five the previous November, and would soon see the Yardbirds at Daytons Top Ten Club, both of which remain on my top five best concerts ever. Four years later I saw Spirit at The Labor Temple, but it took forty four more years to see anything in that league. Leonard Cohen at the State Theatre in Minneapolis finally rounded out my top five.
The Beatles, first on Ed Sullivan, then live at Met Stadium, changed the direction of my life from mundane to fulfilled, happy that I took that road. I met and spoke to three of the four Beatles in my work life thereafter. I left John alone the few times I saw him in Los Angeles. I had nothing witty to brighten his day, so I left him alone.
Stop reading here if you’re offended by substance references. At the 1992 Billboard Music Awards I somehow found myself backstage with the Traveling Wilburys, seated next to George. He was a kind and gentle soul and didn’t object to my presence. When a certain herbal confection circled the room, it was my turn to pass it along to George, who was engaged in an animated dialogue with Tom Petty. I waited patiently. I was about to allow a growing ash to fall on George Harrison’s trousers when Jeff Lynne started waving his arms at me from across the room, pointing at the disaster about to happen. I took immediate measures to avert burning a hole in George’s leg before he went onstage. I never saw any of them again after that night, and will be forever grateful to Jeff Lynne for averting certain expulsion from the inner circle.