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Chuck Gunderson was raised in San Diego, the site of the Beatles' eighth stop on the nineteen sixty five North American Tour. He was too young to attend the show, but fondly recalls his older siblings spinning the records of the Fab Four as he grew up, which perked a lifelong love for the band. He's also worked in the outdoor advertising industry most of his life, although his true passion is history, and he obtained his BA at San Diego State University and a Masters of the University of
San Diego, both in the field of history. Having published a few articles over the years, Chuck turned his sites to researching and writing the critically acclaimed Some Fun Tonight, The Backstage Story of How the Beatles Rocked America the historic Tours of nineteen sixty four through nineteen sixty six. He's consulted on a number of various Beatles related projects, such as director Ron Howard's recent documentary Eight Days a Week.
Chuck and his wife Christina live in Carlsbat, Californi, parents of four children, each a self described Beatles fan Chuck Gunderson. Welcome back to Coast.
How are you hey, Richard? How are you? Thanks so much for having me back on coast. It's always great to be here, and I really appreciate the little reminder of Greek history. Thank you so much.
My pleasure, My pleasure speaking. Which did the Beatles ever play in Greece?
No, they didn't. They never played in Greece, but they loved Greece. They visited a few times.
That's right. There was a legendary story. There's a sandal maker in Athens whose name escapes me, but he was back in the sixties. Everyone came, all the celebrities came to his little sandal shop to have him make their sandals, and he made sandals for John Lennon. They still talk about it. They're very proud of that. So how did you track down all of these amazing photos, most of which I've never even seen before. Plus there's you know, all the images of the rare, the rare memorabilia. How
did you track all this down? I mean this could not have been an easy task.
Well, the whole book was such a difficult task to put together, because you know, I had the Beatles toured. In the social media age, we could have had everything, you know, photos and documents and all of that. The story, you know, the Beatles would come to town. There might be a you know, a headline, that type of thing in a column written, but very very short. The photos
were perhaps the hardest. I really had to do a lot of digging into archives, newspaper archives and photo you know, research libraries and you know, people that had photos in their collection that were these shadowy figures I kind of had to track down. And what's interesting is I would find a photo in Denver and they'd say, oh, yes, we have photos of them in Denver, and I'd get the photos sent to me and they, oh, that's not
them in Denver, that's them in New York. So one of the things I learned in researching the book is that during that first tour, well all the tours subsequently, is to follow the clothing from the minute they get off the plane in say San Francisco in nineteen sixty four, all the way until they get back on the plane in New York. You know, at the end of September.
Is follow that clothing. You'll kind of figure out which city they're in But when I published the book, yeah, I mean I really wanted a lot of photos, and especially the ones that fans hadn't seen, really rare stuff that you know, would have laid in a dusty archived somewhere until I unearthed it.
My understanding is that there was a pre order on this, on this two volume set, four of them, which led us to presume that the pre orders were from either the surviving Beatles or the families of this the families of the two deceased Beadles. Yeah.
Was actually after the book was published, I got a very friendly note from the secretary at Apple, which is the Beatles company, and it was before Apple Computer obviously, and the email said, hey, you know, thanks for the book that you've written about the tours, and the four
shareholders would like to have a copy. So obviously the four shareholders at the time were Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, the wife of George Harrison, which was Olivia Harrison, and the late wife or the wife of John Lennon, the late John Lennon, Yoko Ono. So it was my pleasure to send those quote shareholders book books and I was
able to include a note in each one. I don't know if they ever read it or not, but at least I included it in there, and it was a real great honor for me to know that they have those books.
So let's start with a sixty four tour or the as hard as it may be to believe now looking at backwards at the monumental success at the time, were the Beatles at all reticent about this tour? Did they have any I don't know, lingering doubts about how they'd be received by fans, whether they could pull this off.
I think the Beatles were very familiar with the progression that they were making. They never one of the hallmarks of the Beatles that they never wanted to stay in
one place. They always wanted to progress. And I think this was just this natural progression of playing you know, the cavern in Liverpool, which that you know, whatever one hundred people to, you know, moving out of the cavern and moving into dance falls in Liverpool, and you moved from dance falls to small theaters in and around the UK, and you know, Brian Epstein, their manager, just kind of nourished them and kept them going and it just kept
getting bigger and bigger and bigger. But by the time they got to America in nineteen sixty four, especially during that tour in August, you know, when they faced that first crowd at San Francisco's cal Palace, that was the largest crowd they had ever played to. It was about eighteen thousand people, and the largest crowd they had played to in the UK was about eight thousand people. Then they had gone down to Australia in June and they
played to a crowd of about ten thousand people. So they were just kind of going along and into getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and they're going along with it and just doing a great job, falling into place, doing what they needed to do. And the thing about the Beatles that I loved is they're just so they're just such consummate professionals. They were willing to take on
the challenges. They were willing to just do these really hard things that I think a lot of people would think would be wow, I don't know if I can do this to We're just going to go out there and do it. And currently it went really well because the crowds responded well and the concerts were mostly sold out. On that first tour of nineteen sixty four.
Thirty two shows, twenty six venues, twenty four cities in just thirty three days. And if you look at the itinerary, they're not sort of doing it by you know, by region by region. They're not, you know, going up and down the East coast and then traveling maybe across the South and then up central you know, the Midwest and so forth. They're crisscrossing. They're going from east to west. They're bouncing all over the place. Why was the tour put together this way?
That's an interesting question. Richard Brian Epstein received about a six page document from a company in New York called General Artists Corporation and their vice president, Norman Wife he was kind of the American contact that knew all the venues, the hotels, you know, where they were going to play, put together the support that would tour with them, and he presented the sheet to Brian, and actually I have the original copy of that, and it has Brian's checkbarks
is writing on it, his tea stains from his cup of tea as he was pondering over these different cities and venues that they would play at. And I actually present that in the book, every all of it, you know, in a very large format, so you can see every jot and tittle of Brian's thinking. And it is interesting that it was. It was somewhat very hapazard. When the tour ended in the end of you know, September, Brian or John Lennon spoke to a journalist. He said, we
will never do a tour like that again. And they never did do another tour like that again. But the planning of it was was somewhat strange because you know, they started out in San Francisco, then they flew down south to Las Vegas, then they flew all the way north to Vancouver, then flew a little Southattle and then flew all the way south again to the Hollywood Bowl in La then across over to Denver and then over
into the to the eastern seaboard. I don't sometimes I begin to think that Brian Epstein, you know, it was a wonderful manager. He broke new ground. But sometimes I think he didn't realize how vast the United States, well North America is the United States and Canada, just how large it is, how much ground it covers. The Beatles could could play a gig in you know, south of Liverpool and go back there to the south of England
and head back up to liver just driving around. And when they got to America, I mean, by the time they finished up the tour from London back to London, it was around twenty two thousand miles that they had traveled. So it was just this incredible journey. And sometimes they
would do a concert, finish up a concert. Instead of staying the night in the whole hotel, they would get on the plane at two in the you know, one in the morning and fly for a couple hours to the next city, landing in a city at three or four in the morning, and then be driven to the hotel and sleeping for a few hours and then back to the venue. It was really quite a just just an amazing kind of thing that they had done.
It paint us kind of a mental picture of the reception they received from fans either at the airport or outside their hotel, at the concert venue itself. I mean, we have this this image because these legends about you know, this is chaos and these the mob of fans that were out of control wasn't really like that.
Absolutely, it was a complete besiegement everywhere they went. I think they might have had the mistaken idea they could have gotten out and explored a city, like a city like New Orleans. They picked a city like Las Vegas to go and perform in, which was quite an interesting selection to even go to Las Vegas in nineteen sixty four. It's not the Las Vegas we know of today, only a one hundred thousand people living there. But everywhere they went.
When they first got to San Francisco, there were five thousand fans at the airport, and the promoters or the organizers of the concert had built a little kind of welcome stage at the airport out in the field. They're kind of off to the side of the runway. You know, it's like maybe like a ten by ten. They put some cyclone fencing around it, and they were going to have the Beatles disembarked from the airplane and come to
this little podium and greet their fans. Well, they are only on there for about thirty seconds before they realized that we're going to have a real problem here and these you know, the Beatles could be crushed to death. But anywhere they went, they could not get out of their hotel room all they really saw of America was airports, hotels, venues. That was it. They just could not get around. There was a few places where they did get out, just for a little bit of time, but there just wasn't much.
Fans were besieging the hotels. They were trying to figure out ways to get in. They were climbing up drain pipes, they were coming in dressed as hotel maids, were hidden in room service carts, just any way they could get in to try to to try to get a visit.
With the Beetles.
It was just crazy pandemonium. I had the opportunity to stay at the Brown Palace hotel in Denver about a month ago where the Beatles were at, and it was actually in their room sixty years to the day that they were there, and it was fun for me just to look out the window and kind of imagine the crowds that were down below on the street at the Brown Palace and how they just kind of surrounded the hotel.
Actually had the hotel historian take me on the original route from when the Beatles got out of the limousine and went up the freight elevator to their rooms. It was just quite fascinating to kind of think that, but you're correct. It was absolutely everything that everyone would think about in terms of the fans and how much pandemonium and chaos there was.
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