The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles

The Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl, the open-air amphitheater at 2301 North Highland Avenue in Los Angeles, on 23 August 1964 and again on 29 and 30 August 1965. Capitol Records taped the concerts, which became the 1977 live album The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. The Bowl still hosts concerts, but it has no permanent Beatles marker.

23 August 1964

The first Los Angeles concert came six months after the band's American television debut. When tickets went on sale in April, fans camped overnight on Highland Avenue and the queue stretched nearly to Hollywood Boulevard. The 18,700 seats were gone within hours of going on sale. The Righteous Brothers and Jackie DeShannon were also on the bill.

The promoter Bob Eubanks took the financial risk. To cover the $25,000 guarantee demanded by Brian Epstein, he mortgaged his house. Epstein also set the ticket prices, from $3 to $7, and kept them there. Eubanks later recalled that each Beatles set ran about half an hour and ended with a Little Richard number. According to the Bowl's own account, the screaming was loud enough that the music was hard to hear.

Two more nights in 1965

The Beatles came back for shows on 29 and 30 August 1965, again with Eubanks promoting. A Bowl recording was later borrowed for another film, too: the soundtrack of the Shea Stadium concert film borrowed one song from a Hollywood Bowl recording.

The tapes Capitol shelved

Capitol producer Voyle Gilmore recorded the 1964 show and both 1965 shows on three-track tape, planning a live album. The sound was judged too poor, and the tapes sat unused for more than a decade.

For the eventual release, George Martin and the engineer Geoff Emerick went back to them. The old tape machine overheated as it ran and threatened to melt the tape, so they kept it cool with air blown from a vacuum cleaner while transferring the recordings to 16-track. The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl came out on 4 May 1977, went to number one in the UK and reached number two on the Billboard 200.

A new version, Live at the Hollywood Bowl, followed on 9 September 2016. Giles Martin produced it after Capitol Studios found further three-track tapes in its archive, and it was released alongside Ron Howard's documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week. On this edition the crowd noise is much lower.

Visiting the Bowl today

The Bowl opened on 11 July 1922. Los Angeles County owns it, and it is run together with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2023. The nearest rail stop is Hollywood/Highland on the Metro B Line, and Metro buses 222 and 224 serve the area. Shuttle buses also run to the venue.

No plaque or permanent display about the Beatles is recorded at the Bowl. From 2014 to 2016 the free Hollywood Bowl Museum on Peppertree Lane ran an exhibition, Beatles at the Bowl, with photographs, press cuttings and film from the concerts, but it has since closed.

Close by in Hollywood, the Beatles' star on the Walk of Fame is set in the sidewalk, and the George Harrison Memorial Tree grows in Griffith Park. The band's final paid show, in 1966, was up the coast at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.