Australian Tour 1964

Publisher: Yellow Dog Records
Reference: YD 071

Liner notes:

These live recordings presented in this 2 CD set have been recently re-discovered in Delaware,USA,in May 1998.
The tapes were sourced from a retired American photographer, who had covered the Australian - Far East leg of the Beatles 1964 world tour for a New York newspaper.
He had apparently been in possession of a copy of these tapes since the heady days of June 1964.

Due to the poor conditions in which the tapes had been stored,preliminary assessment of the tapes,showed that some degradation of the sound quality of the recordings had occurred,in particular during the Beatles' support acts section of the tapes.
However, much of the Beatles recordings remain unscathed, and with the use of modern sound and production techniques, every attempt has been made to present the best ever quality of these historical shows.

These recordings for the first time present the best known source tapes currently available for the two concerts held at Melbourne's Festival Hall on July 17th 1964.
Previously, bootlegs have attempted to present these recordings as genuine and complete, but often have either omitted tracks, substituted tracks from other shows or have used inferior audio tracks from video tape.

These recordings of the two 17th June 1964 Melbourne shows are totally different to those versions previously available on other bootlegs or the "Beatles Sing For Shell" Australian TV broadcast in 1964 (& on a number of occasions since then). While it is uncertain as to the exact origin of these recordings, it is plainly obvious by the different mix and lower level of crowd noise relative to the music, that these recordings have originated from a separate recordings system to that used record the video (+ associated audio) for the TV broadcast.
Whether these are actual inline recordings or from a separate microphone set up, it is near to impossible to tell.
However considering the era in which they were recorded along with the fact that multi-track mixes and recorders did not exist, except for the rarefied hallows of recording studios (and in 1964 only 2 & 4 track units existed), the latter scenario is the most probable.
But we will never know for certain.

Also for the first time, a significant portion of the Beatles support acts have been made available to the public.
Unfortunately, in trying to present to you what "Beatlemania" must have felt & sounded like in 1964, with the inclusion of press conferences, interviews and arrival material, all of the available support act's material was not able to be included in this set. (maybe next time...)

The tapes, when re-discovered, had very little information or documentation to indicate their historical nature or importance.
One tape had "17/6/64 Tape No.1" and the other "17/6/64 Tape No.2" (For our American friends,please note that Australia follows the British date nomenclature of Day:Month:Year).
Thus for any one who happened to find the tapes, unless the significance of the date 17/6/64 was apparent or they managed to sit through the extremely poor quality (sound wise) of the support acts, they would never know what lay on the inner portions of the tapes.

Besides the sonic improvements & restorations to the tapes, one of the main items which needed to be determined was if in fact these tapes were (both) from 17/6/64 concerts.

Historical "bootleg" (both vinyl and CD) have had two distinct concerts available from the Melbourne leg of the Beatles 1964 Australian Tour.
However, it soon was apparent that the information could not be relied upon as the dates for the other releases ranged from June 16th through to July 1st 1964 (on July 1st, the Beatles were mid flight, somewhere between Singapore and Frankfurt)
It is our belief that these two concerts are from the 17/6/64, given the following :
(1) the, albeit limited, information on tape reels themselves
(2) one of the concerts (the late concert) is identical to the video concert footage filmed on the 17th June for the Melbourne based GTV-9 Television network, and shown on Australian TV as "Beatles Sing For Shell" (note: although the music is the same,the actual mix is different to that available on the video tape)
(3) The mix and "sound" of the two concerts is very similar and to achieve such a similarity on consecutive evenings would be near to impossible. Rather, consecutive concerts on the same night, with equipment and settings on recorders not being altered,is more probable.
(4) During the Sounds Incorporated set on the first tape, it is mentioned that this particular evening was their last in Melbourne, while Paul McCartney says the same during his monologue between Twist & Shout and Long Tall Sally from the second tape.

Besides confirming the date of the concerts, identification of which reel-to-reel tape contained the early concert and which contained the late concert needed to be done.

Here the evidence is somewhat circumstantial, but without other evidence it is the best we have to go by.
Again we have the fact that (1) the tapes were numbered "No.1" tape and "No.2" tape. (an obvious deduction is that tape No.1 is the early concert and tape No.2 is the late concert).
(2) The second tape (as already mentioned) corresponds to the concert which was video taped, and used for the "Beatles Sing For Shell" TV broadcast. (this can be confirmed very easily by listening to the last portion of Long Tall Sally, where John suddenly stops playing because a male spectator has rushed onto the stage to shake his hand).
It seems the obvious deduction that the TV station would have video taped the final concert of the day (17/6/64) ,maybe using the early concert to set up equipment and sort of technical problems.
Remember in 1964 video tape was a very expensive commodity. (for those of you who do not own a copy of the Melbourne video, technical problems still occurred, as portions of a number of tracks are either not recorded or have glitches in them).

One of the most puzzling aspects of these tapes is that there is only one version of Long Tall Sally, that being from the late (video-taped) concert. (Paul's "thank you" and introduction to Long Tall Sally is also missing from the early concert tape.)
In fact of all the Melbourne Festival Hall bootlegs released over the past 21 years, there has only ever been one version of Long Tall Sally (i.e. the one with John momentarily stopping playing).
Recent CD Bootleg releases such as "All the Best From Australia" have substituted this single version of Long Tall Sally for both their 16/6/64 and 17/6/64 concerts (which in fact should have been dated as the late and early 17/6/64 concerts) or in the case of "Melbourne Complete!", where the date is correct, the order of the concerts has been swapped around, to have the announcer's full introduction at the start of the CD.

One final point of confusion is that although no bootleg has ever had two different version of Long Tall Sally from Melbourne 1964 concerts, some bootlegs actually have a second (from the early concert) Paul McCartney "thank you" and introduction monologue to Long Tall Sally. (This is where he thanks the president of Melbourne fan club..... and "...his girl...")
This Paul monologue was not evident of the tapes which were used as the basis for this CD release.
While not directly saying that this "other" Paul monologue is a fake, or has been taken from another concert, the bootlegs on which this Paul monologue exists, all precede this monologue with a version of Twist & Shout which ends with (what appears to be) two hits of a snare drum.
The tapes which we have used only show at the end of Twist & Shout a single drum hit for the late concert or the no-hit for the early concert.
And to even murky the waters further, the "two snare drum hit" is exactly the same as that at the end of the late concert version of This Boy.
So what are two of Ringo's drum beats, from the late concert version of This Boy, doing trying to cover an obvious edit point between Twist & Shout and Paul's monologue from the early concert,on these previously available bootlegs?

Confused?

Then we have This Boy..... Until the re-discovery of the tapes which have lead to this release, there had only been one version of This Boy available from the Melbourne concerts.
And again, over the past 21 years, bootleggers had substituted the single version of This Boy into all available concerts.
The main difference between the two versions of This Boy is that the early version seems to almost fall apart, as the Beatles are playing it, in the same manner as the final version of Get Back from the Rooftop concert, some five years later, just stumbles along. (also at the end of the late concert version,someone - maybe John - makes what can only be described at "turkey noise".... have a listen)

Of the support acts, the entire Sounds Incorporated sets from both the early and late concerts have been included in this two CD set.
Surprisingly, the sonic quality of the recording of the Sounds Incorporated drummer, appears to be far better than that afforded to Ringo's drum sound.
Why this is, is anyone's guess....

To complete the bill, two local Australian acts were engaged as support acts.
We have presented one track from each of the two local acts.
Johnny Chester sings the track Fever, from the early concert and from the late concert, Johnny Delvin sings (the not so old in 1964,Ray Charles classic) What'd I Say, backed by the group the Phantoms.

The interview and arrival portions of this CD set have been sourced from various (aging) documentary cine-film and video tapes, which were taken during the tour of Australia by the local and oversea news agencies.

CD1:

CD2: