60 Years Ago, The Beatles Performed Together for the Final Time
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr knew their touring days were over, but kept it a secret from fans
NEED TO KNOW
- On Aug. 29, 1966, The Beatles played their last-ever concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park
- The band never toured again and only performed together one more time, in 1969, before they disbanded
- PEOPLE’s special edition about The Beatles chronicles the band’s rise, breakup and the legacy of the Fab Four
The Beatles wouldn’t call it quits until 1970, but 60 years ago, on Aug. 29, 1966, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr performed their final concert in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park.
The tour began earlier that summer, with stops in West Germany and Asia before they came back to North America. That August, The Beatles, who are the subject of PEOPLE’s new special edition, released Revolver with songs like “Eleanor Rigby,” “Yellow Submarine” and “Got to Get You into My Life.”
Though the album is now widely considered one of The Beatles’ absolute best, at the time, The Beatles were mired in controversy. After accidentally snubbing First Lady Imelda Marcos in the Philippines in July 1966, comments from Lennon, who died in 1980 at 40 years old, who had called The Beatles “more popular than Jesus” earlier that year, were widely publicized and met with widespread backlash in the United States, especially in the country’s Bible Belt.
When The Beatles arrived in the U.S. that August — despite Lennon’s apology for the remark — ticket sales for the tour were hindered. As the band criss-crossed the country during a very rainy August, the quartet found themselves exhausted from all of it, including Beatlemania.
“We started to feel we weren’t being heard because all the kids were screaming,” McCartney, now 84, said years later in an interview with Playboy. Still, in The Beatles Anthology, he remembered trying to tell his bandmates, “Oh no, you know, touring’s good, and it keeps us sharp… Musicians need to play.”
But the frequent rainouts, technical issues and controversy got to McCartney too. Even at New York’s Shea Stadium, the site of their triumphant 55,600-person concert the year before, they failed to sell the same number of tickets. Starr, 86, remembered in the Anthology, “Where we ended up on a huge crazy pedestal was not really in my plan. My plan was to keep playing great music.” But The Beatles had become too big for its four members.
When The Beatles arrived at Candlestick Park on Aug. 29, McCartney remembered the band saying, “Don’t tell anyone, but this is probably our last gig.” The band went to the stage with cameras in their hands to take photos to remember the show by.
When the concert was over — they performed a cover of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” — they walked off the stage and never returned to the touring grind again. In 1969, they would perform live just one more time, in an unadvertised five-song set on a London roof.
Still, the band maintained a prodigious output, releasing six more albums, including 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1969’s Abbey Road and 1970’s Let It Be, before they officially called it quits in 1970. When Lennon died, any hope of a reunion was gone forever.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(949x0:951x2):format(webp)/the-beatles-final-tour-2-082826-b1d24bd6778444ecb7f0d402906b669b.jpg)
Harrison died in 2001 at the age of 58. In recent years, however, McCartney and Starr — who both still release music and perform in concert — have reunited on stage.
As for Candlestick Park, the stadium, which had been home to the San Francisco Giants and, later, the San Francisco 49ers, was demolished in 2014. McCartney played the last-ever concert there in August of that year.
60 years after that last concert, The Beatles remain a subject of fascination for people around the world. In April 2028, The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event will hit theaters, with each of the four movies focusing on one member of the band. Paul Mescal plays McCartney, Harris Dickinson plays Lennon, Barry Keoghan plays Starr and Joseph Quinn plays Harrison. The movie’s cast will also include Saoirse Ronan, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Anna Sawai, Aimee Lou Wood and James Norton.
