THE BEATLES COME TO MINNEAPOLIS

 

The Beatles came to town on August 21, 1965 and had a terrible time.  "Big Reggie" from Danceland brought them in and put up the money.  He asked Bill Diehl of WDGY to be the M.C.  Diehl went to Chicago to see them in action and to spend a day with them.  He brought back 16 mm film he took of the concert. 

Things didn't start well when they were attacked at the airport by 3-4,000 crazed fans when they got off their chartered plane at 4:15. They barely got into their car before the mob escaped the 60 Bloomington policemen. 

They lounged on cots in the Twins’ locker room before the show at the Met Stadium, and Ray Crump (who worked at the Met) later sold the sheets to an ad agency for $800. The sheets were eventually cut up and given away in drawings at Dayton’s. They dined on roast beef and Diehl later retrieved some dirty dishes and gave them away in a contest. John Lennon watched a wrestling match on TV during the wait for the show to go on.

Before the concert, the Fab Four held a press conference in the Minnesota Room of the stadium. Bill Diehl knew George's sister, Louis Harrison Caldwell, and got exclusive coverage, as well as WDGY flags on their microphones and a "Welcome to WDGY Land" banner behind the table.  KDWB retaliated by prefacing their questions with "KDWB wants to know..."  Most of the questions were silly but then so were most of the answers.

At the press conference,  Randy Resnick of B-Sharp Music presented George with a Rickenbacker 360-12 guitar on behalf of the musicians of Minnesota.  Randy has a picture of the presentation, which appeared in the Minneapolis paper. George was genuinely touched and used the guitar during the show, but it disappeared a year later after their last concert in Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

Fred Anderson reveals how a picture of the Beatles at the press conference with the second issue of Twin City a' GoGo ended up on the cover of the third issue: a' Go Go editor Bruce Goldstein made arrangements with Big Reggie to put copies of Issue #2 on the tables. The cover of #2 had pictures of the individual Beatles, and the mop-tops (except Ringo) looked at the magazines and played with them and such.  The photo on the cover of issue #3 of the magazine was of the Beatles with Issue #2.  The picture was taken by Kent Kobersteen of the Minneapolis Tribune. Fred (who worked as a copy boy there) made a print of the negative and slipped it to Bruce.

Bill Carlson (not the broadcaster) was a high school student in 1965, working with Merle Morris, a stringer for UPI. When none of Morris' regular photographers took an interest in seeing the Beatles, Carlson got a press pass and took hundreds of photos that day with his Hasselblad and Nikon cameras.  The photos were forgotten until 2007 when Carlson published them in a hardcover book called The Beatles!:  A One Night Stand in the Heartland, which is available on Amazon.

The show started at 7:30.  Opening acts on the tour were King Curtis, Cannibal and the Headhunters, Brenda Holloway, and the Sounds Incorporated, another British group managed by Brian Epstein. Local groups the Accents and Gregory Dee and the Avanties played in the concourses. M.C. Bill Diehl was hailed with boos when he announced that the concert would end if the audience rushed the stage.

The Beatles played to only about 28,500 people at the 40,000 seat Met Stadium.  It was the only show in the tour that wasn’t sold out.  Bill Diehl said that Colihan only publicized it by word of mouth and some print, but not on the radio, for fear of pandemonium (which they got anyway). Tickets ranged from $2.50 to $5.50, and the group was paid $50,000. Enduring terrible acoustics, the lads sang 12 songs in 35 minutes. There is a plaque at the Mall of America at the spot near second base where they played. Security guards and ushers were armed with smelling salts for fainting fans. The number of police has been estimated as up to 350 and came from Bloomington and Hennepin and Ramsey Counties.  Reports conflict as to whether the concert had to be cut short when fans rushed the field. A typical Beatles escape was made in a Falconers’ laundry van (they sat on folding chairs).

Their not-so-luxurious accommodations were the entire 5th floor of the Leamington Motor Lodge (not the hotel) at 4th Ave. and 10th Street in downtown Minneapolis - decoys were set up at much better digs but word got out and the place was mobbed. The coup de grace was when Police Inspector Donald R. Dwyer found a girl in Paul’s room and charged him with making a “false hotel reservation.” Fortunately, the girl was able to prove that she was 21 (and from Cleveland). Dwyer told the Minneapolis Star that “Those people are the worst I have ever seen visit this city.”

The group emerged from the motel at 11 the next morning and started all over again in Portland.  Needless to say, the Fab Four couldn’t wait to get out of town and vowed that they “would never come back to Minneapolis.” (McCartney did return, though, on June 4, 1976, with his band Wings. The show at the St. Paul Civic Center did sell out.)

In 1995, KSTP-TV produced a video called "The Beatles:  Minnesota Mania!"  The video includes an extensive interview of Bill Diehl and members of Minnesota bands from that era.