The Beatles made their first and only Vegas appearance 60 years ago. Here’s how it went
Las Vegas may have taken the idea of the British Invasion a bit too literally.
Ahead of The Beatles’ concerts here on Aug. 20, 1964, during what was just the second stop on the band’s first North American tour, the Review-Journal warned of “swarms of frenzied teenage girls armed with ballpoint pens and sharp fingernails” as well as “thousands of adolescent females ready to tear down brick walls with their bare hands to get a look at the furry foursome.”
Two days before the shows, sheriff’s deputies went through riot training where they were split into two groups: “one the good guys,” we wrote, “and the other the Beatlemaniacs.” We described this instruction as “an hourlong slugfest” during which “the good guys brandished their clubs and waded right in.”
Juvenile authorities refused to waive the local curfew and vowed to send all their officers to the 9 p.m. show to enforce it. Anyone younger than 18 caught after 10 p.m. without a parent or guardian risked being booked.
“They are four fellows who shake their heads like spastics and interject an incomprehensible ‘Yea! Yea!’ between the words in the songs they sing,” the RJ opined in an editorial. “They all need, we might add, haircuts.”
The same piece really stuck it to the youth of Las Vegas: “It is difficult to imagine, some 50 or 60 years from now, an elderly couple recalling their courtship days and playing a Beatle record to bring back the memories.”
A tough ticket to get
Carole Haycock was first in line to buy tickets.
By the time they went on sale at 9 a.m. June 29, the 16-year-old from Salt Lake City and her grandmother, Leslie, had waited outside the Las Vegas Convention Center for 27 hours.
“They are cute and different,” Haycock said at the time. “Their hair is neat.”
She’d been a fan of Ringo Starr before deciding George Harrison’s personality suited her better.
Haycock purchased two floor tickets to the 9 p.m. show for $4.40 each. Other seats were available for $3.30 and $2.20. Many of the 14,860 tickets, including all of the top-priced seats at $5.50 a piece, already had been allocated.
Stan Irwin, the Sahara’s entertainment director, squeezed an additional 4 p.m. concert out of The Beatles when he booked them into the convention center.
“The Beatles want to see Las Vegas,” he told us at the time, “and I sold them on the afternoon show by telling them it would give the other entertainers in Las Vegas a chance to see them perform.”
As a sign of just how radical it was to have The Beatles and their rock ’n’ roll music in our still-small city, other acts performing that night included squeaky clean Pat Boone at the Sahara, folk singers The Kingston Trio at the Riviera, singalong conductor Mitch Miller at the Desert Inn and Patti Page of “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” fame at the Sands.
Under the deal, The Beatles would stay at the Sahara, which would reap the publicity — and control the majority of the tickets.
The 100 seats allotted to Boulder City residents were made available June 30. They were gone in 10 minutes.
Henderson teens must have been less enthusiastic. The city’s recreation center office put its 200 tickets up for sale on July 17. Five days later, 88 remained.
A secret arrival
When The Beatles’ chartered Lockheed Electra touched down at 1:35 a.m. Aug. 20, some sheriff’s deputies must have wondered what all the fuss had been about. There wasn’t a single teenager in sight.
The band had been scheduled to arrive at noon, just hours before the first show. But they flew in directly after their concert in San Francisco the night before — news that wasn’t made public.
Even with that switch up, so many Beatlemaniacs gathered at the airport — in the splashy facility, now known as Terminal 1, that had opened the year before — duty officers had to call for backup.
Deputies, though, had directed the plane to land near the old terminal at least a mile away, where it was greeted by a small group of dignitaries and reporters. While coming and going, official vehicles kept their headlights turned off.
No one in the local traveling party was prepared for what was waiting for them at the Sahara.
Fans were climbing the walls
“It’s going to be Riotsville when they come out,” a fan said at the hotel. “There are only 135 guards.”
The motorcade arrived at the back of the Sahara and headed for the service elevator. This time, Beatlemaniacs weren’t fooled. The singing sensations were shielded as best as they could be from the mob.
“We formed an arm-in-arm link, a fence of human beings,” Irwin told us for a story on the 25th anniversary of the concerts. “If any of us fell, we would have been stomped to death. It was absolutely frightening.”
The madness was far from over once the lads were safely ensconced in their 18th-floor suites.
“Although well after curfew, the Beatlemaniacs infiltrated the Sahara tower’s elevators, stairwells, floors and balconies,” we wrote that day. “Some got to the floor below the Beatle penthouse and tried to scale the outside wall for a glimpse of their idols.”
Pause for a moment to let that sink in. Teenage girls. Tried to Spider-Man their way up the outside of the Sahara. Nearly 200 feet above the Strip.
Hotel guests used binoculars to watch the disturbances from their balconies. One fan offered Review-Journal photographer Terry Todd $10 for the electrical cord to his camera because it had been used to photograph the band.
Not even other celebrities were safe. We wrote about a father who found his daughter in the hotel lobby and asked how she was doing: “ ‘Well, I’ve got Pat Boone’s autograph,’ she said disappointedly.”
Fans only began dispersing after Capt. Ray Gubser of the sheriff’s department threatened to book them into the county’s juvenile home. “And I promise,” he declared, “that you won’t be out in time to see the Beatle show.”
The noise ‘was almost unearthly’
Doors to the convention center’s saucer-shaped rotunda opened at 3 p.m. for the 4 o’clock show.
First came the opening acts: The Exciters, who had a hit with “Tell Him” and recorded “Do-Wah-Diddy” before Manfred Mann made it a success; the Righteous Brothers, a month before they’d record “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ”; and Jackie DeShannon, who would release “What the World Needs Now Is Love” the following spring.
By 5:30, when the Sahara’s Irwin appeared on stage to introduce The Beatles, fans were just about ready to burst.
It was all over in 29 minutes.
Cornelia deBruin, a 16-year-old honor student at Bishop Gorman who was one of three people to review the early show for the RJ, reported the setlist: “Twist And Shout,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “All My Loving,” “She Loves You,” “Till There Was You,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “You Can’t Do That,” “If I Fell,” “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” “Boys,” “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Long Tall Sally.”
Not that anyone heard much of the songs.
“Most of the time,” we wrote the next day, “the music was lost in the screams of wild-eyed teenage girls that jumped up and down, slapped their hands, swooned, cried, laughed and pulled their hair.”
Review-Journal night editor Don Digilio, who had spent the summer infuriating teenagers with his anti-Beatles columns, wrote that he was “right next to the stage” and “in the shadow of Ringo’s nose,” yet couldn’t hear a note. “I saw the Beatles twist, I saw their hair flip-flop, and I saw their lips moving,” he reported, “but the hysterical screaming made it impossible to hear the music.” The noise, he added, “was almost unearthly.”
Elsewhere, we described the crowd as a “shrieking sea of worshippers” and a “howling, unhinged mob.”
“Stalwarts who managed to stick through both Beatle performances,” we wrote, “said the two differed only in that the afternoon’s steady shrieking — it left ears ringing and heads aching — gave way in the evening to a steady dull roar.”
They never saw the sights
The Beatles departed the Sahara at 11 a.m. the next day to the screams of hundreds of fans. Some cried in place, others ran after the rented Cadillac as it headed to the airport. Hours later, a small group milled about in silence outside the hotel where they’d last seen their heroes.
At 11:24, the band’s silvery Lockheed Super Constellation departed for Seattle and the 21 other cities they’d cover over the next month.
At 11:25, Capt. Gubser, who led their escort, radioed headquarters: “The Beatles have departed our fair city.”
“In the wake of their onslaught,” we wrote, “they left behind some 200 tired, disgusted law enforcement officers who kept a bare semblance of order among the milling, charging, roaring crowds.”
A Sahara spokesman said the hotel suffered less than $300 worth of damage from the siege.
Frenzied crowds, though, kept The Beatles from their goal of seeing Las Vegas. “What they saw,” Irwin recalled in 1989, “was the airport, the inside of a car, the hotel elevator, the inside of their suite.” The band got a taste of the city when the Sahara staff brought a slot machine up to one of those suites. The Beatles also left town with $33,000 for the two shows that totaled less than an hour.
Sixty years later, there’s a pretty good chance some of the fans who were there will play a Beatle record to bring back the memories.
Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567. Follow @life_onthecouch on X.
