Transcription
The Beatles as live performers, I don't think anybody in the world ever saw us outside of Liverpool and Hamburg and a few places in England where we traveled to because that's when we had to perform live to a small audience in the dance hall. We had to hold them. We were great live performers then.
Then we were doing an hour, two-hour show, you know, and we had to keep it up. In Germany we played eight hours a night. An hour on, hour off, hour on, hour off. So you had to keep them Germans happy or whoever the audience was.
Now suddenly you're going on the big-time circuit with, you know, uh some big star like Roy Orbison top of the bill and we're second on the bill. Suddenly your two-hour act has got to be down to 20 minutes. Suddenly you do 20 minutes like that. But next minute 20 minutes is a drag and you got to do the same thing every night. Do you hit record, hit record.
Next thing is we're the biggest thing. Everybody's screaming, nobody hears the music. We lose interest in the music. That's why in one way it was good because we did we went into the recording scene and really sort of expressed ourselves through the records then because we could no longer do it outside.
>> To hear you say something that the screaming of the audience was as disturbing to you as it was to many of us.
>> Well, it wasn't so much a disturbing like Shea Stadium was a fantastic happening and the vibrations and the feeling that I was fantastic. But it wasn't rock and roll. It was a happening, man, and that's fine. But I'm interested in playing music, right?
>> That's right.
>> So now if I go on the road, I know people aren't going to scream, they're going to dig it. I hope.