Bev Dietrich Hughes was beside herself when she heard the Beatles were coming to town on Aug. 22, 1964.

So the 16-year-old went down to Empire Stadium with her friends Margaret Forbes and Linda Butler two days before the tickets went on sale.

“We slept out for two nights so that we could be first in line to buy tickets,” recounts Hughes. “I was hoping that maybe if we were first in line, maybe we would get to meet them.”

Alas, that didn’t happen, but the girls did get a front-row seat to one of the most legendary gigs in Vancouver history.

The Beatles show was short (27 minutes), but wild. The Vancouver concert had the largest crowd of the Beatles’ first North American tour. And the 20,621 in attendance went nuts.

Teenage girls screamed from start to finish, literally drowning out the music.

“It was pandemonium, and we could barely hear anything,” says Hughes. “And barely see anything.

“(But) it was fantastic. It was electric. There were so many people and so much screaming and hollering and crying.”

As it happened, the Beatles hit Vancouver at the peak of Beatlemania.

The band had notched five No. 1 hits in Canada in a little more than a year — She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand, I Saw Her Standing There, All My Loving and This Boy — and were about to score a sixth with A Hard Day’s Night, which had just been released.

They opened the Empire Stadium show with Twist and Shout and ripped through 11 songs (You Can’t Do That, All My Lovin’, She Loves You, Things We Said Today, Roll Over Beethoven, Can’t Buy Me Love, If I Fell, Boys, Hard Day’s Night and Long Tall Sally).

But Hughes said she was so busy screaming, her memories of the actual concert are just a blur.

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“They came running on stage, there was a lot of screaming and hollering, and pretty much the next thing I remember is them running offstage,” she says with a laugh.

In fact, the band cut the concert short when it looked like the fans were about to crash through a barricade and storm the stage.

John, Paul, George and Ringo bowed, dropped their instruments and ran to waiting limousines, which whisked them to the airport, where they boarded a plane for Los Angeles.

Vancouver Sun reviewer William Littler was aghast, writing that “seldom in Vancouver’s entertainment history have so many (20,621) paid so much ($5.25 top price) for so little (27 minutes).

“Aside from their haircuts (or lack of them) and Merseyside accents,” Littler wrote, “I perceived nothing that made them better or worse than any number of less ballyhooed groups, either as vocalists or instrumentalists. They sounded just as loud, just as monotonous, and just as unmusical.”

Littler was a classical music reviewer; he hadn’t heard the Beatles before he reviewed their show. The mainstream media were quite wary of the Fab Four at the time: Sun columnist Jack Wasserman broadcast live from the concert on CKNW and went into hysterics, convinced there was going to be a riot.

Craig McCaw, who was also at that concert, was a lot younger (20) and hipper than Littler or Wasserman. But he admits that he bore a bit of a grudge against the Beatles.

“They were making so much noise, the guys in my band (the Shadracks) all wanted to do Beatles songs and I wanted to do songs by the Righteous Brothers,” says McCaw, who went on to be the guitarist in The Poppy Family.

“Then I went down there and saw the gig and just flipped. The energy level coming off that stage was just palpable, it was so freakin’ good. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.”

It wasn’t just the music that was mind-blowing; it was their look.

“These guys looked like aliens,” says McCaw. “They were totally cool ... the hairdo, the suits, the boots.”

The boots made such an impression, McCaw and his friend disc jockey John Tanner decided they needed some, right after the show.

“We found out the Beatles’ boots were made by Anello and Davide (in London),” says McCaw.

“So John Tanner and I stayed up all night and phoned over to London at 6 o’clock in the morning and ordered Beatle boots. We were that serious. We didn’t want any B-S Beatle boots, we wanted Beatle boots from Anello and Davide, the guys who made the Beatle boots.”

As it happened, the singer in McCaw’s band bore a passing resemblance to Ringo Starr. So disc jockey Red Robinson of CFUN hatched a plan.

Three thousand teenage girls had parked themselves outside the Hotel Georgia, where the Beatles were rumoured to be staying. Robinson put a Beatles jacket on Rick Musalem and sent him by the hotel in a convertible.

“Red goes on the air and says, ‘There’s been a reported sighting of Ringo Starr in front of the Georgia Hotel,’” recounts Musalem.

“I was in the front seat of the CFUN car. There was a little bit of a riot. All these girls started surrounding the car and jumping up and down and tearing the aerial off.

“The policemen were telling us to get the hell out of there — put the car in neutral and they would try to shove us out of the hordes of these little screaming teeny boppers.

“I was literally (trying to hide) up under the dash when they tore this (Beatles) coat literally off my back.”

The real Beatles were late arriving in town, partly because they had to fly back to Seattle to get the proper immigration stamp before being allowed into Canada.

“They made the Beatles return to Seattle to get a customs stamp,” says Robinson. “Can you imagine?”

The band had a crowded press conference (John joked they had to return to the States to be “deloused”), then hopped into a limo for a tour of the city. They had burgers and milkshakes at King’s Burgers in North Van, then headed to Empire Stadium.

Red Robinson was the MC of the show, filling in for an ill Fred Latremouille. He said the view from the stage was a bit scary.

“It was the wildest thing I’d ever encountered,” says Robinson. “Even wilder than Presley in ’57. That was wild, but this was wilder.”

Things were getting so out of hand that Beatles manager Brian Epstein told Robinson to get up on stage and try to calm down the crowd.

John Lennon didn’t know what was going on and told Robinson to get off the stage. But Robinson explained he had been ordered up by Epstein, and then did his best to calm the masses.

It didn’t work, so a couple of songs later, Beatles publicist Derek Taylor tried to calm down the crowd. When that failed, the Beatles split.

“The only song they cut (out of the set) was I Want To Hold Your Hand,” recalls Robinson. “They played 11 songs; in other towns they played 12.”

There was never any plan for an encore — the Beatles didn’t need to do one.

Neither did Elvis.

“Presley never did an encore in his career. Did you know that?” says Robinson, who also emceed the Elvis show in 1957. “Never ever ever. ‘Elvis has left the building.’”

The show was preserved for posterity by the crafty DJ Jack Cullen, who surreptitiously recorded it with a direct feed off the public address system. Several years later, he released a bootleg album of the concert, pressing 1,000 copies before Capitol Records put a stop to it. It has become a collector’s item and the bootleg has been widely bootlegged.

The CBC also filmed the show for a TV special, but a producer accidentally erased the tape, reportedly while he was trying to impress a lady friend.

Robinson says the gross for the Beatles show was $108,412. The band made $48,000, the rest went to expenses and promoter Harvey Weiner, who also did Beatles shows in Toronto and Montreal.

Robinson will mark the 50th anniversary of the concert with a free show on the PNE’s Chevrolet Performance Stage on Aug. 22 at 7:30 p.m. The Fab Four will be portrayed by Revolver, which bills itself as “the world’s best Beatles tribute show.”

Craig McCaw probably won’t go to the tribute show, but he admits that in 1964, the Beatles changed his life.

“I had Bobby Rydell hair at that point,” he says, laughing.

“(After the Empire Stadium show) I tried to grow Beatle hair, but it turned into a white Afro.”

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jmackie@vancouversun.com

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