TICKET TO RIDE

 

It was (ulp) 60 years ago today, that I went to my very first rock 'n' roll concert — The Beatles, at Dodger Stadium, in LA. August 28, 1966. Two days after my 14th birthday, I piled into a car with my girlfriends, Jeannine and Nora, driven by one of our stalwart moms, and hit the freeway from Hermosa Beach. I wore a rib-knit sleeveless turtleneck and corduroy skirt in beige, the color Paul wore in the Salisbury Plain scene in Help. 

I also carried the Paul doll I'd made out of muslin and wire (his face so lovingly drawn with felt tip pens), which I waved in the window, to the delight of every other carload of babbling teenage girls we passed on the way.

 

The stage, such as it was, was set up on the pitcher's mound. (No Jumbotron, no light show, with speakers about the size of the ones on my portable stereo.) Our seats were behind home plate — about eighteen stories up, in the nosebleed section. I believe our tickets cost $6 each. As for merch, all we got was this Beatles (USA) Ltd tour program, which I suppose might be a valuable collectible now, if I hadn't cut out every wallet-sized picture of Paul to carry around in my purse.

 

When the Beatles came bounding onstage, they looked like ants. They might as well have been ants, for all we could tell at that distance, or hear, for the non-stop barrage of screaming. But we recognized their trademark moves, and even though their primitive equipment didn't allow them to play anything much more complicated than "Ticket To Ride," it didn't matter. We were in the same place, breathing the same air, as the actual Beatles. 

 

As singular an event as it was in my own life (i.e.: Best. Day. Ever.), it was almost as momentous for the Beatles. The next night, they ended their tour at Candlestick Park in San Francisco — which would be the last live concert they ever performed together. (Except for the rooftop event at the Apple Corps headquarters in London, at the end of the Let It Be shoot, in 1969.)

 

You can now (of course) find amateur footage of the Dodger Stadium show on You Tube, which I find interesting, in an archaeological sense. But nothing compares to the rapture of memory.

 

Best six bucks I ever spent!

 

 

 

Above: 14-year-old me trying to torture my curly hair into straight bangs, like the Beatles' girlfriends!