The Beatles offered Mewborn a position as the sound man for the rest of their tour, but Mewborn declined. (When Paul McCartney performs nowadays he uses something like a 300,000-watt system.)

“Duke” Mewborn of Baker Audio said he used four Altec 1570 tube amplifiers, generating about 500 watts in power, or slightly less than the power in Mewborn’s home stereo today. Without question proved the most effective of all during our U.S. Beatles manager Brian Epstein sent the engineers at Baker Audio a thank you note later, saying the sound was “Excellent. These allowed the musicians, for the first time, to hear themselves over the screams of their fans. The sound system in Atlanta featured an innovation unused elsewhere: monitors. Cecil proudly handed out the keepsakes to other members of the Braves organization, including owner Bill Bartholomay, discovering later that some Beatles assistant actually did the autographing. Before their performance, Cecil left a dozen baseballs in the Beatles’ dressing room for the rockers to autograph. “And neither one of those was revenue-producing.”ĭick Cecil, head of Braves Productions, had arrived in town ahead of the baseball team and aggressively courted the Beatles as part of his commitment to keep the stadium busy. “I told them I felt the shape was probably good for two sports: one was chariot racing, the other was feeding Christians to the lions,” he said. Press coverage reached a crescendo on what the papers called “B Day.”Ĭity planner Leon Eplan, who had helped Allen write a feasibility study for the stadium, was happy to see the facility earning money, since the Braves wouldn’t move from Milwaukee for another year.īut he wasn’t completely thrilled with the stadium’s final design, a perfectly round coliseum suited neither to baseball nor football. Legislators were photographed in Beatle wigs. They had just played to 55,000 people at New York’s Shea Stadium - at the time, the largest-grossing concert ever - and to 17,000 at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.Īs the concert approached, Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen prepared a key to the city for the visiting Britons.

Their guarantee that summer was $50,000 per performance. The British band was already the biggest act on the planet, dominating radio and record sales. 18, 1965, the concert inaugurated the city’s brand-new stadium with a 500-watt salute heard around the world. From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 17, 2015:

Paul mccartney 1965