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The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl by  Released4 May 1977Recorded23 August 1964 & 29–30 August 1965, Length33:15 (original recordings)
 (mixing and sequencing) chronology
(1976)The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl
(1977)
(1977)

The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl is a  by , released in May 1977, featuring songs compiled from performances at the  in August 1964 and August 1965. The album was released by  in the United States and Canada and on the  label in the United Kingdom. It was the band's first official live recording. A remixed, remastered, and expanded version of the album, retitled Live at the Hollywood Bowl, was released on 9 September 2016 to coincide with the release of the documentary film , directed by .

Background

 considered recording the Beatles' February 1964 concert at  in , but it could not get the necessary approval from the . Six months later,  DJ  booked the band's performance of 23 August at the , in , where Capitol recorded their performance with the aim of releasing a live album in America. The sound quality of the tapes proved to be inadequate for commercial release, however, although Capitol used a 48-second excerpt of "" from the concert on the 1964 documentary album .

High-quality black-and-white film of the 1964 show was also made and preserved. Excerpts of "" and "" from the 23 August 1964 performance appeared in  documentary series (1995).

Original tape of the 1965 recording

When the Beatles returned to the Hollywood Bowl a year later, during their , Capitol recorded two performances by the group at the same venue. The sound quality of the 1965 recordings was equally disappointing.

The Beatles were among the few major recording artists of the 1960s not to have issued a live album. Consequently, among Beatles fans, pent-up demand for a concert album continued to build.  set off a minor frenzy when, in a 1971  interview, he incorrectly identified an obscure Italian compilation album, , as a live recording ("There's one in Italy apparently, that somebody recorded there"). Despite the obvious demand for a live album, the tapes from the three Hollywood Bowl performances lay untouched in a Capitol vault. In 1971, after American record producer 's salvaging of the Get Back tapes, which was released as the group's  album, the Hollywood Bowl tapes were given to him to see whether he could fashion an album from the material. Either Spector did not complete the job or his production was unsatisfactory, and the tapes sat unreleased for another six years.

A complete tape of the August 1964 performance found its way out of the Capitol vault in the early 1970s and was the basis of a popular bootleg LP, Back in 64 at the Hollywood Bowl. The audio, while below professional release standards, was more than adequate for desperate hardcore fans and served for years as the standard recording of the summer 1964 tour.

Finally, with a rival record label's impending release of the  album, consisting of a 15-year-old, poor-quality mono concert recording of the group performing in the  in Hamburg, Capitol Records' president, , decided to revisit the Hollywood Bowl recordings. Beatles producer  was handed the tapes and asked to compile a listenable "official" live album.

When Martin heard the tapes, he was impressed by the performances but disappointed by the sound quality. In working on the three-track Hollywood Bowl concert tapes, Martin discovered quite a challenge. The first difficulty was finding a working three-track machine with which to play them. Once he found one, he discovered that the machine overheated when it was running, melting the magnetic tape. Martin and recording engineer  came up with the solution of blowing air from a vacuum cleaner to keep the tape deck cool whilst the recordings were transferred to 16-track tape for filtering, equalization, editing, and mixing.

Although the original album sleeve says that the recordings were all made on 23 August 1964 and 30 August 1965, "Ticket to Ride" and "Help!" were recorded on 29 August 1965, and "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" is a composite using parts from both nights in 1965.

A number of songs performed at the 23 August 1964 and 30 August 1965 concerts were not included on the album. Songs from the 23 August 1964 show that were not on the album are "", "", "", "", "", and "". Songs from the 30 August 1965 show that were not on the album are "", "", "", "", and "". "Baby's in Black" from the 30 August 1965 concert was issued as the B-side of the "" single (1996), and "I Want to Hold Your Hand" from the 1964 concert was mixed into the studio version of the song for the  album (2006). Those two performances, along with the 1964 performance of "You Can't Do That" and the 30 August 1965 "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby", were included on Live at the Hollywood Bowl, in 2016.

Release

The album was originally released as a  in May 1977. Though the recordings were 12 and 13 years old, the album reached number one on the  chart in the UK and number two on the  in the US. In France, a single was released featuring two songs from the LP: "Ticket to Ride" with "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" on the B-side.

The original 1977 album was also officially released simultaneously on  and  but was not officially released on  until 9 September 2016, when it was re-released worldwide as Live at the Hollywood Bowl. Shortly before the re-release date, a number of tracks were available for purchase and streaming early, and the album was available for  on the . The re-released album was simultaneously released as a digital download and made available on streaming services. It was also released on vinyl on 18 November 2016.

A music video of the performance of "Boys" was released to promote the remixed album.

Before the official digital release of the album,  circulated transfers of the LP, and complete recordings of the three concerts, on CD and the Internet.

Critical reception Professional ratingsReview scoresSourceRatingfavourable A

The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl was voted the 26th best record of 1977 in the , an annual poll of American critics published by . , the poll's supervisor, ranked it 12th on his own year-end list, and in a review for the newspaper, he wrote:

A tribute not only to the Beatles (which figured) but to George Martin and Capitol (which didn't necessarily figure at all). The sound rings clearly and powerfully through the shrieking: the segues are brisk and the punch-ins imperceptible; and the songs capture our heroes at their highest. Furthermore, though the musicianship is raw, the arrangements are tighter (faster, actually) than on record.

In  (2004),  called the record "a loving tribute to the screaming girl fans who drown out the band in these 1964–65 shows; those girls were heroes on the rock & roll frontier, and they deserve to be the lead instrument on a Beatles album of their own."  critic Richard S. Ginell was impressed the Beatles' performances under the chaotic circumstances, although he lamented the sound quality and separation from the crowd noise, citing it as a possible reason for the record remaining out of print.

Live at the Hollywood Bowl Live at the Hollywood Bowl by  the Beatles Released9 September 2016Recorded23 August 1964 & 29–30 August 1965, Hollywood BowlLength43:27, Voyle Gilmore (original recordings)
 (2016 remix) chronology
(2015)Live at the Hollywood Bowl
(2016)
(2017)

Live at the Hollywood Bowl is a remixed and remastered version of the album, released on 9 September 2016 to coincide with the release of The Beatles: Eight Days a Week. It includes four additional songs not found on the original release. According to the producer, , son of the Beatles' original producer, George Martin, " called saying they'd discovered some Hollywood Bowl three track tapes in their archive. We transferred them and noticed an improvement over the tapes we've kept in the London archive. Alongside this I'd been working for some time with a team headed by technical engineer James Clarke on demix technology, the ability to remove and separate sounds from a single track." It was released on 9 September 2016, seven years to the day after the release of the band's remastered core catalogue and .

One of the bonus tracks on the album is "Baby's in Black" from the "Real Love" single CD, which was previously unavailable on an album or as a digital download.

Track listing

All tracks are written by , except where noted.

Side oneNo.TitleWriter(s)Recording dateLength1."", 30 August 19651:332."" 30 August 19652:533.""29/30 August 19653:394."" 29 August 19652:515."" 30 August 19652:146."" 23 August 19642:187.""23 August 19642:28Side twoNo.TitleWriter(s)Recording dateLength1."", 23 August 19642:082."" 30 August 19653:133."" 29 August 19652:464."" 23 August 19642:155."" 23 August 19642:316."", , 23 August 19642:53Total length:33:152016 reissue bonus tracksNo.TitleWriter(s)Recording dateLength14."" 23 August 19642:3415."" 23 August 19642:2916.""30 August 19652:2117."" 30 August 19652:44Total length:43:27