BRAVO Beatles blitz tour

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The Bravo is the arrival of the Beatles in Germany known; Issue from June 27, 1966, cover (excerpt)

The BRAVO-Beatles-Blitzournee was the only tour of Germany that the Beatles completed. It took place in June 1966 and included six concerts in three cities. The tour of the youth magazine Bravo initiated and sponsored was is, by numerous bootleg - LPs and CDs but with concert recordings by appropriate DVDs documented with television and newsreel recordings. The Munich and Hamburg police each shot a film for training purposes, which is officially available on DVD.

prehistory

The youth magazine Bravo had already organized its first tour in September 1965, on which the Rolling Stones appeared. The London Bravo correspondent Karl-Heinz Kukowski contacted Brian Epstein in 1965 , with whom he discussed the possibility of a short tour of the Beatles through Germany.

On April 25, 1966, Bravo announced that the Beatles would perform in Germany. The press reported on the upcoming tour at the end of February, when the locations and dates had not yet been finalized. In the following months, the magazine brought massive coverage to the group, which is why Beatles book author Rainer Bratfisch stated: “The aim of the tour was obviously to strengthen the reader-paper bond.” The magazine initiated between April and June including a “BRAVO Beatles Blitz Quiz”. A total of 100 free tickets for the concert including arrival and departure were raffled off. According to its own information, the magazine received around 200,000 letters by June 1966, with the announcement of the winners being distributed over two Bravo issues. Further actions of the magazine were the publication of a Beatles book with the title These are the Beatles , which could be acquired, as well as the search for doppelgangers of the mushroom heads .

At the beginning of the press releases, Berlin was supposedly intended as a tour station . It was claimed afterwards that the Sportpalast and the Waldbühne were already fully booked and that the negotiations with the Deutschlandhalle and the Olympiastadion were unsuccessful and that a concert in Berlin was therefore not possible. But that's not correct. The Beatles had insisted from the start not to play in stadiums and from the start only three concert venues were planned.

Bravo organized together with the travel agency Hummel Reisen , which later became part of TUI , a total of 18 special trains to the event locations in Munich, Essen and Hamburg. To compensate for the Berlin demand, two special flights were offered from Berlin to Hamburg . One flight per concert in Hamburg. The purchased travel or flight ticket entitles the holder to receive an entry ticket. However, shortly afterwards it turned out that these trips were a flop. Very few trains were reasonably full and special trains had to be canceled or scaled down. The cards went on sale at short notice. Whether it was the cost or the parents' fear for their children can only be speculated.

A total of 34,200 tickets were sold for all six concerts; the single ticket cost between 10 and 25  marks , on average 16.50 marks (adjusted for purchasing power in today's currency around 32 euros). The gross income of the tour was therefore around 550,000 marks. The Beatles received (estimated) between 300,000 and 400,000 marks in gage for the tour, so that the tour and fee costs could not be covered by the entrance fees. "It is thanks to the BRAVO magazine that this tour could be carried out at all," said concert organizer Kurt Collien in an interview in 1966. In Thorsten Knublauch's book The Bravo-Beatles- Blitzournee, files from the organizers' archives could be evaluated for the first time. which underpin this statement by Collien. Despite the high admission prices denounced in the press, the tour itself could not be covered by this and had to be offset by additional payments in the almost six-digit DM range from Bravo .

Tour stations

Place of performance in Munich: The construction of the Circus Krone
date city place Spectators
per concert		 Concerts
Friday June 24th 1966 Munich Circus Krone ≈ 3000 0002
Saturday June 25, 1966 eat Grugahalle ≈ 8000 0002
Sunday June 26th 1966 Hamburg Ernst Merck Hall ≈ 6000 0002

procedure

Munich and Essen

Venue in Essen: The Grugahalle

The BRAVO-Beatles-Blitzournee, which was produced by Karl Buchmann, was the first tour of the Beatles in 1966. The band flew from London to Munich on June 23, 1966 , where they gave the first two concerts the following day. On the day of arrival, a large press conference was held in the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, the recording of which has not been preserved.

At the beginning, Chris Andrews and even Drafi Deutscher were discussed as one of the Beatles' tour guides, but Cliff Bennett & the Rebel Rousers , The Rattles and Peter & Gordon appeared as supporting acts for all six concerts . The opening act was generally not well received by the audience, who waited longingly for the Beatles. The announcer was Charlie Hickman . The Beatles' performance lasted around half an hour at each concert. The first concert in Munich at Circus Krone began at 5:15 pm; the second concert at 9 p.m. Both shows were recorded by ZDF and broadcast on July 5, 1966 as a compilation on ZDF under the title The Beatles . The recording was 45 minutes long and contains seven of eleven Beatles titles as well as recordings from the supporting acts.

Bravo had announced in advance that the Beatles would present new titles on their tour: “The Beatles are bringing a suitcase full of new hits to Germany. Nobody knows yet what Paul, John, George and Ringo will surprise their fans with during the BRAVO tour. […] Perhaps the Beatles will even come to us with a new kind of Indian sound? ”Contrary to the announcement, the Beatles are not presenting any titles from their recently completed album Revolver , but with Paperback Writer, a title that was released as a single in June 1966 and is in Germany as the first single in two years to reach first place again.

The Beatles played the following tracks at all six concerts:

In the official and unofficial recordings that have been preserved, you can tell that the Beatles went on this tour relatively untroubled and allowed themselves a few mistakes with the lyrics. Due to the technology at the time, very few fans should have noticed. The sound of the ZDF recording is of excellent quality.

The Beatles took a special train on June 25th at around 8:30 a.m. from Munich to Mülheim an der Ruhr . From there they went to Essen in the motorcade, where they gave two more concerts and a press conference. Parts of the press conference and the afternoon's Beatles performance have been retained as a recording from the audience. The evening concert has also been kept as a recording. Around midnight, the special train continued to Hamburg. “It was the train that was also used by the royal family when they were traveling in Germany and it was very nice; each had a small compartment with a marble bath, really luxurious, ”said George Harrison looking back. The costs for using the special train amounted to 22,000 marks. In fact, Queen Elizabeth II and her entourage used this train's saloon car for the state visit in 1965.

Hamburg

The Beatles arrived at Ahrensburg train station at 5:30 a.m. on June 26th and got off at Tremsbüttel Castle , where they showed up to their fans on the hotel balcony for a few seconds in the afternoon. These scenes were recorded in the newsreel .

The Beatles last appeared in Hamburg in 1962 as an internationally unknown but very popular band in Hamburg, so that these two concerts were of particular importance. Backstage, friends from old Hamburg club days visited the Beatles. Even the actress Evelyn Hamann came into the cloakroom as the wife of an old friend of the Beatles.

“Hamburg triggered pleasant and uncomfortable feelings in me. The good thing was that we came back after all our successes; when we first went there we had to play in dingy nightclubs. The bad thing was, a lot of ghosts from the past appeared - people you didn't want to see again. People who were befriended on a drunken night in 1960. It was 1966, you went through incredible changes, and suddenly a ghost like that from the past jumps at you. "

- George Harrison

Both Hamburg concerts took place in the Ernst-Merck-Halle in front of around 5,700 spectators each. The concerts lasted 105 minutes each - 3:00 p.m. to 4:45 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. the Beatles stood on stage for around 30 minutes each. A press conference took place between the two concerts, the recording of which has been preserved. During the press conference, the Beatles complained about the mostly very stupid questions from reporters, who were hardly any better in Essen the day before. Some members of the press later reported that they were ashamed of their colleagues. During and after the concerts, riots broke out in downtown Hamburg, in which a total of 117 rioters were arrested and the police used water cannons . Most of the rioters were sentenced to dissuasive juvenile sentences the very next day. The Hamburg police film reported extensively on it.

The Beatles flew from Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel via Heathrow to Tokyo on June 27, 1966 , but had to make a stopover in Anchorage , Alaska , as a typhoon warning had issued to Japan . In Japan they played a total of five concerts in Tokyo and then two concerts in Manila in the Philippines. On August 29, 1966, they gave their last ever touring concert in Candlestick Park, San Francisco .

LPs, CDs and DVDs

It came in the last 30 years, numerous bootleg - LPs and CDs with concert recordings on the market. The press conferences from Essen and Hamburg are now officially available. The police films from Munich (in color) and from Hamburg are officially available on DVD . DVDs with all TV and newsreel recordings are unofficially available.

literature

  • Thorsten Knublauch: The BRAVO-BEATLES-BLITZTOURNEE - Five days of Beatlemania in Germany in June 1966 , BOD 2011, ISBN 9783842353565 .
  • Thorsten Knublauch and Axel Korinth (with Michael Müller): Come, Give Mir Your Hand - The Beatles in Germany 1960–1970 , BOD 2008, ISBN 978-38334-8530-5 .
  • Thomas Rehwagen and Thorsten Schmidt: Mach Schau - The Beatles in Hamburg , EinfallsReich 1992, ISBN 3-926207-12-4 .
  • Siegfried Niedergesäss: The Beatles , including the chapter Germany in Beatles Fever, pp. 5–20; Description of the BRAVO Beatles blitz tour. Appeared in the series Dressler - Menschen . Cecilie Dressler Verlag, Hamburg 1976. ISBN 3-7915-5002-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ BRAVO Beatles Blitz Tour . In: Bravo , April 25, 1966, p. 8.
  2. ↑ a b Bravo . In: Rainer Bratfisch: The Fab Four - The great Beatles Lexicon . Imprint / Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2002, p. 96.
  3. ↑ The first 50 winners . In: Bravo , June 6, 1966, p. 15.
  4. ↑ Hush to the travel agency! In: Bravo , June 6, 1966, p. 13.
  5. ↑ a b c d e This Sunday belonged to the Beatles . In: Hamburger Abendblatt , June 27, 1966, pp. 3, 5 ( online ).
  6. ↑ Does it work with Chris Andrews? . In: Bravo, April 25, 1966, p. 6.
  7. ↑ Beatlemania in Bavaria 1966 , broadcast on the 50th anniversary of the Munich Beatles concert in the Circus Krone. Range land and people of 18 June 2016 Bayerischer Rundfunk , Bayern 2 (articles and audio)
  8. ↑ See entry on imdb.com
  9. Jump up ↑ New hits ... In: Bravo , April 25, 1966, p. 6.
  10. ↑ See beatlesbible.com
  11. ↑ a b The Beatles Anthology . Ullstein, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-550-07132-9 , p. 215.