The owner of two reel-to-reel audio tapes containing a one-of-a-kind, superior-quality Beatles concert, recorded directly from the soundboard at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens on Aug. 17, 1965, is ready to sell. Only seven people have purportedly heard the reels, from the show nearly 60 years ago at the height of Beatlemania.
The question now is who will buy it, how much it could be worth — and whether it will ever be released for the public at large to hear it.
“I have never offered it for sale before,” Piers Hemmingsen, a Toronto-based Beatles historian and author of The Beatles in Canada series, tells Billboard. “This is the best recording of any Beatles concert in Canada, if not North America, other than what was professionally recorded for The Beatles themselves.”
For a band as legendary as the Beatles, any rare artifact is likely to draw a horde of prospective buyers. But a singular recording of a concert held at the band’s apex is a rarity among rarities.
Hemmingsen, who has a copy on three cassette tapes for listening purposes only, says the reels contain The Beatles’ entire afternoon set, the opening acts, venue announcements about upcoming events (The Beach Boys, wrestling), and a press conference with The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, their PR person Tony Barrow and the BBC’s Brian Matthew, held at the long-shuttered arena’s Hot Stove Lounge.
The Beatles’ set was approximately a half hour long, featuring 12 songs (in order): “Twist and Shout,” “She’s A Woman,” “I Feel Fine,” “Dizzy Miss Lizzie,” “Ticket To Ride,” “Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Baby’s In Black,” “I Wanna Be Your Man,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Help!” and “I’m Down.”
The openers were King Curtis and his Capitol Recording Band (12 songs); Cannibal and The Headhunters (five songs); Brenda Holloway (five songs), and Sounds Incorporated (five songs), who Epstein also repped. In total, the tapes contain 39 songs.
Hemmingsen’s first-look letter — a sell-sheet of sorts outlining the opportunity to purchase the tapes that was shown exclusively to Billboard — says the original concert tapes are “available now for the first time privately, to select individuals who resonate with their rarity and historical imperative.” And one appraiser who spoke with Billboard estimated that the reels could be valued at between $60,000 and $80,000, and could go at auction for as much as $100,000 or more. But the only potential buyer with the ability to release the recording to the public would be Apple Corps — and so far, there has been no offer.
According to Hemmingsen, the soundboard recording was organized by former Toronto Argonauts football player and two-time Grey Cup champion Don “Shanty” McKenzie, who after retiring from the Canadian Football League (CFL) worked for 40 years as the building superintendent for Maple Leaf Gardens. He passed away in 2001.
Hemmingsen views himself as a “custodian” of these tapes and realizes he is not able to share them publicly because Apple Corps owns the rights. (Apple Corps is aware of the recording but declined to comment when reached by Billboard.)
While doing years of research for his 2016 book, The Beatles In Canada: The Origins of Beatlemania! (Red Book), Hemmingsen discovered the existence of a black and white 8mm home movie McKenzie shot, without sound, of The Beatles’ Sept. 7, 1964, concert at the Gardens. He bought the film from McKenzie’s son around 2010, who threw in the two reels.
“When I had bought the items, it was really just for the film, which was not the original but a copy,” says Hemmingsen, a collector himself who recently curated and loaned many of his treasures to the Beatles exhibit that opened last month at Calgary’s National Music Centre, titled From Me To You: The Beatles in Canada 1964-1966. “I certainly wasn’t expecting to find out what was on those two reels. I still find it hard to believe.”
Hemmingsen would not tell Billboard what he paid McKenzie’s son for the film and the reels, but says it was “not expensive” because they did not know what was on the tapes at the time. “I took a risk in buying them, as it took a while before I could locate a proper player and listen to them,” he says. “The tape boxes were not dated.”
The Aug. 17, 1965, concert was The Beatles’ first after their show at Shea Stadium in Queens, N.Y., on Aug. 15, which opened their 1965 North American tour with an attendance of 55,600. The famous footage of that concert showcases the “Beatlemania” that had taken hold, as well as why the live bootlegs in circulation and posted online are not good quality.
“Most of these recordings captured only the sounds of the audience’s screams of delight at seeing The Beatles,” begins Hemmingsen’s first-look letter. “This live recording, made on professional equipment by a sound engineer from Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens stage soundboard on August 17, 1965, is the finest live recording made in Canada during their touring years.”
Hemmingsen says he has not made duplicates of the cassettes or even played it for friends over the years. Only a select group of people have heard it, he says, including former Canadian concert promoter John Brower, who put on the famed Toronto Rock and Roll Revival music festival in 1969 and is helping with the sale of the tapes; and Doug McClement, who he describes as “one of Canada’s most respected sound engineers.”
More importantly, several individuals who are intimately involved with the Beatles’ legacy have listened to the recording. After bringing the tapes to the attention of Apple Corps, Hemmingsen says the company flew him to Abbey Road Studios in July 2015, where he “auditioned” the original reel on their equipment. He tells Billboard four people were there: Abbey Road producer Giles Martin (Beatles’ producer George Martin’s son); Jonathan Clyde, director of production at Apple Corps; Sean Magee, mastering engineer at Abbey Road; and Lester Smith — the technician and “microphone custodian” who retired only a week ago from Abbey Road after 56 years — who set up the tape equipment.
“That was for their project Eight Days a Week, the Ron Howard movie,” says Hemmingsen of the meeting. “Now, it turned out that at that time, they said they could not use it for that project and that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t be able to do anything else with it later, but that’s how we left it.”
He adds that when he heard the recordings via a recording studio console, “it was a revelation. It is just like being on stage with them.”
Billboard’s attempts to reach Martin were unsuccessful.
Hemmingsen says the tapes were authenticated by Apple Corps and Magee. Reached by email, Magee told Billboard he is not authorized to comment about what he heard without permission from Apple and Universal Music Group.
He adds that earlier this year, Universal Music Canada’s director of catalogue marketing, Warren Stewart, heard some “sample clips” and that two “sample clips” were sent to filmmaker Peter Jackson “this week for his evaluation,” given the MAL software technology he used to enhance the recordings for the documentary series he directed and produced, The Beatles: Get Back.
Hemmingsen says he would like to keep the cassette copy but that everything is negotiable “if somebody absolutely insists that I give it up.” He wasn’t prepared to tell Billboard the dollar figure he has in mind but plans to use any proceeds to fund both the printing of his next book, The Beatles in Canada: The Evolution 1964-1970 (Blue Book), set for release in September; and a second edition of his The Beatles In Canada: The Origins of Beatlemania! (Red Book).
The Beatles played just nine concerts in Canada, six of which were at Maple Leaf Gardens: two on Sept. 7, 1964; two on Aug. 17, 1965; and two on Aug. 17, 1966. Hemmingsen also owns the only other known Toronto recording from one of the 1966 concerts, which he obtained on eBay in 2008 from a U.S. seller and donated to the University of Toronto in 2017.
“The value given by the University’s appraiser was $30,000 [Canadian dollars; USD $22,000],” he says. “If you compare something that’s been spread around the world to something that they haven’t heard before, which is superior audio quality, I think there’s a factor of five, at least.”
To try to estimate the value of this one-of-a-kind board recording based purely on the description of what the two reels contain, Billboard reached out to U.K.-based music memorabilia and vinyl specialists Omega Auctions Ltd., which has a Beatles auction coming up Oct. 8 and is inviting consignments.
“We’ve sold lots of Beatles recordings down the years. That’s our niche,” says auction manager Dan Muscatelli-Hampson, citing a recent audio tour diary Ringo Starr made in 1966, which sold for £10,000 ($13,000) and a set of unheard interviews, which sold for £30,000 ($39,000).
“Concert recordings are different and are, obviously, more interesting than interviews and will have a greater value, but the key thing is that what you can do with this is limited,” he continues. “If you bought this, you’ve got a really cool reel. But if you ever tried to do anything with it commercially, Apple and Paul McCartney would sue you to the next century. So that limits the commercial value.
“But I think that if you were to put it into auction, you might be thinking around I would probably say something like 40 to 60 thousand pounds,” he adds. “So that’s maybe $60,000 to $80,000, but that’s a provisional auction estimate; I would not be surprised to see it selling upwards of $100,000.”
Muscatelli-Hampson says Hemmingsen “will always be better served putting it into auction, opening up that by a pool rather than just go for the first offer that he gets from Apple. [But] some people like to close that loop and get it back to the people who might be able to do something with it.”
Hemmingsen’s preference would be for Apple Corps to purchase the tapes and release the concert for all to hear. He hopes it will be made available to Beatles fans before the 60th anniversary of the Toronto concert next year.
“You can’t sit on a thing like this,” Hemmingsen says. “You want to share it with the world. On the other hand, there’s a commercial value to it and the only people that can release it are Apple. Somebody could buy the tape from me and enjoy it for themselves, but they could never release it. I have that in writing from Apple. I mean, there’s nothing I can do with it.”
