George Harrison said nobody knew how to make sound on The Ed Sullivan Show
George Harrison said nobody knew how to use sound The Ed Sullivan Show. However, the Beatles were used to not sounding great during their shows.
73 million people tuned in to see The Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show
keep playing The Ed Sullivan Show was a huge honor, especially for emerging artists and acts from overseas. The Beatles, who already had a #1 hit in America, didn’t come cheap, however.
According to Mental Floss, the Beatles “would only agree to perform if the show covered their travel expenses and paid them a fee of $10,000 (equivalent to just under $90,000 in 2022). Sullivan and his producers agreed, but only if the Beatles would commit to three performances. They had a deal.”
The performance proved mutually beneficial. The Beatles received immense attention that catapulted them to superstardom, and The Ed Sullivan Show more viewers than ever before.
Corresponding The Ed Sullivan Show‘s website tuned in to a record-breaking 73 million people to see The Beatles’ performance that night on February 9th. So about 40 percent of the country’s population watched the show.
A crowd of 700 people, mostly screaming girls, erupted after Sullivan introduced the Beatles with “Ladies and Gentlemen… The Beatles!” In the next second the band started with “All My Loving”.
RELATED: George Harrison didn’t enjoy hearing the Beatles’ music on CD
George Harrison said nobody on The Ed Sullivan Show knew how to make sound
The Beatles’ performance The Ed Sullivan Show was groundbreaking. However, people in the audience could not hear the band.
In a 1977 interview with Crawdaddy (per George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters), George explained that no one at The Ed Sullivan Show knew how to make sound.
“The Sullivan show was fun because I didn’t go to the rehearsal, I was kind of sick on the flight on the first trip to the States,” George said. “The band rehearsed for the sound guys for a long time, they kept going into the control room and checking the sound.
“And finally, when they found a balance between the instruments and the vocals, they marked the boards at the controls and then everyone left for lunch. Then we came back to tape the show and the cleaners were around cleaning all the markers off the board.
“Back then the sound was a bit cheesy. People put amps next to the stage so they wouldn’t disturb the recording, you know.”
RELATED: Why George Harrison was confused about his son Dhani’s knowledge of The Beatles’ ‘Hey Bulldog’
The sound during The Beatles’ Shea Stadium performance was worse
Sound was a major issue during The Beatles’ performance at Shea Stadium. It was just another case where the band couldn’t hear themselves or the audience. There was no way any amp could keep up with the roar of 55,000 screaming fans.
Despite this, Vox tried their best and made special amplifiers to improve the sound.
in the Here Comes the Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison, Joshua M. Greene wrote: “Stadium concerts have never been seen before. No singer or group could fill such a large space. Originally designed for baseball, soccer, and other relatively non-musical events, Shea Stadium’s acoustics were poor.
“For the Beatles concert, the sound company Vox developed customer-specific amplifiers whose usual output was increased from 30 watts to a spectacular 100 watts. Nothing helped. The Beatles’ performance was drowned out by an all-consuming noise that drove the arena’s two thousand guards to despair. Screams overwhelmed everything that came off the stage.”
“Now we were playing stadiums!” Ringo Starr explains in anthology (according to the Beatles Bible). “There were all these people and just a tiny PA system – they couldn’t get a bigger one. We used to always use the house PA.
“That was good enough for us, even at Shea Stadium. I never felt like people came to hear our show – I felt like they came to see us. From the moment the first number was counted in, the volume of the screams drowned out everything else.”
No matter what the Beatles did, their sound during performances was never satisfactory. The fans just screamed and screamed. That was one of the reasons the band stopped touring in 1966.
RELATED: George Harrison said Jeff Lynne’s singing voice made him try his singing harder on ‘Cloud Nine.’
https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/george-harrison-said-knew-sound-ed-sullivan-show.html/ George Harrison said nobody knew how to make sound on The Ed Sullivan Show
