Paul McCartney On The ‘Worst Gig’ The Beatles Ever Played—One Of Their Last

The Beatles’ St. Louis show was the cue for Paul McCartney to consider putting a stop to the group’s live performances. At the start of their 1966 USA tour, the rest of the band were tired of touring, except Paul, who thought it made them better musicians.

Paul described the performance at St. Louis as the “worst little gig we’d ever played at, even before we’d started as a band…it was worse than those early days. And I don’t think the house was full,” Paul recalled.

What made the St. Louis gig so bad?

The Beatles missed their first concert due to the weather in Cincinnati; however, they did a makeup show and headed to St. Louis right after, where the weather was not so great either.

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“Open-air concerts in the States were terrible. When it looked like rain in the open air, I used to be scared stiff. Rain on the wires and everybody would have been blown up, yet if they’d stopped the show, the kids would have stampeded,” road manager Mal Evans said in the Beatles anthology.

However, unlike the previous show, the group did not cancel and performed regardless. “It rained quite heavily, and they put bits of corrugated iron over the stage,” Paul recalled. “We were having to worry about the rain getting in the amps and this took us back to the Cavern days— it was worse than those early days. And I don’t think the house was full.”

The Beatles’ final show was in San Francisco

The Beatles had a series of bad shows, including one in Memphis where someone set a firecracker off while they were on stage. “Somebody let off a firecracker, and every one of us— I think it’s on film,  look at each other because each thought it was the other that had been shot. It was that bad,” the late John Lennon recounted.

The final straw was their San Francisco show in Candlestick Park right after St. Louis. “We placed our cameras on the amplifiers and put them on a timer. We stopped between tunes, Ringo got down off the drums, and we stood facing the amplifiers with our back to the audience and took photographs,” George Harrison said. “We knew: ‘This is it – we’re not going to do this again. This is the last concert.’ It was a unanimous decision.”