Today is the 44th anniversary of the Beatles’ last concert at Candlestick Park, San Francisco.

Fifty-five seconds of lousy video that nicely captures what it must have been like to be there, here.

This was the Beatles’ last concert but not their last public performance, which didn’t occur till three years later on January 30th 1969.  A much better clip of that event after the jump. (Notice how Austen Powers-y London looks: check out Ringo in his red plastic mac.)

Frye in discussion with Robert Fulford and Marty Gross on the ritualistic element of Beatles concerts:

[Fulford discusses the human need for ritual, as seen for instance in the intense emotion of the audience at a Beatles concert where the music could not be heard above the audience’s screams.]

Frye: You need different rituals at different times.  There is something in the pantomime, where you don’t hear the words, that has a very direct childlike appeal.  So it didn’t matter whether you heard the Beatles, as long as you saw them.  The response to the aural stimulus is something that develops much more gradually. (CW 24, 542)

Perhaps that’s what makes the next clip so poignant.  There’s no more Beatlemania, no more adolescent girls screaming like Bacchantes.  The Beatles’ last audience was just a random collection of people (including a number of noticeably middle-aged Londoners, who are somewhat stiff and formal but evidently still fans) who found their way to nearby rooftops so that they could watch and hear the Beatles in public for what turned out to be the last time.

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2xnEv9aF60

Jimi Hendrix, “Voodoo Child”

Monday, August 19, 1969: Among those who played Woodstock that four day weekend were Janis Joplin, The Who, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, and the very unhippie show-stoppers, Sly and the Family Stone.  Jimi Hendrix closed out the concert — to a very small audience because almost everybody else had already gone home.  His performance therefore was sort of like Woodstock’s Woodstock: more people claim they were there than actually were there.  (The one person I know who did go to Woodstock sorrowfully admits that she, like many others, left Sunday afternoon to be home for Monday and so missed this celebrated performance.)

Despite hippiedom’s self-declared ethos of revolution, Frye didn’t see it that way:

The conception of “participatory democracy,” which requires a thorough decentralization, is also anarchist in context.  In some respects this fact represents a political picture almost the reverse of that of the previous generation.  For today’s radical the chief objects of loyalty during the thirties, trade unions and the revolutionary directives of Moscow, have become reactionary social forces, whereas some radical movements, such as the Black Panthers, which appear to have committed themselves both to violence and to racism, seem to descend from fascism, which also had anarchist affinities.  Similarly, anarchism does not seek to create a “working class”: much of its dynamic comes from a bourgeois disillusionment with an overproductive society, and some types of radical protest, like those of the hippies, are essentially protests against the work ethic itself. (“The University and Personal Life,” Spiritus Mundi, 29)

Hendrix’ iconic rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” after the jump.

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