The Beatles in Kansas City
[Charlie Finley’s] most infamous event involved the greatest rock band to invade America—the Beatles. Finley tried to gain fan approval by bringing the band to Kansas City for a concert in the fall of 1964. Seeing that the Beatles did not have a Kansas City stop on their first U.S. tour, he tracked down manager Brian Epstein at the Cow Palace in San Francisco on August 19 to try to bring the band to Municipal Stadium. For the modest price of $150,000, Epstein agreed to divert the band’s tour to Kansas City for an additional concert date at the Kansas City Municipal Stadium on September 17, 1964, just before the Beatles ended their first American tour on September 20.
Even before that Kansas City concert, Finley had some fun at the Beatles’s expense when the band visited Chicago at the International Amphitheatre on September 5. He took Charlie Jr., Paul, and Kathryn to the Beatles’s concert in Chicago and arranged for them to meet the band, even getting their photographs made with the “Fab Four.” They drove back to LaPorte in a limousine wearing Beatles wigs and sent a stir through the community that the Beatles were staying with the Finleys. As Ron Knoll recalled, “you can imagine all along Johnson Road, the entire length of the marble fence, it was probably 2-people deep,…all trying to get a glimpse of the Beatles.” The myths expanded as some in LaPorte claimed to have seen Ringo, or George, or Paul, or John. “That was one of the biggest scams and to this day, there are people that still believe they were here,” he added. “Oh yeah, but they weren’t.”
They played in Kansas City on September 17, 1964 for only 31 minutes in front of a crowd of about 20,208 fans. The Beatles began their set with the song “Kansas City/Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey,” and the crowd went wild. But, sadly the rest of the city wasn’t frenzied enough.
Drew Dimmel recalled that “When confirmation was announced on my local ‘rock’ station, WHB, that tickets were going on sale to see The Beatles, live, at Municipal Stadium in Kansas City I persuaded my dad to drive me down to the ticket booth. I bought two field-level tickets, paying $6.50 apiece; one for my little brother and one for me. I was 15 and he was 12.” In actuality, the standard ticket price for this concert was $8.50, making it the highest price in the 1964 tour, except for one concert in New York City. Never shy about publicity, the back of the tickets featured Charlie Finley wearing a Beatles Wig as a joke.
Kansas City became the only concert venue on the tour not to sellout. Many potential concertgoers stayed away after the Kansas City Star and others urged a boycott of the concert as a way of showing their displeasure with Finley. Finley promised to give all after expense profits of the concert to a local charity—Children’s Mercy Hospital. Because it did not sell out, Finley actually lost money on the concert—possibly becoming the only promoter of a Beatles concert ever to lose money. Finley nonetheless made a sizable donation—$25,000—to the charity. Of course some local entrepreneurs did make money on the concert, especially the two people who acquired the bed sheets from the Beatles hotel rooms, when they cut them into small squares and sold them as souvenirs. They netted $159,000 for their efforts. For Finley, because of years of self-generated acrimony, no good deed went unpunished. There would be many more instances of similar behavior in Kansas City thereafter.
- from CHARLIE FINLEY by Michael Green and Roger Launius
